2004 Articles for the Macintosh Computer

 

December 2004

Real People Reviews™ - by Daniel M. East
Browsing the Browsers:   Web Choices for your Mac Expand

With the release of Firefox v.1.0 from Mozilla Foundation, the options and choices for Mac-friendly web browsers improve, but what do some of these browsers offer that we don't already get from Safari? Depending on your needs, not much. There are some benefits from the added features in Firefox, Netscape (remember them?), Opera and OmniWeb, but Safari still outperforms them all. What Firefox does, more importantly, is provide a cross-platform alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which continues to be riddled with security flaws and a very dated interface. Even having said that, there are still a large number of web sites (many of which are database driven) that require IE for functionality and even *those* don't perform well [enough] with Macs. With several choices out there (several based on Apple's WebKit  developer tool), there are some options and choices if, and only if, you are frustrated by your current browser. It's good to try a few and look at your favorite sites that require a few of the things that might end up as "road blocks" to see what works best for your particular needs. Continued...

 

Freshly Squeezed Reviews
    by Frank Petrie    December 2004

The W3C, WSIWYG and Hand-Coding

Today, I thought that I would write a sister piece to my friend Daniel East's recent article <> on the plethora of browsers that are out there for end users to choose from. Dan wrote his piece from the view of the end user but I'd like to view the issue from the flip side, from that of the web designer or webmaster.

The W3C
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the body that oversees the standards that are used on the web. Or at least they try to. You see, browser coders occasionally take short cuts or, like in any profession, some are just plain lazy or lousy. As a result, the standards that The W3C recommends all browsers follow are either totally ignored or partially so. It ends up being like all the various plug formats in the 90's before the industry pretty much settled on USB and FireWire.
Continued...

 

Reflections on the Mac at 20

     By Lowell J. Erickson  Mountain View Users Group, Arizona

Twenty years ago, in January 1984, two momentous events occurred. The first was an ad that appeared during the TV broadcast of the Super Bowl. The other, two days later, was the introduction of a new kind of personal computer.

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