The default fonts and colours are: Headings — blue serif (such as Times New Roman); Body text — black sans-serif (such as Verdana, Arial). If you are not seeing those colours and fonts then you have pre-set defaults in your browser that are overriding the incoming document's style sheet. That is not a problem, but it may help to explain any differences you are seeing.

(Nescape produced its own set of problems in this regard because it will not allow you to import style sheets. Hence it would not give the background paper when specified in style sheets and it would not give blue headings on pages controlled by style sheets that import other style sheets. However, you can use the LINK command more than once in a file and this overcomes the two style sheet problems, but to get a background in Netscape, it must be specified in the actual file, not in a style sheet! But this was only the beginning of woes!)

The decision was to implement as much of the CSS guidelines and principles as possible while at the same time opting for speed for the user. Hence graphics are small and heavily reused; there were very few tables (until we hit the NN and Opera in our testing!!).

I never thought I would live to see the day that I considered Microsoft had done an excellent job (the stability of Office 97 number streams are a good example of their usual standard!) but in our hands, Internet Explorer 5 has an excellent implementation of CSS. Next comes Opera and a long way third is Netscape. I am the first to admit that we are still learning HTML and CSS and the problems we have had with Netscape may be all of our own doing.

However, if you are interested in this kind of thing, please load css-browser-test.html into the three browsers and compare the presentation. You can also view the style sheet that was used at the time of these tests. The single biggest problem seems to be the inability to cope with two right aligned images on the same line with justified text to the left. Unless it is in a table, it seems Netscape has no idea of what to do with it. (Netscape doubled the time and cost of this job because of their poor CSS implementation!) . We will welcome any comments you care to offer.

As you can see, we had to settle for tables in the Book Shop and The Quiltwise Gallery. Yeech! Our apologies to the users with slow connections — we tried really hard to overcome this problem.