Bill Connelly

   

A tip o' the hat to John Friese for giving Ol' Bilgey the "heads up" that
the Club's website was causing the latest Netscape version 7.1 browser to
choke during login to the password-protected "Members Only Area" at
http://www.amphicar.com/memberslogin.html . After testing it myself with a
newly-downloaded copy of the Netscape browser, I think I've identified and
corrected the problem.

The reason for Netscape's "choking" on some features of the Club's site is
easy to explain: the web editor (sort of like a souped-up word processor for
websites) that has been used for the past couple-few years to cobble
together the Club's site has been Microsoft's FrontPage2000 (thanks to Mike
Israel's donation of it...The same nice fella who manages this very
Amphicar-Lovers List). This web editor, still perfectly adequate for
tending to the Club's not-too-fancy website 99% of the time, unfortunately
had a very well-known prediliction for sometimes "going its own way" and
flouting some of the agreed-on W3C standards that make the web work while
these standards were still being hammered out, sort of inventing its own
non-standard Microsoft web standards, if you know what I mean. While this
flouting of standards (a Microsoft emplyeee might call it "innovation") back
then when these were still "Transitional" may result in lots of pretty
snazzy and useful features for visitors to the Club's website who are using
pretty much any version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser (that's
about 90% of human visitors...See
http://www.amphicar.com/wwwstat/browsum.png for a breakdown for this week),
but they CAN cause problems for some visitors to the site with more W3C
standards-compliant (non-Microsoft) browsers, like Netscape.

Hopefully this problem, of Netscape users not being able to get into the
important 'Members Only Area,' is now resolved. But I must still tell you
all that after browsing around the site with Netscape 7.1 today, I still
have to admit that the site just plain looks and works better with almost
any version of Internet Explorer. So, at the risk of alienating "fringe
browser" users, open source software aficionados and guys with Linux Penguin
T-shirts, however compliant their browsers may be, you'll still get the most
out of the Club's site as it was intended with Internet Explorer....like
over 90% of the other human visitors.

Which finally brings me to this superb tip: If you want to REALLY beef up
your Internet Explorer's features, flexibility and appearance, AND enjoy
thereby pretty much all of the very best innovations of its rival Netscape
and Opera browsers, then go download the absolutely free MYIE2 Internet
Explorer enhancement at http://www.myie2.com/ . You won't regret it.

~Bilgey~