The Plant Science web site uses contemporary browser technology (see below). If you are seeing this message, you have either clicked on the link "web-tech" or "Trouble Using this page" on the home page, or you are using a very out-of-date browser. Pages on this site will look distorted, perhaps indecipherable, and homepage navigation (which uses css-driven dropdown menus) will be unusable. To use this site, you should update your browser now. These links will take you to either Microsoft, Netscape, or Mozilla, where you can download (free!)a current version. Mac users are strongly encouraged to migrate to Apple's Safari brower.
Please Note: Although Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 is currently the most popular web browser (~90% of all users use IE6, or Mac IE5.5), it is ~ three years old now (That's over 70 in people years!). It is notoriously bad at conforming to contemporary web standards! For this reason, we suggest that you try the free downloads from Mozilla, Netscape, or Apple.
Contemporary web technology follows the recommendations of the World Wide Web Consortium. We follow these recommendations because W3C-standard's driven web pages are much faster, can support far superior layouts, and do not use technology which is being abandoned ("deprecated") by world standards-setting bodies. We are also working to convert all of this site to conform to the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative, so that by this Fall web users with sight or mobility limitations will be able to use our pages.
Although web developers are constantly working to turn the W3C's recommendations into standard programming practice (see Web Standards Project), not all browsers do an equally good job of conforming. By contemporary technology, we refer to the standards for the Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML 1.1), and particularly for the current version of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS2), which we use. Although not perfect, the current generation of mozilla browsers (Mozilla 1.6, Netscape 7.1) do a reasonable job of adhering to this technology. Internet Explorer (IE6) does not. We have attempted to use standard "hacks" to overcome IE6 inadequacies and to otherwise use "transitional technologies" to allow our pages to "degrade" as gracefully as possible in older browsers (specifically, the Netscape 4 series, which is seriously deficient and should be upgraded), but we have decided to no longer add the necessary page coding to overcome the deficiencies of out-of-date browsers. Again, please do yourself a favor and upgrade if you have not done so already.
Thank you.