Vivarium makes use of many up-to-date web technologies to deliver its content. Choosing and setting up web browsers correctly will ensure the proper delivery of its contents.

Computer Monitor Settings:
Vivarium is intended to be viewed on a full-color (24-bit color, 8 bits per channel or better) computer monitor set at a screen resolution of 1024 by 768 pixels. Users running lower resolution screens will have to scroll back and forth to view the entire listings for objects.

My Favorites:
In order to use the "My Favorites" feature of Vivarium, the user must have her browser set to accept "cookies." It's important to note that any favorites gathered on a particular computer will not appear on another computer, even if that same user logs onto the new computer. The cookies are stored on the computer that gathered the favorites. Save your favorites as a standalone HTML page if you want to move your favorites from computer to computer. Help in using "My Favorites" is available here.

Unicode:
Many of the names and terms used in Vivarium contain text characters that are outside the normal Latin 1 character set. Transliterated Semitic languages require special characters not contained in many readily available computer fonts. To properly deliver such text, Vivarium uses Unicode, an emerging worldwide text-encoding standard that assigns unique code points to thousands of text characters, eliminating the need for separate code pages for different languages. In order to view these special characters, the user's computer must have a font installed that contains glyphs for these codepoints. The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library has a test page you can use to determine if your browser can display these characters correctly.

JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets, etc.:
Increasingly, web pages use cascading style sheets (CSS) to set the look and feel of web content. Older browsers, such as Netscape 4.x, do not support CSS and will not display such pages properly, if at all. Lists, drop-down menus, and the like depend on JavaScript for their operation. Some older browsers do not support JavaScript at all. Current browsers must be set to enable JavaScript--they usually are set by default to accept it.  

Macintosh OS X
Thorough testing has been done with various web browsers running on Macintosh's OS X. Overall, Mozilla Firefox have proven the most compatible with HMML's use of special transliteration characters and non-Latin scripts. Safari, Apple's default browser, has some minor problems in rendering certain Arabic characters; otherwise is is fully functional. OS X ships with a system font called Lucida Grande that contains the necessary Unicode figures to properly render Latin transliteration characters. OS X can dynamically swap non-Latin characters from other installed fonts to render Arabic and other native scripts.  Internet Explorer for OS X is not recommended, as it doesn't support Unicode.

Linux/Unix
HMML has tested Vivarium on a few Linux installations with good results. Firefox, the open-source version of Netscape, has worked on Linux and would be a good starting point for choosing a browser for this platform. We welcome feedback from folks using browsers on these platforms.