Wait a Minute! I'm Old Guard!

I realize that the very first generation of Web browsers didn't support images and that tables weren't introduced until Netscape 1.1, but I just talked about text only, so hush.

Hey! You Left Out ActiveX!

Internet Explorer devotees probably won't appreciate my analysis. I purposely left out ActiveX in my considerations because it's IE-specific and, in terms of designing site versions, it should be thought of as a plug-in.

Browser-Specific Sites

You can divide 90 percent of all browsers into three families: Before Netscape 2.0, Netscape 2.0 and 3.0, and 4.0 and later browsers.

Netscape 2.0 introduced Java, JavaScript, browser plug-ins, frames, and VRML to the world at large. (There were other Java and VRML browsers, but they were mostly for tech heads.) There are basically three generations of browsers:

• Any browser that doesn't support these things is a pre-2.0 browser, or in the low-end category I mentioned earlier.

• Any browser that does support JavaScript, etc., is in the Netscape 2.0 and 3.0 category.

• And 4.0 and later browsers are the browsers that support the W3C-approved applications of style sheets and layers. Existing 4.0 browsers have their own JavaScript quirks and treat DHTML differently, but they're still a family.

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