- Site Design Conversion to CSS1
I have taken the momentous step of converting the entire site to using CSS1.
This took quite some doing, and I hope that the site remains at least as
usable as it was previously, if not more so for more readers. In order to
make it as widely compatible as possible, I have killed all FONT COLOR
element and BODY coloring effects that were used before. What this means
is that all non-CSS browsers will see rather boring looking pages, but
the information and structure will all be intact. For CSS enabled browsers,
the old color scheme is still in place for now, and can be easily changed
for your own use if you decide to download it.
- Common Attributes
There are now many attributes that are applicable to many different elements.
I have taken the time to document them all, but not all have been manually
verified (such as the many Internet Explorer event handlers.) I have
relied on existing official documentation to fill in some of my knowledge
gaps, but the official documentation often contradicts itself, so take this
support information with care.
- Script
The portion of the site that covers scripting does not go deeply into scripting.
Discussion of scripting quickly gets out of the realm and scope of HTML.
- Miscellaneous Elements and Attributes
I have tried to document as many known elements and attributes as possible,
gathered from official and semi-official resources. I also occasionally find
or am alerted to unadvertised features. I do the best that I can to keep
on top of this, but occasional errors occur. Also keep in mind that I have
made guesses and extrapolated support information in a few cases due to
missing information and lack of browser availability on different platforms.
I try to stress this fact where it occurs.
- Platform Information
The information for this site concentrates predominantly on browsers
made for the Windows platform (win32 mostly, win16 for some of the early
history.) There are often significant differences in support between
the various platforms, so the support and version information here will not
always be valid for the respective browser version on a different platform.
- Tag Models (Parent/Content relationships,
etc.)
The element relationship and definition models are mostly based off of the
HTML 4.0 Recommendation "Loose" DTD. HTML 4.0 is the
most cohesive model available to authors as of the time of writing. There
are occasionally a few points of departure that I make to the HTML 4.0
model and I have tried to point out exactly WHY I chose a different
interpretation when this occurs.
- Page Validation
As of November 1997, I have spell-checked the entire site and validated
all of these pages against the HTML 4.0 "loose" DTD with the
W3C HTML Validation Service. I
don't do this often (I have only done so once before against HTML 3.2
last year), so as I add or update content along the way and massage some
of these pages it is possible that this may fall out of date.
- Slight Regression in HTML/CSS Support
Between IE3 and IE4 Beta1
Most browsers have historically only added support and functionality as time
progresses. But a special case occurred with Microsoft Internet Explorer.
The rendering and parsing engine for IE4 was re-built from scratch. This has led
to a few idiosyncrasies between the betas of IE4 and the IE3 releases.
These have basically cleared up by the final release, but I try to document
these discrepancies where known.
- Significant divergences in HTML Support
Between Mosaic 3 Betas and Mosaic 3 Final
The early Mac Mosaic 3.0 Betas had significantly different support than what
is found in the final releases (eg: frames capability.) I have tried
to keep this clear by noting which elements/attributes were supported in
BOTH M3 Betas and final by listing support as 'M3.0' and features
supported in only the betas by listing support as 'M3.0Bx.' Hopefully
this is not too confusing.
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