What's in your wallet?

• Most home and office computers today use Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0/5.5 as their web browser -- perhaps already installed when the computer was purchased, a monopolistic practice which led to anti-trust rulings in the Department of Justice case against Microsoft.
  
  
• Most university computer networks, on the other hand, use Netscape Navigator 4.7 as their web browser, a reflection of the era when Netscape was the leading browser.
  
  
• Unhappily, IE5 and NS4 interpret some details of HTML code quite differently -- when they can handle them at all. Knowing this, some programmers write to the quirks of one particular browser, abandoning the idea that HTML should be the lingua franca or common language of the web. Laboriously, other programmers add different versions of their code to suit several different browser families, including Opera, AOL, Compuserve, and others.
  
  
• In hopes of retreating from this tower of Babel, the W3C governing body has proposed new universal HTML 4.0 compatibility standards. Commendably, the first browser to adhere strictly to these standards is the Netscape Navigator 6.x. Although Internet Explorer 5.x follows these W3C standards, it does so loosely, keeping its marketing edge well-honed by adding its own interesting but proprietary features. Unhappily, Netscape 4.x does not keep up with the new W3C standards, and thus even Netscape urges its users to upgrade to other software which does.

True confessions:

• My browser history of the last few years can be traced in my home pages for myself and for the English department. I have always relied on text editors rather than HTML editors. After first writing web pages for text-based Lynx in 1994 and briefly switching to Mosaic, the first graphical browser, I adopted Netscape as my standard browser, faithfully upgrading through versions 1.x, 2.x, 3.x, and 4.x in the mid-and late 1990s. But when Netscape stalled at level 4.7x, I began to browse with and write for Internet Explorer 5.0 and then 5.5. Today I use Netscape 6.x for checking but miss some features in Netscape 4.7, which I continue to use as well.
  
  
• I prefer to read on paper rather than on the screen. I go through a lot of toner. Some of the biggest differences in the NS and IE browsers are in how they handle printing.
  
  
• Netscape 4.7: printouts usefully contain the time as well as the date, but data must be accessed a second time before printing begins and it is hard to predict type face sizes on paper from typeface sizes on screen.
  
  
• Internet Explorer 5.5: screen font sizes reliably predict paper font sizes. Version 6.0 already available for download
  
  
• Word processors: I especially like software programs with remappable keys so codes can be dropped in as I go without mouse distractions: examples are emacs, XyWrite/Nota Bene, PC-Write.

So .. where do we go from here?