CSS Guidelines and their compatibility with IE5 and N5

This exercise demands that we locate information about the CSS2 guidelines established by the W3C Consortium, and check to see if they are implemented in the Fifth Generation of the two major browsers. Of course, information is out there about the sixth or latest generation of browsers, but I will stick to the literal requirements of this exercise just to see what I come up with!

First of all, you can find the CSS2 definitions at the W3C site dealing with this agreement.

Fixed Tables

This is an important addition to the CSS coding system. Since tables used in ordinary HTML code take some time to appear on the page, particularly if they have complicated structures, this new coding feature makes the tables load quickly. It does this by using the tag property "fixed" which tells the browser to use the width and height information of the columns and rows from the first row to lay out the rest of the table immediately. This is what the code looks like:
<TABLE STYLE="table-layout:fixed">
This will obviously only work if there is a consistent row dimension to open up, but it can save some time.

This new CSS coding works in IE5, but information about whether it works in Netscape 5 was contradictory and sparse. One reason for this is, I think, that Netscape have turned their main page into a vendor for light-weight news as opposed to focusing upon Netscape information or product support (as at Microsoft's main page). Thus I can find the latest babbliings from inept politicians but I can not find much information about Netscape 5. Netscape 6 is well-hyped, however, although even there information about CSS compatibility is limited.

Behaviors

The second example of the new CSS2 guidelines deals with the "Behavior" function. This function gives a new level of integration to the document in terms of funcionality and control over all elements.
In the same way that style sheets provide for style to be separated from content so "Behavior" script can separate functions from HTML content. This is a list of some of the new provisions of "Behavior" function coding:
Ability to access a component via the registry, host, or page.
Access to the Document Object Model, allowing you to communicate with the document.
Notifications to the component during the lifetime of the tag.
Access to the drawing surface for a component to render .
Inheritance from existing and new DHTML Behaviors for behavior and rendering.
Stylesheet support for standard CSS attributes.
Support for tag-specific CSS attributes.
Security Zone knowledge to avoid instantiation in inappropriate places.

Here is how behavior would be defined for a simple form function:

<html>
<head>
<style>
.mask {behavior: url(mask.sct);}
</style>
</head>
<body style="font-family: verdana">
<h2>Mask Input Fields</h2>

date
<input type=text class=mask maskType=date><br>
money
<input type=text class=mask maskType=money><br>
time
<input type=text class=mask maskType=time><br>
</body>
</html>

Again, this new CSS2 guideline is fully applied to IE5 but information about its applicability to Netscape is scanty. The boast about Netscape 6 make it clear that most of the CSS2 guidelines apply to that generation of browsers, but not whether they applied to earlier generations. If you were to look at the history of the competition between these two browsers you could argue that it was Netscape's failure to come up with useful development in DHTML coding and W3C compatibility in its Fifth Generation browser which sealed its fate in the browser market. Netscape 6 has no market demand to support it and Microsoft, with all their monopolisitic activities, has won the browser wars!