Web Design in a Nutshell

Browser Differences

In order to create DHTML content available to the largest audience, you will need to understand the differences between Microsoft’s and Netscape’s DHTML. Although both Netscape and Microsoft implement DHTML, they do so very differently.

Both Netscape 4.0 and Internet Explorer 4.0 support the Cascading Style Sheet Positioning (CSS-P) standard as established by the W3C. CSS-P (now rolled into the CSS Level 2 Specification) specifies settings for attributes of distinct objects in an HTML document. These objects are generally words or text. By accessing attributes, objects can be hidden, shown, and layered.

Although both browsers use CSS-Positioning, Microsoft and Netscape have applied this to HTML objects differently. Dynamic objects in a Netscape browser are called layers. Netscape has created a <layer> tag to add such items to a document. Dynamic objects in Internet Explorer are referred to as styles. Web designers must create DHTML documents that utilize both implementations of CSS-Positioning.