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After long and careful consideration, I have to decided to give my
pages over to the underworld of Netscape-specific tags and
extensions. There are myriad reasons for and against excluding
non-Netscape users from receiving these pages in a properly
decipherable form. In the end, though, I feel that the advantages
of using the enhancements I list below outweigh the benefits of
universal cross-platforminess.
Here are some reasons: as the WebWorld gets more competitive, it's the visual and communicative impact of the finished page that really counts. Purists who avoid alienating their Lynx-equipped users by shooting their pages at the lowest common language denominator end up losing design (read: job) opportunities to those unprincipled bastards who are raping the system for everything it's got. Join or die. It's the fancy stuff like this that seperates the sidewalk from the freeway, and, perhaps more importantly, lets the presentation of the material be as individual as the content. Also, I was never above using things like tables in Microsoft Word documents to align material not necessarily tabular in nature, or using weird troff macros to craft elaborate forms. To me, these underhanded manipulations along the limits of the language are what makes computer programming as thrilling as it gets. The "controversial" Netscape features I make use 
This is a nifty trick that allows me to simulate variable inter-line spacing and indentations. The usefulness of this lies in the ability of spacing and indentation to designate orgnizational constructs (like the way the heading above goes with this paragraph) in a purely graphical form and without the use of extraneous (and by now tired) characters like bullets or techniques like font-size changes.
Tables permit me to layout a page with control over my margins and to position blocks of text and graphics in a way that is impractical to do any other way. Face it: this page is easier to read than it would be if the text stretched all the way from the right side of your window to the left.
I'm referring here to the extensions of the <BODY> tag that Netscape supports wherein you set the color of the background and of the text and links. Simply put, I've always wanted to do print documents that made use of color. That's expensive, and has been basically unavailable to me in any practical fashion. The Web is cheap. Here, finally, is a place where I can say "Lavender, with indigo text" and have it happen. I find that this usually doesn't cause any compatabililty issues with other kinds of browsers, but I should mention that I compose my colors so that they please me when my monitor is in 16-bit mode (i.e. "thousands" of colors). Sometimes I check to see what they look like mapped to the Macintosh 8-bit system palette. Sometimes I don't. For best results, you'll be reading this page in 16- or 24-bit color mode. So that's all I have to say about the Netscape thing for now. It took me a long time to come around to this decision, because I basically agree that it would be better if the legibility of Web documents was browser-independent. In essence, though, I'm conceding that graphical organization and design is a crucial communicative channel of Web documents these days. |