What follows is a paraphrased version of the 'Browser Upgrade Campaign' information, formerly available at: http://www.webstandards.org/act/campaign/buc/, which is intended to be used as guidance for upgrading your browser.

What are “web standards?”

Created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) — the people who invented the web itself, these standards were designed to ensure the web would work better for everyone. New browsers, mainly, support these W3C standards; old browsers, mainly, don’t.

What can I do?

You might consider upgrading to any of the following browsers. Doing so will allow you to use and view the BlackStar.co.uk website, and many others, as their creators intended.

IE6 for Windows delivers fine support for HTML 4, CSS-1, and other important W3C standards. Don’t worry if you don’t know what that means; the people who build your websites know. The browser is available free of charge.

IE5 Macintosh Edition, released in March 2000, provides superb support for key web standards (CSS, HTML, XHTML, PNG, ECMA-262, DOM1HTML) and an elegant user experience. IE5.1, released December 2001, improves on its predecessor. The browser is available free of charge.

Netscape 6.2 complies with important Web standards, including full support for XML and the DOM. These technologies can help web builders create powerful sites that work well. The browser is available free of charge. Netscape 6.2 fixes bugs in earlier releases, and adds support for Mac OSX. It is based on the standards–compliant Gecko engine and open–source Mozilla, which supports AIX, Linux, Win32, Mac OS, OpenVMS, HPUX, and FreeBSD, and which may be the most compliant of all current browsers.

Opera 6 for Windows, released 13 November 2001, supports many key web standards and a variety of computing platforms. Its lead designer was the chief author of the CSS-1 standard. The browser, which works well even on older PCs with limited power, is available free of charge. (A pay version is also available.) Opera supports Windows, Linux (beta, but works very well), Mac OS (beta, but works very well), and will soon support the OS/2, EPOC, and BeOS platforms.

Konqueror is a full–featured, modern graphical browser for Unix/Linux, with excellent support for web standards including HTML 4, CSS-1, ECMAScript, and the DOM Level 1, and partial support for XML and CSS-2. The current version is not at the same level of compliance, however, as Mozilla, IE, and Opera, and some sites may display incorrectly in Konqueror as a result.

The IBM Web Browser is based on Netscape's open source Mozilla project (see above), and offers excellent standards support for folks using IBM's OS2/Warp and Workspace On–Demand.