"The Desktop Global Marketer" (tm)

   A free on-line newsletter of Sidereal Designs, Inc.,
   for Internet Entrepreneurs, and those who are
   considering becoming one.
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                    March 2002

In this issue: 

"If your site doesn't look good and work well in 
Netscape 6.2, you are about to have big trouble."

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A big event is about to occur at AOL which is going to give
many web site owners something to worry about.

First a little history. In the distant web-past, say four or
five years ago, Microsoft's Internet Explorer was not the
dominant browser. The Explorer of those days was pretty
inferior to Netscape, which held the lead.  Netscape looked
sure to become the dominant force on the web while Microsoft
ruled the desktop. There were other browsers around (and still
are) but most people used one of those two. As everyone knows
who reads the news, Microsoft won the ensuing battle for the
web by using a lot of monopolistic practices for which it is
now in deep trouble.

Where this concerns us is that during the struggle both sides
tried to add new features which were not part of the web code
standards and which were proprietary to their browsers. This
made life a nightmare for web site owners because you
essentially had to code two different web sites if you wanted
it to be seen by both the common browsers. Partly we could
just avoid the proprietary effects, but partly we had to
detect which make and version of browser a visitor was using
and code the site to respond differently for each.

Today Netscape is used by only about 15% of web surfers and a
lot of lazy web builders are no longer worrying about how the
site works with anything but Microsoft Explorer. In fact a lot
of home-brew sites are built with Microsoft's "Frontpage" tool
which (surprise!) creates code that doesn't work very well
with Netscape browsers. I'm seeing even professionally-built
sites recently that have clearly not looked at how they appear
in Netscape.

An interesting thing has been going on however. The Netscape
people have continued development and are now up to version
6.2. They have stressed compliance with the international code
standards for the web, and this version is very nearly fully
standards-compliant.

Enter AOL. Technical types don't much like AOL because of a
lot of technical sins they commit, but they must be doing
something right because they've got about 30% of the web
surfers in the U.S. connecting through them. A lot of AOL
users don't even know they have a browser - it's all just the
AOl software to them, and they don't even want to know how it
works. In fact however, the "AOL" software is just Microsoft
Explorer hidden under an AOL brand-label skin and bundled with
some code to dial up AOL and fetch the mail. As AOL grew, this
aided the dominance of Microsoft-compatible coding for web
sites.

But an odd thing happened. A few years ago when Netscape went
bankrupt, AOL bought the wreckage. Now the big announcement
has come out. With the release of its next version (8.0) the
AOL software will be built around the latest Netscape browser.

When you add Netscape's existing 15% to AOL's 30% and
throw in 5% for browsers like Opera, about 50% of your site's
visitors are suddenly going to be using non-microsoft
browsers. If your site doesn't look good and work well in
Netscape 6.2, you are about to have big trouble.

In the long run this is going to be a Good Thing, because
Netscape 6.2 and Opera are very standards-compliant, and now
Microsoft could be forced to become so. No one is going to get
away easily with using just proprietary Microsoft
code. Microsoft will no longer be able to dictate how your
site must be coded and change it at will. We will all be
better off for it. Standards are good.

In the short run however a lot of people are going to be
scrambling when they start getting complaints from AOL users
that their sites don't work. We've always protected our
clients by making sure our sites were cross-browser compliant
even as Netscape faded, but even so a lot of those sites were
built before version 6.2, and it's a lot different from
the older Netscape browsers.

If you want to check your site out, you don't have to join
AOL. Just download the free version 6.2 browser from the
Netscape site. 
http://home.netscape.com/computing/download/index.php

If your site looks good in that, it ought to look good in the
new AOL software when it comes out. If not, you can get a head
start getting it fixed.

Look particularly for things like portions of the page display
overlapping and covering other portions, things being the
wrong size, images not showing up, buttons and mouse-over
effects not working properly, forms that don't behave well,
and problems with fonts.

If you see problems in Netscape 6.2 and not in Microsoft
Explorer, it's almost a sure bet that it's due to the site
having code that is not compliant with the Web standard. 
Making it compliant would be an excellent idea at this point.

If you find yourself in trouble, don't panic; it's unlikely
you'll need a total rebuild. Get a web expert to look through
the code and run some tests for you. They may be able to
quickly pin it down to one or two lines of code that need
changing.

Thanks for reading this issue!

Best,

Ernie


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Sidereal Designs, Inc.               "Putting your business on the web"
http://siderealdesigns.com    301-916-5702   info(at)siderealdesigns.com