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CyberArtisans Web Developers Newsletter |
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Our goal is to present information that will be useful to you as a website owner and as a user of the web. If these newsletters are useful, please forward this to a friend. To unsubscribe, follow the directions at the bottom of this email.
Browsers have always been the web designer's nightmare. You would think that, since there are standards for almost everything needed to build a web page - HTML, JavaScript, CSS (no, you don't have to remember the acronyms, no, there won't be an exam) - that it would be straightforward to build a browser and they would all work alike. Hah! Part of the problem is that standards evolve. So while one browser may be built to a particular standard, another browser may be built to a different revision of the same standard. The web designer builds a page, checks it out in his favorite browser, and decides it is done. Until he checks it in another browser and discovers that one of the neat features designed into the page doesn't work in the second browser. Another problem is that some browser builders are notorious for bending the standards. This was true for Internet Explorer for years. Some years ago, while exploring a page in Microsoft's website, a few of us discovered that an entire section of the page disappeared in non-Microsoft browsers because Microsoft had used a non-standard "feature" of Internet Explorer to display that section. Other browsers that more-closely adhered to the standards didn't show the section at all. Some enterprising designer have also been caught by this. For years there was a cottage industry of programmers who designed code to take advantage of errors in certain browsers (again, mostly Internet Explorer) to create neat effects. Unfortunately, Microsoft fixed those errors in later iterations of the browser, breaking the pages that used that code. One obvious example that persists today is paragraph spacing. Internet Explorer and Firefox use different default values for the space before and after paragraphs. If you design a page without specifying that spacing, your page will look the way you want it to in one browser and not in the other. The simple fix is to always specify paragraph spacing. They are still not identical but the differences are minor. What happens if, despite everything you do, you can't make the page look right in all browsers? Then you move into the world of browser detectors. When you ask your browser to retrieve a web page, your browser tells the website what browser it is, what operating system you are running, and your IP address (that's the address your Internet Service Provider (ISP) uses to identify your computer). Using that information, a web designer can design a different page for each type of browser and use a browser detector to route the right code to your browser. That's right, if you want your page to show up right on three browsers you may have to design three pages for each page of the site. Incidentally, identifying the operating system is important because the same browser on a different operating system can often work very differently. For example, Internet Explorer on the PC is a totally different animal from Internet Explorer on the Mac. Web designers have been complaining about browser incompatibility for years. You might suppose that the powers that be would have responded and that this problem would have disappeared by now. Well, yes, it's a little better. But disappeared? No way. So one of the things you still have to pay your web designer to do is make sure your site looks good on all browsers.
Wait now, in the previous article we said that a website can identify your IP address. Doesn't that mean it knows who you are? Well, no. It knows the request is coming from the same computer that asked for a previous web page, and it knows that computer is serviced by a specific ISP (ISPs "own" groups of IP addresses and yours is, of necessity, within that group) but it can't identify the specific computer. It can't get that information unless you or your ISP tells them. Your ISP can't (well, OK, isn't supposed to) without a warrant. But you can if you fill out a form on a website. Most websites don't make the association of IP address and personal information, but some unscrupulous ones do. The moral: Be careful who you give personal information to. If you want to be anonymous for any reason, you can use an anonymizer. This is a site that forwards your request for a web page but removes identifying information about you. You can try this at Anonymouse.org (http://anonymouse.org/ , and yes, they prefer to leave out the "www"). It's a German site, but they offer both English and German interfaces. Your webpage comes through with an overlying "advert," often for something a little, um, racy, so you might not want to try this at the office. Yes, anonymizers are often used by people who want to watch naughty stuff without leaving a trail, but they can also be used to reach websites that your ISP blocks for technical reasons like a bad Domain Name Server setting. Or to reach websites without giving out any identifying information.
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