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How different browsers react

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Jul 10.2005

Using a free editor (TopDawg) I am trying to teach myself a little about HTML.
I am still very raw so any replies please address to an idiot.
I created my first site and asked for it to be reviewed(see that forum) and my eyes were opened to a lot of the pit falls, mainly that all seems to work using IE but not others browers.
I got many,many suggestion how to improve my site but haven’t attempted to change much yet as I am still getting to grip with basic coding.
The sort of thing I notice is that with IE when the cursor hovers over an image the alternate title is display but not the idtentical coding with NetScape.
How do I get round this very simple prob please?

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@CharlesJul 10.2005 — By following the standards. It is a common misunderstanding that HTML is "how browsers work". In reality it's its own free standing language for describing how the parts of a document fit together. Browsers are supposed to follow the standards, and for the most part they do, but they are given a great deal of freeplay. In other words, pages are supposed to render differently in different browsers.

But consider the "alt" attribute. It's there to provide alturnative text for images. On an audio, Braille or text-only browser the image cannot be displayed so the "alt" text will be substituted. MSIE exends this and displays it as a "tool-tip". If you just follow the MSIE's behavior you would never figure out what the "alt" is for. But if you read the HTML 4.01 specification you would. And you would never find out that there is also a "title" attribute that is supposed to be rendered as a "toop-tip".

Do not try to learn HTML from an HTML editor and do not try to learn it by playing around. Read the following documents in the following order:

http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html32

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/

http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/Style

And if you must use an HTML generator, there is only one the produces real HTML or XHTML. See http://www.w3.org/Amaya/ .
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@ulillilliaJul 10.2005 — IE is "smart". It can pick out minor mistakes and make "fixes" for improper HTML coding like forgetting the # when defining colors as in color="#ffc000" and the such. Other browsers, like Firefox, follow the rules exactly and aren't "smart". You'll need to stick with the standards. View and edit your site in Firefox. This way, you can see things correctly and fix problems. Firefox is free. I'm unfamiliar with Netscape, I practically never use it or see it.

Also, free software isn't all that reliable. I use Wordpad (it comes with Windows) to edit my site as Notepad's limit of 32 KB causes problems for a few of my pages which get to even 50 KB.
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@felgallJul 10.2005 — I use Wordpad (it comes with Windows) to edit my site as Notepad's limit of 32 KB causes problems for a few of my pages which get to even 50 KB.[/QUOTE]

Sounds like your pages are on the HUGE side. Why not split them into multiple pages. 40k is a good target maximum size for web pages (including all images) and certainly they should never go over 80k if you expect people to see them.
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@ulillilliaJul 11.2005 — They are split into multiple pages. 50 KB isn't all that bad. Almost all of that is readable text, not HTML formatting or any scripting. Throughout at least 95% of my site, at least 80% of the disk space is from HTML files, not pictures. In fact, if you click a link, you'd be able to see the text of the linked document in under a second, even on dial-up, provided the transfer is successful (server isn't bogged down and the line has no trouble (such as static), and the end user's computer isn't bogged down either (as from spyware or a virus scan)).
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@SpectreReturnsJul 11.2005 — IE is "smart". It can pick out minor mistakes and make "fixes" for improper HTML coding like forgetting the # when defining colors as in color="#ffc000" and the such. Other browsers, like Firefox, follow the rules exactly and aren't "smart".[/QUOTE]

Actually, FF seems to display everything IE does, and more, like FF will put in missing > tags, where as IE will die.
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