HTML for the complete beginner

IE and Netscape

My logs show there are a lot of people searching for Internet Explorer (IE) and Netscape (NS) browser differences. Some are common errors like missing end tag or missing value, other things include certain things not working in either browser.

Since things change on every new version released keeping a list of everything is very difficult, but I've tried to list most below.

Internet Explorer and Netscape would have to be the top two browsers, with Opera and Mozilla coming up behind.

Why do people hate some of these browsers? I think the biggest reason is speed (and sloppy coders are lazy). IE is bundled into Windows so is actually loaded when you start up your computer, Netscape on the other hand isn't so has to load plugins, fonts, preferences ... while you wait.
The actual surfing speed of these browsers are pretty hard to time but there isn't much in it. Opera claims to be the fastest browser on earth.

Making your site universal isn't very hard, in fact its actually easier to make your site in Netscape, as most things that work in Netscape work/display the same in other browsers. If you choose to make them in IE, that's fine but making them work in other browsers like Netscape becomes a chore as it hardy ever works/displays the same the first time if your code is sloppy.

There isn't much that doesn't work in both IE and Netscape, and if you see "best viewed with Internet Explorer" or similar you know they haven't done a user friendly job in making their site.

One main thing to remember when using tables in Netscape is to never leave a blank td cell, and is best to have each td cell on the same line:

<td> </td> which is the right way
<td>
 
</td> Is the wrong way, apart from being messy it does affect your table layouts.
Also background images for tables, IE will tile a background if set in the table tag, NS will repeat the background in every table cell, best way around it is to cut up the image and set as background in each td cell.

Body margins. Most people find two of them (the IE ones) but you need 4 to work in IE and NS, they are:
<body leftmargin="0" topmargin="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0">

Browsers have different margins, in some default is zero, others it's about 2. For things like cellpadding and cellspacing in tables set these to zero (0).
NS doesn't render table borders or background colours, IE renders background colours but doesn't render borders.
Fonts aren't supported in tables on NS if displayed outside of the table, where as IE will display them (best method is to use CSS and forget the font tag).

These are only a few things, if you have come to this page from outside this site look on the page topics for more work arounds for things like fixed backgrounds, form widths ...

Here are some other HTML tags that do and don't work

Tag	Internet Explorer	Netscape
abbr	No	7 up
acronym	Yes	7 up
button	Yes	7 up
del	Yes	7 up
fieldset	Yes	6 up
label	Yes	Not properly in NS7
bgsound	3 up	No
blink	No	Yes
bgproperties	Yes	No
embed	4 up	Yes
frame bordercolor	No	Yes
frame borber	Yes	No
frame spacing	Yes	No
frameset bordercolor	No	Yes
frameset border	No	Yes
hr color	Yes	No
q	No	6.2 up
marquee	Yes	7 up
table bordercolorlight	Yes	No
table bordercolordark	Yes	No
table bordercolor	Yes	No
table frame	Yes	No
iframe	4 up	7 up

This isn't a complete list by all means, but lists the basics. The key is to test, test and test again.

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