Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference

Version Headaches

As a further complication, there are the inevitable prerelease versions of browsers and standards.

Browser prereleases are sometimes called “preview editions” or “beta” versions. While not officially released, these versions give us a chance to see what new functionality will be available for content display in the next-generation browser. Authors who follow browser releases closely sometimes worry when certain aspects of their current pages fail to work properly in prerelease versions. The fear is that the new version of the browser is going to break a carefully crafted masterpiece that runs flawlessly in released versions of the browser.

Somewhere between the releases of Netscape Navigator 2 and 3, I learned not to fret over breakages that occur in prerelease browser versions. Of course, it is vital to report any problems to the browser maker. I refuse, however, to modify my HTML or scripting code to accommodate a temporary bug in a prerelease version of a browser, as it is being used by an extremely small percentage of the population. My feeling is that anyone who uses a prerelease browser does so at his or her own risk. If my pages are breaking on that browser, they’re probably not the only ones on the Net that are breaking. A user of a prerelease browser must understand that using such a browser for mission-critical web work is as dangerous as entrusting your life’s work to a beta version of a word processing program.

On the standards side, working groups usually publish prerelease versions of their standards. These documents are very important to the people who build browsers and authoring tools for us. The intent of publishing a working draft is not much different from making a prerelease browser version public. The goal is to get as many concerned netizens as possible looking over the material to find flaws or shortcomings before the standard is published.

And speaking of standards, it is important to recognize that the final releases of these documents from standards bodies are called not “standards” but “recommendations.” No one is forcing browser makers to implement the recommendations. Fortunately, from a marketing angle, it plays well to the web audience that a company’s browser adheres to the “standards.” Eventually—after enough release cycles of both standards and browsers allow everyone to catch up with each other—our lives as content creators should become easier.

In the meantime, the following sections provide a snapshot of the various standards and their implementation in browsers as they relate to the technologies that affect DHTML.