The Netscape-B-Gon® page


This page is Netscape-proof. What does it mean? Simple: the unfortunate people who are using Mozilla 1.x (Netscape Navigator) will not be able to read anything beyond this paragraph. Anything beyond this line, including the nice image below, will be invisible for them.

[Netscape-B-Gon® V1.0]

Congratulations, you are not using Netscape 1.x!

If you are reading this, which is the second paragraph, then you are not using Netscape 1.0, 1.1 or 1.2... Unless you are looking directly at the HTML source, of course (you cheater!). The unfortunate people who are using Netscape will not be able to see the image and the text that follows it (unless they are using Netscape 2.0 beta, which is much better than the previous versions).

How does it work? It's simple: if you look at the HTML source of this page, you will see that I included the image above using the following tag: <IMG SRC=internal-external-reconnect>. This is a valid name for an image (which is actually a GIF image, although it doesn't have the .gif extension), but Netscape recognizes this as one of its internal images and fails to display it because it is not used in its usual context. The simple fact of including this image in a page will prevent Netscape from displaying whatever follows it. Even if the automatic image loading is turned off!

How to create your own Netscape-proof pages

The only thing you have to do if you want to create your own Netscape-proof page is to create an image in the same directory as your page and call it internal-external-reconnect. All browsers will display the image correctly... except for Netscape, which will show a blank page! I'm sure this will confuse Netscape users.

If you are using this nice trick, please put a link back to my page, using something like this:
<A HREF = "www.montefiore.ulg.ac.be/~quinet/web/nonetscape-en.html"><IMG SRC = internal-external-reconnect></A>

Note: if you are using Netscape-B-Gon® in your own page, you might have some problems if your HTTP server does not recognize the image as a GIF file because the file extension is not .gif. If your HTTP server does not send the right content-type (content-type = image/gif), some browsers will not be able to display the image. There is probably a way to fix this by tweaking the server's .mime.types file, but I haven't tried it yet. If you succeed in modifying your server so that it outputs the correct content-type for this file, please let me know.

Shameless plugs

I would like to credit Scott Bigham who introduced the name Netscape-B-Gon®. Previously, this page was called The Netscape-Proof Page, but the new name sounds better. Thanks, Scott.

While you are here, you might as well visit my Netscape-enhanced page or my home page. If you want to add images in your HTML pages, you can also take a look at my collection of icons. By the way, this page has successfully passed the HTML2 and HTML3 validation tests in ``strict'' mode. It has also passed the Mozilla validation test although it cannot display it... He he he...

HTML 3.0 (Beta) Checked! HTML 2.0 Checked! HTML HaL Mozilla Checked!