The benefits of up-to-date browsers

All web pages are written in a language called Hyper Text Markup Language or HTML. You will be familiar with a Word Processor, where different styles may be selected for headings, normal text, footers, etc. In the case of web pages, the associated styles are contained in Cascading Style Sheets or CSS. The content is therefore in an HTML document and the layout and styling in a CSS document.
Both HTML and CSS have evolved and gone through several versions over the past decade or so. In late 2009, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published the first release version of the definition of HTML5 (hyper text markup language, version 5) and CSS3 (cascading style sheets, version 3). Back in the year 2000, when this web site was starting off, most of the layout and styling were contained within the individual HTML pages, which made the pages long and took the browser more time to load them. Now, a single CSS document can be used with every HTML page in a web site. The advantage for you, the reader, is speed; the style sheet is loaded only once into your computer and the smaller HTML pages are processed by your browser much faster. The advantage for me, the author, is speed and simplicity. When I come to make changes, I could for example change the size of the text or the colour of the background by making a few simple changes in one CSS document and this would then be visible immediately in all the associated pages in the web site.
Today's main browsers (Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Opera and MS Internet Explorer) support HTML5 and CSS3 with only a few exceptions. Whilst Firefox led the way, some years ago, in being "standards-compliant" (ie supporting the standards defined by W3C), Safari, Chrome and Opera have reached this level of compliance too. Internet Explorer is the problem and, once again, Microsoft has shot itself in the foot! Although Microsoft has been supporting W3C and was in agreement with the new Web Open Font Format (WOFF), IE versions 6 to 8 have only minimally supported any new standards. It was only with the introduction of the operating system Windows 7 that Microsoft launched IE 9, its first browser to be almost as standards-compliant as its main competitors. The big problem is that Microsoft has stated that IE9 will not be available for Windows XP. I doubt if many people will pay the price or risk upgrading their operating system just to get IE9. The obvious (and free) solution to anyone running Windows XP would be to install Firefox or one of the other modern browsers.