It is really unbelievable how many different versions and types of web browsing equipment and programs there are out there. Making web pages that will display properly on practically all of them is a difficult task, especially if you want your site to have character, appeal and a pleasing style. The real question is, how many systems do you want to cater to, and what are the rewards of maintaining multiple, redundant versions of your website to please everyone?

How many different web page viewing formats are there? What about translation services? It's alarmingly easy to cut your site off from the rest of the world by turning it into a silly Flash plugin-animation!

1. Plain Text- A very few users use ancient text-only monochrome Lynx type readers that aren't really browsers. While you can make concessions to make your site understandable to them, making a custom version of your site for them is not a big issue.

2. Early Hypertext- These group includes NCSA Mosaic, IE 2, Opera demos, WebTV and others. Excepting Lynx and WebTV, They're mostly a vanishing breed. They can display most HTML documents well, but lack certain basic abilities, like interpreting links, color and layout tables properly, and running Javascripts. These browsers will display plain pages like this one more or less, but are really suited to viewing text with minimal graphics, sounds and layout features. A number of AOL users are still afflicted with AOL clones of IE 2, which will dissapear as PC prices plummet.

3. Javascript Browsers- These include Netscape 2,3,4 and 6 and in and, in an odd manner, IE 3,4 and 5. Javascript was an important development that allowed amazing new features to be added to web pages like scrolling text, mathematical functions, switching images on mouse movement, opening documents in new windows, asking questions or warning users of certain actions, using the bottom status bar to display messages, and more importantly, actually writing customized pages based on a surfers intentions, rather than having to have hundreds of similar documents for displaying and formatting images or other content. It also allowed webmasters the luxury of identifying users with cookies that could store individual preferences or subscriber passwords automatically, eliminating the need to type them in every time they visit. It basically allows the web page to do some thinking, in the visitors browser, instead of at the website's server itself!

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