I am interested in your statistics on browsers. A possible explanation of part of the preference for Netscape is the inability of IE4 (or 4.5) on a Mac to recognise the font symbol. For much of my nomenclature work I have to Greek letters and no longer use graphics files to creat the letters.
From my monitoring of the use of one document where the graphics approach is offered as an alternative fewer and fewer users use the graphics approach. I cannot distinguish between those upgrading old browsers from those switching to Netscape.
Try, for instance <font face="symbol"><span style="font-family: symbol">a</span></font> to write Greek alpha. While, correctly, <font> is frowned upon these days, the combination of style and font seems to work on everything, including Mac IE 4.5 and iCab. My access stats to date in 2000 give the same split as Henry's, and further suggest that is will not be long before <span style="font-family: symbol">a</span> will do as well over 90% of browsers now should work with this recipe. The numbers are: Version % 1 Netscape 4.x 33.67 2 MSIE 5.x 26.80 3 MSIE 4.x 17.79 4 MSIE 5.x (AOL) 8.97 5 Netscape 3.x 4.47 6 MSIE 4.x (AOL) 4.14 7 MSIE 3.x 2.04 8 MSIE 3.x (AOL) 1.24 9 Netscape 2.x 0.40 10 MSIE 2.x 0.39 11 MSIE 2.x (AOL) 0.09 12 NetPositive 0.00 13 OmniWeb 0.00 14 Sun HotJava 0.00 15 Opera 3.x 0.00 You might find these interesting when it comes to site design: Operating System % 1 Windows 85.64 2 Macintosh 10.77 3 Other 2.36 4 Unix 1.24 Screen Resolution Visitors % 1 800 x 600 pixels 52.42 2 640 x 480 pixels 19.68 3 1024 x 768 pixels 17.33 4 Other Resolutions 3.52 5 800 x 553 pixels 2.07 6 1280 x 1024 pixels 2.06 7 1152 x 864 pixels 1.33 8 640 x 433 pixels 0.76 9 1024 x 721 pixels 0.61 10 1600 x 1200 pixels 0.24 So we see that there are still 20% using small screens (quite a high proportion), and about 12% using decent computers. The next question is: how accurate are these numbers? In a different note Wendy asks about the proportion of company users. Short of enforcing user logins I don't know how to determine this. Suggestions? A .com referral means nothing! regards Dr Mark J Winter (Director of Studies) Department of Chemistry, The University, Sheffield S3 7HF, England tel: +44 (0)114 222 9304 fax: +44 (0)114 222 9303 e-m: mark.winter@sheffield.ac.uk http://www.shef.ac.uk/chemistry/staff/mjw/mark-winter.html WebElements is the periodic table on the world-wide web: http://www.shef.ac.uk/chemistry/web-elements/ or http://www.webelements.com/ The Sheffield Chemdex is a listing of chemistry sites on the world-wide web: http://www.shef.ac.uk/chemistry/chemdex/ or http://www.chemdex.org/ chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. To post to list: mailto:chemweb@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; (un)subscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)