WWW pages of the past (Mar 2003)
| Two of the biggest problems in design WWW pages are not the generation of graphics, or the fonts used, or banners, or menu items. No! It's none of these. It's the different version of WWW browsers, and the different resolutions of graphics screen. The biggest problem for WWW browsers is NetScape. For this you can design a good layout, that works well in Microsoft Internet Explorer, and then try it with NetScape, and it doesn't work, even though you've specified all the correct dimensions. The greatest weakness seems to be in the layout of tables. I've been designing WWW content for a course in Networking and Security for a company which uses UNIX and NetScape, so I had a quick look at some of my pages with NetScape, and found that they didn't quite show the same layout of a Internet Explorer. This tends to be less important for the secondary pages, but it is important that the primary page shows correctly. One of the pages I've been using a good deal recently is the CNDS page. This page previously had a two column layout in the area for the main content. Unfortunately NetScape did not scale this well, and made one of the columns larger than the other, so I've revised the page to use a single column format: 
The previous one had two tables, and although it looks better, it is not really compatiable with NetScape: 
If you're interested, here it is:
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