Browsers for the Internal Web

Warrant, Marilyn (MMWARRA@saix367.sandia.gov)
Fri, 05 May 95 17:11:27 mst

I manage the SNL ES&H Manual, and am working with my team of editors and word processors to get the ES&H Manual documents up on the Web. So far we have a Home Page, and one document. I want to make sure that a browser with the capabilities of Enhanced Mosaic remains available for people to view my document and print it if they desire.

At least some Sandians will need paper copies of ES&H Manual documents for some time to come. In August, we plan to reprint the core ES&H Manual for distribution in September. If we're ready in time, we'll print it from HTML files viewed from Enhanced Mosaic to get people used to what they can see on the screen. The features of Enhanced Mosaic that are especially attractive for printed documents are the ability of the user to: (1) set margin width for printed pages, (2) print headers and footers with information about the document, (3) print the page number and total number of pages, (4) print the date. The documents also look good on the screen.

There are a number of problems with Netscape. The worst problem is that Netscape doesn't print bullets from bulleted list codes, and we have many bulleted lists in our documents. If there is a way to print the title and other document information, I've not found it. Printed pages have very small margins, and I've not found a way to modify margin width. Default fonts, which many users will stick with, take up a lot of room on the screen, limiting the amount of information that can be viewed at one time.

In short, I've used both browsers, much prefer Enhanced Mosaic, and recommend it to my customers. Please make sure that this browser, or one with the features mentioned, is available to Sandians.