Really, really Under Construction!

Last updated Friday, September 29, 2000 CE.

General Issues

All your graphics are hard to see- there are odd bands of color running through them.

Reason: Due to the nature of the publication, the ownership of UpClose has elected to use high color graphics for all of the website. To view them properly, your display must be set on at least "thousands" or "16 Bit" color (these terms mean the same thing, but are used by different versions of different operating systems).

Solution:

Windows: Go to Start Menu, Settings, Control Panel, Displays. Choose the "Settings" Tab, and select "16 Bit" (24 or 32 is better, if your display supports these modes) from the Color drop-down.

Mac: Go to Apple Menu, select Control Panels, Display and choose "Thousands of Colors" (Millions is even better, if your display supports this mode).

America Online

AOL has a spotty record of WWW support. Like most of the large online companies, they began as a members-only system that had nothing to do with the internet. Later, they added some access to the web but wrote their own browser software that had very few of the features that were considered standard by the rest of the world. They finally gave up efforts to maintain this hopelessly out of date software and made a deal with Microsoft to bundle a modified version of the fledgling Internet Explorer in its place. While this helped somewhat, early versions of IE were quite buggy; later versions of AOL fortunately include later versions (4 and 5) of Explorer.

We strongly reccomend updating to the latest version of AOL software.

Issues and solutions:

All the graphics are stacked one right after each other, distorting the pages badly.

Reason: Your AOL software is from before IE 4.x was included.

Solution: Updating to the latest version of AOL will solve the problem.

The graphics look as if they've been through a meat grinder.

Reason: Microsoft included a "feature" in Internet Explorer that seeks to speed browsing up by compressing graphics with a process known as JPEG encoding. While JPEG is indeed very good at compressing graphics, images that have too much compression develop nasty artifacts. Since most of the graphics on this site are already JPEG compressed to a very high degree, this feature mangles their appearance.

Solution: Turn off the extra compression.

Netscape/Mozilla

For some time, the Netscape browser (nicknamed 'Mozilla') was the de facto standard of web browsers. Their purchase by AOL resulted in losing many of their top-flight programmers, and, predictably, the overall quality of the browser has declined.

Furthermore, Netscape/AOL has launched a re-worked browser under the name "The Mozilla Project," the goal being a completely open-source browser that complied with all prevailing standards exactly. Furthermore, they have released a version of this browser that, while being based on the open-source Mozilla, ships with third party commercial plugins (such as RealPlayer and Shockwave) under the name "Netscape 6 Preview."

We must stress that both of these projects are nowhere near complete, though one may download and use "beta" versions of Mozilla and Netscape 6. As a result, they are quite buggy and UpClose Online will not support either at least until their official release.

There is nothing stopping the reader from using these browsers to read UpClose Online. However, your results may be unpredictable.

Netscape 4 (The 'Official' Netscape)

Some pages cause my browser to crash.

Reason: These pages use Java. Netscape has not yet brought their Java software up to current official standards and it behaves unpredictably. Some computers have no problem with this, and some crash each time they access Java.

Solution: Use another browser. If you are using Windows, you likely have Internet Explorer pre-installed. Oddly enough, we've note that older verions of Netscape apparently do not have the same problem.

Alternate Browsers

UpClose Online has not been tested with alternate browsers such as Opera, Arachne, or WebTV because of their low market share.

http://browserwatch.internet.com/stats/stats.html

Any that claim to support layers, graphics, image maps and Java should work reasonably well.

Bug Reports or Further Questions

Any further questions or bug reports may be addressed to our webmaster.