About this Website
The page style, with its wine red colour range especially in the page header and footer, was developed by a professional web designer circa 2004..5. The entire site uses a CSS (cascading style sheet) which means that the "look" is constant for all normal pages on the entire site.
The text sizes are set such that usual browser text size adjustment works. If you do not know about this, hold down the Ctrl key (left hand corner) and press + on numeric keypad (desktop keyboards) for larger, – (minus) for smaller text. Note that many images are also placed so that their sizes adjust to match. In my opinion, all websites should do this for accessibility and flexibility. Many do; some do not.
Let me know if you find anything about this website that does not work, or if you have information that I do not about Opera South or related subjects, which should be on the site, or if you find factual errors. Email me as webmaster.
Browsers
 | Mozilla Firefox | The Opera South site works fine with this well behaved browser |
 | Opera | No pun intended, but what can you do?! The Opera South site works OK with this fairly well behaved browser. I have one problem: when using Ctrl+ and Ctrl− to increase or decrease text size quickly (which works with all the latest versions of major browsers), in Opera, each time the + or − is pressed, the text size jumps too much — in fact, one Opera text size jump is about as much as three such jumps in Firefox! |
 | Safari | This is famous on Apple Mac systems under OS X, but available for Microsoft Windows based PC systems too and pretty neat if you are used to Mac styling and behaviour. The Opera South site works fine with this well behaved browser |
 | Netscape | The Opera South site works fine with this well behaved browser. Despite the facts that the Netscape corporation was acquired by Time Warner (formerly AOL Time Warner) and dissolved, version 8 of the Netscape browser is based on Firefox. In October 2007 a new browser version, Netscape Navigator 9, was formally released. Strangely, even after 24th October 2007 www.netscape.co.uk was still touting something described as "Netscape version 7". Would you use a browser offered by these people? |
 | AOL | The Opera South site works OK with the latest versions of this badged variant. (For example, AOL browser version 1.5001.6.1 says it is version 7.0.5730.11 of MSIE about which see below.) |
 | Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE for short) | The Opera South site is displayed mostly correctly by version 7 or later of MSIE, but some deviations from the W3C standards in how older versions render pages are apparent, which mar the look. See below. |
Poor rendering in older MSIE
To give just one example, each one of those wine red rectangles (borders) around opera titles and other images that are hyperlinks, such as the top three browser icons on this page, should only become visible when you point at the image within the border, but in some older versions of MSIE still in wide use, those borders are displayed all the time, which is incorrect. In some other versions of MSIE, the border is (correctly) only visible when you point at the image, but even then you only see two out of the four sides of the rectangle. (The borders were added to the style because we are mindful of inexperienced web users who need reminders of every entity behind which there is a hyperlink.)
Poor rendering in latest MSIE
Even on the latest version (writing at April 2008 I had MSIE version 7.0.5730.11)
there are display problems.
To give just one example, the Opera South home page at April 2008, displayed in Firefox like this:
is displayed in MSIE v. 7 like this, with a terribly obvious background colour error:
with the same window width, when that width is below a certain value.
How to get better rendering
If you are using MSIE (or an AOL badged version of it) and you see those borders all the time, or you only see two out of the four sides of the rectangle when you point at the image, you should do one of these things:
- if you are absolutely devoted to Bill Gates and all his works, obtain the latest version of MSIE
- otherwise, and far better, obtain the latest version of Firefox or Opera