times in 1999 and
times in 1998.
One of the worst Netscape bugs is that it doesn't refresh properly, so you often don't see it when a page has changed. (The fix is to manually clear your cache, if you know how to do that.)
Refresh problems are most annoying when you're looking at a web camera page, since such pages are supposed to automatically refresh every minute or so. ( JenniCam is the most famous web camera site, of thousands. OpalCat's World Domination Headquarters, stefCAM, and concretecam are three other cool examples.)
For people who hate Microsoft, the worst thing about Internet Explorer is that Microsoft makes it.
The worst Internet Explorer bugs are in the standard installation option, which replaces the Windows 95 "desktop" with Internet Explorer. Select the "browser only" installation option, instead of the default installation, so that Internet Explorer doesn't "take over your whole system", as it's often described.
Actually, there's nothing that sucks about Opera. It's amazingly fast and bug-free, and takes very little disk space. It achieves those desirable goals by ignoring lots of web frills, which (on most sites) are just a waste of download time anyway. That will make everything run faster, and if you encounter a web feature that Opera doesn't support (and it's actually worthwhile), you can always view the page again with one of the two major browsers. It isn't free, but it isn't expensive.
Vince reccomends using Netscape, particularly when people have problems with Internet Explorer bugs.
SteveS mostly reccomends Internet Explorer, particularly when people have problems with Netscape bugs. He uses Opera to read pages that Internet Explorer can't read, because he doesn't have enough disk space for Netscape.
Disk space permitting, a good thing to do is use more than one browser. If a Netscape bug prevents you from doing something interesting, you can try the same page with Internet Explorer, and vice-versa. The "browser only" installation of Internet Explorer does a much better job of cooperating with Netscape. Some pages only work properly with one major browser or the other, and having both installed makes such problems easy to solve. And Opera is so small it's simple to keep it around to avoid the major browsers' bugs.
ICQ is another great chat program (even though AOL has bought Mirabilis, the company that makes ICQ). ICQ allows you to keep track of whether your friends are using the Internet any time you are. It is said to be similar to AOL's "Instant Message", but better.
It doesn't work on WebTV, at least not that SteveS knows of. There is said to be a Java version, which may or may not work on WebTV. There are also browser-based ICQ pagers, but they are send-only, as far as SteveS knows.
This information is based on my opinions. If you think I've done a nice job on these pages, you might find my opinions worth reading. If you think these pages I've written suck, you might not want my opinions. In my defense, I think my HTML skills are quite good enough. If these pages suck, it's because my graphic design skills suck, not because I can't write decent HTML.
-- SteveS
Club Seattle webmaster
I don't think much of HTML editors in general. HTML is simple enough that you can make a decent page directly in HTML, rather than hassling with a hide-the-details editor. I write most web pages with a simple text editor, most often Windows Notepad. (It's lame, but it does the job.)
To write web pages directly in HTML, you need two things: a simple editor you almost certainly have already (like Notepad) and at least a slight understanding of HTML. I learned most of what I know about HTML by looking at others' web pages. The Internet Explorer command to do that is View.Source -- other browsers (and WebTV) have their own ways of doing the same thing. For stuff that didn't make sense from looking at others' pages, an HTML book is a good thing to have.
The only HTML book I have is HTML for Dummies. I got it for 60 percent off at a clearance book store, because it was the supposedly out of date third edition (1997). That's kind of silly, because nothing in HTML ever goes away (except maybe the dreaded <blink> tag), and pretty much everything added to HTML in recent years has been crud. So, my cheap old edition of HTML for Dummies covers everything I think is important about HTML.
If you really can't face dealing directly with HTML, there are a number of HTML editor programs you can use. The most evil thing some of them do is write bad HTML -- avoid any editor that does that. How do you know if your editor writes bad HTML? It comes back to understanding enough about HTML to recognize bad HTML. So, an editor doesn't save you the trouble of learning HTML, but it can save some trouble in actually writing it. HTML editors also make it easy to use lots of "advanced" HTML features that you shouldn't use anyway, like frames. Their greatest value is for making tables, which can be a real pain with a plain text editor.
The only real HTML editors I've used are a very early edition of FrontPage and the current version of FrontPage Express, both by Microsoft. Both are pretty good, although if you hate Microsoft you'll want to avoid them. I found them very helpful for writing tables. Friends with complicated sites really like FrontPage, but it's more than I need most of the time.
I also tried Microsoft Works as a web page editor. It's pretty good for its intended purposes, but as a web page editor Works doesn't work. It writes completely brain-damaged HTML. It may be correct, but its HTML is horribly bloated -- even a simple text web page will be a disk hog, and take a long time to download. Worse still, the HTML it writes is completely unreadable by normal humans. Avoid it!
As I mentioned, some HTML editors will tempt you to use obnoxious, "advanced" HTML features. Most of those features should be avoided. You can read more of my opinions on web page design on my Web Site Quality Guarantee page, which is really more of a sarcastic summary of ways to make a bad web site, and my expression of hope that I've avoided most of them.
This page has been viewed
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SteveS currently maintains this page,
and created its initial content.
Page created in August 1998.
Last updated on 23 March 1999. (Minor revision on 5 January 2000.)
