Re: web browser capability?

["Sergej Rinc" <info -at- sinonim -dot- si>]

  Well, Diane,

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Moscrip, Dianne" <Dmoscrip -at- wcb -dot- bc -dot- ca>
> Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2000 12:25:16 -0800
> where can I obtain information on what browsers people are using? For
> example, how many people (or a percentage) use internet explorer 4 or 5?
> How many are using lesser browsers?

  Hop over to Internet usage statistics. One fine and free is (for January)
at

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2000/January/browser.html

  and you have several others listed at

http://webreference.com/internet/statistics.html

  (unfortunately www.stamarket.com is not free anymore).

  You can safely bet that MS IE 4.x and 5.x have 75% "market share" (in
quotes, because they are free) and NN 4.x additional 15-20%. This gives
90-95% of all browsers are either MS IE 4+ or NN 4+, capable of HTML 4.0,
basic CSS-1 and CSS-2, JavaScript 1.2 and some other limited goodies (for
example, both state they have Flash Player 3 or 4 in their distributions but
they do not allways install it - and Flash is practicaly most widely used
plugin, approx. more than 80%).

> What issues are there in regards to browsers? Can all of them read smart
> quotes, em dashes? Where would I find this type of information?

  The answers are: Don't ask :-). No. Arlen has given you some links but I
do not agree that one would have to support several browsers, spend a lot of
time for doing that etc (although I'm doing this <green>). If you stick with
HTML 3.2 standard - for example http://www.useit.com -, your pages will be
seen well for a long time if we suppose that support for it in browsers will
stay. But you never know ... and I give my thumbs up for standars based
browser like Mozilla (http://www.mozilla.org , its code should be finally
incorporated into Netscape Navigator 6).

Sergej Rinc, Certified Doc-To-Help Trainer
Tehnical Director, Sinonim d.o.o.
Member, International Webmasters Association http://iwanet.org
mailto:info -at- sinonim -dot- si, http://www.sinonim.si/index.html