>It appears that about a third of the sites here at NIU are using
>HTML that requires Netscape. Since I prefer to use Mosaic those
>sites are closed books for me and perhaps others.
HTML is supposed to provide a "device independent" description of
pages, whenever possible. That's why some Netscape enhancements are
very irritating: for example, the fancy backgrounds make text hard
or impossible to read on monochrome screens, and I have to disable
them in my browser.
But some extensions such as tables are genuinely useful and relatively
easy to display in any browser, even ASCII-based. As much as I hate
creating pages which cannot be used from anything but Netscape, I'm
not about to give those conveniences up.
In short, I decide which extensions _I_ think should be a part of
HTML, and I use them, hoping that the developers of other browsers
will incorporate them in their software soon.
A more general note: the math community is particularly hard-hit by
the limitations of HTML. Whenever I need to put something as trivial
as a subscript on our colloquium calendar page, for example, I have
to include a GIF rendering of the symbols. This is ridiculous. At the
same time trying to put such things into HTML would create a monster
(what's next -- music notation? electronic diagrams?) The problem is
display technology and lack of any uniformity in that area. If most
computers could use -- say -- Display PostScript, we wouldn't have to
deal with all this.
>From this point of view I think it's a good idea to push the users
towards more modern hardware and software, so things like Adobe
Acrobat could soon replace ASCII as the common denominator of computer
display capabilities.