[WEB4LIB] Re: Netscape 7

[Andrew Cunningham]

  Hi all

Andrew Mutch wrote:

>Without some way to lock down the interface, I'm not sure that the
>Netscape-branded versions of Mozilla are going to be good fits with the public
>computing environments in libraries. However, in Netscape's defense, the
>problems with Javascript and the previously mentioned problems with table
>display in web pages are not the fault of the browser. These problems are
>caused by Netscape's attempt to implement web standards for HTML and DOM
>running into hacked methods that worked with old browsers but fail in when made
>to fit the standards model. As has been said before, web designers are going to
>have to learn to write to the standards if they want the future browsers to
>properly handle their scripts and display their pages. Of course, all of that
>means nothing to a patron or staff member who can't understand why Netscape
>won't display a web page that looks fine in IE.
>

Although IE tends to be preferred, netscape has a few advantages that 
are useful for those of us that need to support non-English use of the 
internet. It has better Vietnamese support than  IE. I doesn't have IE's 
design flaw with the user encoding slot.

On win98/ME it has much better unicode support integrated into it. I can 
even input unicode into Netscape's dialog boxes.

The MySidebar feature is sometimes useful. We've been playing with a 
sidebar that contains search boxes for alltheweb, google and altavista. 
The search boxes  allow language specific unicode searches.  Still a few 
tweaks needed to it. We're also experimenting with  language specific 
sidebars including tools for Vietnamese and Hausa.

I've always preferred having both netscape and internet explorer on 
public access computers. There are times when one browser is preferable 
to another.

Andrew


Andrew Cunningham
Multilingual Technical Officer
Accessibility and Evaluation Unit, Vicnet
State Library of  Victoria
Australia

andrewc at vicnet.net.au

http://www.openroad.net.au/

http://home.vicnet.net.au/~andrewc/