Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
pages properly?
Have you ever opened a Web page and had parts of it fail to
open or seen the page framed awkwardly as though it were not be
ing displayed correctly? One reason this happens is that from time
to time, browsers may contain software errors or bugs. Much soft
ware malfunctions in one circumstance or another, and browsers
are no different than other software packages in this regard.
Your browser, however, may be displaying the site incorrectly
because of more substantial reasons, those based on the code in the
instructions. For the most part, browsers correctly handle standard
HTML—at least for versions that were known when the particular
browser was written. For example, HTML version 2.0 was pub
lished in November 1995, HTML version 3.2 was developed in
1996 and published in January 1997, HTML version 4.0 was pub
lished in December 1997, and HTML version 4.01 was published in
December 1999. A browser written in 2002 is likely to work appro
priately for HTML 4.01, but it might not display pages written in a
form of HTML that was released after that time. An old browser
might work fine for HTML 3.2, but not for HTML 4.01.
Unfortunately, however, various developers of browsers some
times decide to include features or alternatives that do not fit within
standard HTML, and Web authors or some wordprocessing pack
ages may utilize these nonstandard features. For example, a browser
may allow additional tags for formatting, and the “save as HTML”
option for a word processor may include those tags in the files it
generates. Of course, when the resulting files are displayed on the
expanded browser, they look fine—perhaps even elegant. However,
such files may be interpreted in peculiar ways or not at all on other
browsers.
As with most Web applications, standards make a difference.
When Web pages follow the standards, authors can be reasonably
confident that their pages will appear as they want them to on most
any browser and on most any computer system around the world.
When standards are violated, however, an author is throwing her
self or himself on the mercy of the computer to do the right thing,
and the results may not be predictable.
