For those of us that do NOT use the most recent microsoft products to take advantage of the internet, either due to intelligence or equipment that just can't handle the exorbitant resources needed by their software, we also can't use the Town of South Bristol's web site. It's heavily MS proprietary formatted and won't work at all in many other browsers & operating systems. If there is something there that you'd like to read, like the minutes concerning wind mills, there is a way...

What I do is access the page. Netscape will at least access most pages on the site even if it can't display the contents. Go to the file menu and "save the page as", giving it a memorable file name in a location you can find. Then load this page into a text editor. This should even work with Notepad or any decent text editor..

Next mark and delete all the MS junk! Start at the top of the page, eliminating all the formatting codes & scripts. I just start with the cursor at the top of the page, hold down the shift key and then scroll down, marking all the way, until I find the section I want to read. Once marked, hit the delete key. Do the same from the bottom up... Then save this file under a new name.

Now open up a blank page in your browser. Click on this new file, holding down the mouse button, and drag it over to your browser window. The text of the page should now be visible and you should be able to save or print it, along with reading it of course ;-)

I know it's a lot of work, but for those of us who believe in internet _standards_ and not the MS monopoly, this is the only way at the moment to get to some of this information...

If you want to do this and have any problems, let me know and I'm sure we can get you through it...

With a little bit of spare time and some curiosity, I went in search of an alternative to either microsoft bloated junkware or the latest versions of netscape (which for various reasons, I did not want to install here). At this point it seems that I have found one...

Mozilla

For those who may not know, Mozilla is the result of Netscape releasing the source code of their browser a while back. A group of dedicated individuals picked up this source code and started the Mozilla project. They have been working very hard on fixing bugs and adding enhancements. Recently, they released verion 1.0 of Mozilla for many platforms including OS/2, linux, MAC and windows. I finally decided to give it a try.

I went for the brand new version 1.1a (a for alpha, not completely tested). If I'm going to try something 'new', I may as well try the newest...

I was/am plesantly surprised. Flawless install and even picking up all my settings from my installed netscape browser, so I didn't have to set anything to use it. It works without hogging (or lossing) resources, hasn't crashed yet and seems to load every page I've thrown at it including our Town's web site.

So, for those who don't want to run the bloated MS products, or those who can't, I recommend trying Mozilla. It seems to work and work very nicely. Added boneses are the news reader, e-mail client, html composer and even an IRC chat client. At least we have an independant option!

You can get more info at http://www.mozilla.org

There's a lot of developmnent info there, but most can ignore that and go right to the downloads or help/info pages...