| I am by no means claiming to be an expert in any facet of page design. I have been at the enjoyable hobby of putting together personal web pages since March of 1997. I do it for joy and relaxation. But the need to know tricks of the trade has led me to search the web for information. Here I will relate facts that I have discovered, but did not find in my search. These facts may be written elsewhere but I have discovered them on my own, usually by accident. If you have tips that you believe are yours alone or are hard to find, send them to me and I will post them. |
| Table Border Colors |
| Those of us that write HTML for Microsoft IE are aware of the attributes of bordercolordark ="" and bordercolorlight ="". This renders 3D border effects for IE in the colors specified but does nothing for Netscape. |
| Likewise, those of us that write for Netscape may be aware that a darker and a lighter shade of the back ground color specified in the body of a page produce the same effect. To make the borders a different color than the back ground color all you have to do is specify a back ground image for the desired page color. Then use a different color for your table borders. |
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| The tables above look very close to the same in both Internet Explorer and Netscape. |
| Nesting Tables and Backgrounds |
| If you want to nest tables and have different backgrounds for those tables there is one small difference between our two browsers. In the tables below I wanted a background image for the main table and just a color for the nested table. |
| This was easy enough for InternetExplorer. I just assigned the background I wanted to the main table and then assigned the desired color to the nested tables. Not so with Netscape. It seems the background of the main table does not just show through the color of the nested color. It is actually used as the background. Go figure! To get the same effect in Netscape you must assign the background attribute to the nested table. A small image of the color desired tiles to give the same effect in both browsers. |
| If you are viewing this page with InternetExplorer the two nested tables below look the same. If you are using Netscape table #1, the one with a background image assigned to the nested table, appears as I wanted it to. But table #2, with only a bgcolor assigned to the nested table, does not. |
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| In Line Images |
| If you need to use several images in line for some reason, say to make a navigation bar, the finished product may not appear the same in Internet Explorer and Netscape. |
| As with most things, IE is more forgiving than Netscape when it comes
to the use of more than one image in a row. While Internet Explorer
ignores all white space (spaces or different lines) between image codes
Netscape does not. For Netscape, you must have the beginning element
of one image directly after the ending element of the former image
for the images to be rendered next to each other. That is, no white space between </image> and <image>. |
| There is a space between the first and second images, a line break between the second and third, and a no break space between the forth and fifth. These are all render with a space between images in Netscape. The only space in Internet Explorer is where the no break space is between the forth and fifth images. |
| Font colors in Links. Sometimes I have had the need to change the color of the font in a link. This need usually arises when the link is in a table with a different Background color than the page. Example:
We must accomplish this in different ways for our two browsers. For Netscape, the font tags inside the anchor tags work just fine. But for IExplorer, we must assign the font color using a <STYLE TYPE="text/css"> tag. Look at the code for this paragraph
to see the two codes used. |
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