Other notable browsers in Java

Generator PDF 417 in Java Other notable browsers

Firefox and IE are the big players in the browser world, but they certainly aren t the only browsers you will encounter

The Opera Web browser is one of the earliest standards-compliant browsers It is a technically solid browser but has never been widely used If you design your pages with strict compliance in mind, users with Opera have no problems accessing them

Apple includes a Web browser in all recent versions of the Mac OS The current incarnation Safari is an excellent standards-compliant browser Safari was traditionally designed only for the Mac, but a Windows version has been released recently

There s still a Mozilla browser, but it has been replaced largely with Firefox Because Mozilla uses the same underlying engine, it renders code the same way Firefox does

The Web isn t just about desktops anymore Lots of people browse the Web with cell phones, iPhones, and PDAs These devices often have specialized Web browsers designed to handle the particular needs of the portable computing model However, these devices usually have tiny screens, small memory capacity, and slower download speeds than their desktop cousins A portable browser can almost never display a page as it was intended on desktop machines Portable browsers usually do a good job of making standardscompliant code work, but they really struggle with other types of HTML (especially tables used for formatting)

There are browsers that don t display any graphics at all Some, like Lynx, are intended for the old command-line interfaces This may seem completely irrelevant today, but they are incredibly fast because they don t display graphics Auditory browsers read the contents of Web pages They were originally intended for people with visual disabilities, but they are often used by people without any disabilities, as well Fire Vox is a variant of Firefox that reads Web pages aloud

Really, you need to have access to a couple browsers, but you can t possibly have them all I tend to do my initial development testing with Firefox I then check pages on IE7 and IE6 I also check the built-in browser on my cell phone and PDA to see how it works there Generally, if you get a page that

gives you suitable results on IE6, IE7, and Firefox, you can be satisfied that it works on most browsers However, there s still no guarantee If you follow the standards, your page displays on any browser, but you might not get the exact layout you expected

One of the best features of Firefox is its support for extensions Hundreds of clever and generous programmers have written tools to improve and alter Firefox s performance Three of these tools the HTML Validator, Web Developer toolbar, and Firebug are especially important to Web developers

In 2 of this minibook, I explain how important Web standards are and how to use online services such as http://validatorw3org and HTML Tidy online (http://infohoundnet/tidy) These are terrific services, but it would be even better to have these Validators built directly into your browser The HTML Validator extension by Marc Gueury is a tool that does exactly that: It adds both the W3C Validator and HTML Tidy to your Firefox installation When you have this extension (available on the CD-ROM) running, you have an error count in the footer of every page you visit (You ll be amazed how many errors are on the Web) You ll be able to tell immediately if a page has validation errors With the HTML Validator, your View Source tool is enhanced, as shown in Figure 3-4 The View Source tool becomes much more powerful when you run HTML Validator, as follows: Each error is listed in an errors panel This is exactly the same error list you see from W3C Clicking on an error highlights it in the source-code listing This makes it easy to see exactly what line of code triggers each error Complete help is shown for every error The Validator toolbar presents much more helpful error messages than the official W3C results Automated clean-up You can click the Clean Up link, and the Validator extension automatically applies HTML Tidy to your page This can be a very effective way to fix older pages with many errors