Workshop
The workshop contains quiz questions and activities to help reinforce what you've learned in this hour. If you get stuck, the answers to the quiz can be found after the questions.
Quiz
What will an older browser do if it encounters Cascading Style Sheets? Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
Which browsers are the closest to being fully compliant with the CSS specifications?
Why is it important to test in Netscape 4?
Answers
An older browserone written before the CSS recommendation was issuedwon't understand anything about Cascading Style Sheets. This is not great, but it's not bad either because CSS is designed so that if you design your style sheets correctly, your Web pages will still function even with CSS unavailable. The presentation may look dull or even awful, but your message will still shine through.
The best browsers for CSS support currently are Netscape 6, Mozilla, Opera 6, Internet Explorer (Mac) 5, and Internet Explorer (Windows) 6.
It's important to test your designs in Netscape 4 because it's still used by a sizable minority of Web surfers, and because it contains serious problems that can render your content unintelligible for those users.
Activity: Browser Test-drive
The more browsers you use for testing, the better you'll be able to understand how your CSS works with those browsers. To get some hands-on experience with new browsers, follow these directions:
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Choose one or more browsers from earlier in this hour that will work on your operating system. If you've already used them all, download an older version or an alternate browser from the evolt browser archive.
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Install the browser and fire it up for surfing the Web.
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Visit several Web sites that use CSS, including Eric Meyer's css/edge spiral and the site for this book, http://www.CSSin24hours.com.
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How does your experience using these browsers differ from your experience using your normal browser-of-choice? Note whether the CSS support is better or worse, and rank the browser you're using as "older," "limited," "broken," or "compliant."