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Twenty years ago today (13 October 1994), Mosaic Communications Corporation released the Mosaic Navigator, the first commercial browser for the World Wide Web. This was just six months after the company was founded by ex-Silicon Graphics CEO Jim Clark, and Marc Andreesen, a recent computer science graduate of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Andreesen had co-developed the Mosaic Web browser while working for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), on UIUC's campus; Clark, who had been losing a power struggle at Silicon Graphics, the company he'd founded, was restless and looking for an adventure and revenge. Andreesen quickly convinced the band of programmers from UIUC he'd worked with on Mosaic and web server development, to relocate to Silicon Valley.
Both the company and the browser were re-branded 'Netscape' a month after the product was released, settling a lawsuit by the UIUC, who regarded Mosaic as intellectual property belonging to the university.
Andreessen and Netscape moved fast, even by the standards of the personal computing business at the time. After Microsoft entered the game (they jump started development by buying rights to a web browser created by Spyglass), Netscape pumped out Navigator 2.0 a little more than a year later, unveiling JavaScript, frames, cookies, plug-ins, SSL (2.0, the first released version), and integrated mail and news readers. Oh, and client-side integration with a mysterious new language called Java.
Bill Gates broadcast his famous "Internet Tidal Wave" memo to the troops at Microsoft in May 1995. Internet Explorer 1.0 was released in August 1995; future versions of IE were bundled with Windows 95, as Microsoft tried (rather successfully) to "cut off Netscape's air supply", as Microsoft Vice President Paul Maritz is alleged to have ranted at the time. Microsoft's actions against Netscape and numerous other competitors in the software industry became the subject of an antitrust suit brought by the US Department of Justice.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Wednesday October 15 2014, @03:33AM
Oh, I wasn't trying to blame anybody, it was just a great example of a point, since you had two different rules for spacing within the same page. Easy for anybody to check and verify against my opinion about it, basically. I didn't expect any staff to even notice I mentioned it, so your response is a pleasant surprise.
I just tend to pay a lot of attention to things like contrast, font sizes, whitespace, use of colour, etc. They're a big part of keeping things readable (especially for people with poor vision or issues like colour-blindness), so it's something I try to watch out for, even with minor projects. I get a lot of use out of kmag (KDE's magnifier) because it has options to simulate types of colour blindness, including achromatopsia.
Even if you aren't worried about things like red-green blindness, being able to see everything in greyscale (the achromatopsia setting) is a great quick check for contrast problems. Not to pick on SN again, but the subscriber star badge is a good example of the greyscale thing. Take a screenshot of the page, convert to greyscale, and you can see what I mean: the star doesn't stand out against the backdrop. Even a slight squint will make it disappear.
Or, another example that is more subjective: link text doesn't stand out among normal text because they have similar value. This makes links more difficult to pick out at a glance (bad), but also means they're less distracting while reading (good). Which one is more important depends on the site and the content, so you just have to try finding a good balance. Example: if you change the tag colour to #BD2828 from the current setting of #660000 the links will stand out a bit more, for better or worse.
Gah, sorry, I started doing it again. This is what I meant, I just look at and notice this kind of thing. None of this is "oh crap this is horrible you need to change it NOW NOW NOW" but it's just the kind of thing I think of when I'm reading a site. I tend to over-analyse stuff :)