browsers

Recommended browsers

The Erin Arts Centre Web site, which has been optimized for a minimum resolution of 800x600 (1024x768 is better!), complies fully with current standards imposed by the World Wide Web Consortium – the people who invented the Web itself. The W3C created these standards so the Web would work better for everyone. New browsers, mainly, support these standards; old browsers, mainly, don't. These are the currently recommended browsers, in descending order of compliance with the W3C standards:

• Mozilla Firefox (Mac OS X, Windows and Linux i686), Camino (Mac OS X), Netscape v7 or higher (all platforms), Galeon (Linux GNOME Desktop) or other browser stemming from the Mozilla.org project
• Apple's Safari (Mac OS X, Windows)
• Opera v7 or higher (Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, Solaris)
• Konqueror (Linux KDE Desktop)

Earlier versions and other Web browsers will give unpredictable results and are not recommended. If you are using such a browser or an earlier version, you should upgrade to the latest version to take full advantage of developments in browser technology. Most browsers are available free of charge from the respective Web sites and are quick and easy to install. Click here for the Web Standards Project (WaSP) Web site to read more about the advantages of upgrading or changing browsers.

Firefox and other Mozilla-based applications are rapidly becoming the browsers of choice for many commercial organisations worldwide, as well as a growing number of individual users. While Firefox remains at the top of the list of compliant browsers, Apple's Safari and Mozilla's Camino (Mac OS X) are also enjoying phenomenal success. We at Look and Feel strongly recommend any of these as permanent alternatives to Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

JavaScript

For the navigation links to display properly in your browser, it is essential that you enable Javascript in your browser preferences. Furthermore, our Web site uses Cascading Style Sheets and some browsers will not observe these styles if Javascript is not enabled.

Caching

Your browser keeps web pages and images in memory, so you don't have to wait to see things you've already downloaded. Browsers have two kinds of caches: a memory cache and a disk cache. The memory cache keeps all the images in a web page in memory and this means scrolling is faster because the whole page is in memory. The disk cache keeps previously visited pages on disk, so you don't have to wait when you hit the Back button. To enable caching to work efficiently you need to make sure the Check Documents preference setting in your web browser is set to update images "Once Per Session". Checking a document means to compare the date on the file with the date stored in the cache; if the file date is newer, it reads the image again. If the date is the same or older, it keeps the cached version as is. The cache size should be between 5 and 10 megabytes.