Specific Web Browsers and our Service
Specific Web Browsers and our Service
Despite a published HTML DTD few browser vendors really adhere to the standard and most cook their own soup in the battle to win stock points.
Nearly all browser vendors have no background in SGML and few have bothered. While HTML was originally designed as hypertext enhanced ASCII its designers and developers have attempted to make the transition from a "cheap hack" to a conformant standard. Unfortunately vendors such as Netscape, Microsoft and others have been less interested in content than in product differentiation, market hedgemony and consumer ignorance. The vision of the World-Wide-Web has collapsed into a dull abyss of Active-X, Frames, Java, plugins and other platform dependent marketing instruments.
Although the W3 Consortium provides a standard HTML parser library (a WWW practice dating as far back as '91) the browser vendors tend to use other code or modifications to try to set themselves apart from the others. Given the trend in the WWW, spawn of a legacy DTP paradigm, to develop HTML as descriptive, in contrast to content, markup, and the tendency of many WWW Publishers to design their pages to exploit the specific quirks of a single browser, some vendors are even forced by the market to design their parsers to "make mistakes" to more closely replicate the errors in some other popular browsers. Even the descriptive markup elements (which don't really belong in something like HTML) or style sheet mechanisms don't have a standard presentation, alignment semantics or font metrics.
With the dozens of web browsers out there, it's hard to know if a specific browser will enable you to use all the features of our page. The HTML parsers often take some shortcuts and all HTML browsers tested to date do not pass our test suite for parsing validated HTML. Some are better on some fronts, some worse and many seem to have the same legacy errors.
The forms have not been developed for a specific browser but for a fictional HTML browser that supports forms and tables. The design of the interface has attempted to find a common ground to work well on a large pool of browsers instead of enforcing the use of non-standard extensions or the metrics of a specific hardware or operating system platform.
In an effort to help clarify the situation we are providing information on how each interacts with our system.
BSn and IBUnet customers can the download the latest Windows 3.1 and Win'95 versions from here
BSn and IBUnet customers can download it from here.
A few browsers support some, but not all of our features. Most notably, although they provide access to all search results and allow you to follow links, their lack of proper support for tables and other formatting features means the pages aren't organized and laid out the way we'd like.
Some other browsers are completely incompatible with the features provided by our service. They will cause problems like missing database path errors, "You must first select a database to search" messages, missing menus or blank search results pages.
While it is intended as the HTML reference browser it is totally broken-- too bad since it is really quite fast and a very complete HTML 3.0 implementation.
Code still in development...