Unfortunately, as with most things in the world, not all things get along with each other. In the “browser war” every Web browser tries to rule over each other with new and improved functionality on the Web. What this creates is a somewhat different behavior (and appearance) between the programs. Simply looking at a Web site with Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator, for instance may produce a very different look. This is due in part to how the programmers programmed their browser to act with various HTML elements, etc. Fortunately, you have the ability to correct major mistakes, namely through using HTML validators (simple programs that check the HTML code of your Web pages for errors). A common mistake that can be corrected through using HTML validators is slowly-loading Web pages. The most common problem is that some of your tags haven’t been closed or they weren’t closed properly. A nice HTML validator called CSE HTML Validator Lite (the special edition of the full version package) has the ability to check your HTML documents for syntax errors and other problems. It’s available for download at http://www.htmlvalidator.com.
To check the behavior of your Web pages, we recommend downloading a copy of Netscape 3 and a version of Microsoft Internet Explorer (version 4 or above would be fine because its installed on most computers). The reason why we recommended testing your pages on an old copy of Netscape is because pages tend to act a little differently on that version than on the newer versions. You can be assured that the errors you correct with Netscape 3 will view correctly with most other versions of Netscape (and especially the newer ones). Unfortunately, you won’t be able to find a copy of Netscape 3 on Netscape’s corporate Web site since they promote their most recently developed versions. Probably the best method to obtain a copy of version 3 online would be to conduct a search using your favorite search engine (i.e. HotBot, Infoseek, Yahoo!) for the query “Netscape 3.” If that doesn’t produce satisfactory results, try using “Netscape Navigator 3,” or more specifically “Netscape Navigator 3.03″ or “Netscape Navigator 3.04,” for example. At the time of this publication, both versions were available for download at the FTP address: ftp://ftp.netaxis.qc.ca.