Netscape renders the ridge-style borders used throughout this site with far less color saturation and far more brightness than Internet Explorer. Borders that are richly colored in IE are glaringly stark in Netscape. In order to make its ridge-style borders look good in Netscape, this site loads a special style sheet if viewed with this browser.

In this Netscape style sheet the RGB value for the 4 pixel ridge-style borders is (64,0,5). A similar rendering in IE would reqire an RGB value of (209,146,152). In terms of the hue, saturation, brightness (HSB) color model, that’s a hue of 355 degrees in both cases, but with a saturation of 100% and brightness of 25% in Netscape, and respective values of 30% and 82% in IE.

Rather than try to make my pages look the same in IE as they do in Netscape, I’m taking advantage of the former browser’s ability to render ridge-style borders with a higher degree of saturation. For IE I’ve set my borders’ RGB value at (209,82,92) for a saturation of 61% and a brightness of 82%.

I’m hoping that future versions of Netscape will render ridge-style borders with more saturation and less brightness. Despite this complaint, I do appreciate Netscape’s higher relative contrast between the shadows and highlights of ridge-style borders.

If your browser is older than Internet Explorer 5 or Netscape 6, you would be well advised to update it, as older browsers aren’t very good with Cascading Style Sheets and JavaScript. Fortunately, you can download Internet Explorer 6, Mozilla 1.4.1, Netscape 7.1, and Opera 7.21 for free from the software manufacturers’ Web sites. And if you’re running Mac OS X, Camino, formerly known as Chimera, is another browser that comes highly recommended.