[thelist] Re: WARNING: Very odd browser behavior -- anybody else seeing this?

[Techwatcher]

First, thanks to all who gave me the info about firewall/Norton
behavior. Indeed, it turns out that anyone who has enabled something
like "prevent display of ads" in their configuration of the Norton
firewall is not seeing banner.gif (even though my banner.gif files
never were ads!).

One important design criteria is that different pages should share a
similar look across the site. Naturally, most clients wanted the site
to display a recognizable name, as a sort of online logo. So most of us
who began coding Web sites in the mid-90's used banner.gif (often with
logo-type text) as a design element on every site's page. Examples and
tutorials supported this very common practice.

The bad news: Anyone who calls some logo-type graphic on their
pages "banner.gif" should stop doing that.
The worse news: If you already created a lot of Web sites with
banner.gif at the top of all those pages, that banner is now invisible
to an unknown number of users. You might want to use something like *BK
Replace'Em* to alter the name of the banner.gif graphic *within* all
those files (but this utility works offline).
The only replacement programs I know of that could do this for you
automatically *online* are very expensive. (I used to have a demo CD of
one, but I can't find it now.)

So far, renaming the graphic from banner.gif to logo-[initials].gif
works, but who knows what Norton might do next!?
After fixing each file (offline), you'll also have to reload all those
pages.
You'll also have to change the name of the banner.gif graphic file
itself on the server.

Norton's decision to make all files named banner.gif invisible is a
disaster... unless one is so desperate for work that replacing the name
of a graphic on every page seems attractive. The least they could have
done was to check the dimensions of the banner.gif and only delete
those with the standard ad size! Groan.

Very grumpily --
Carol (techwatcher)