Re: CSS and Netscape

From: "Austin Govella" <austin@desiremedia.com>
> You can create 99% of all designs using standards *and*
> have them work in NS4 with very, very little to no degradation in
> functionality or visual appearance.

I will have to disagree on the level of degradation, a standards-based
NS4-compatible design _will_ limit and cripple your choices severely and
will leave you with lesser options than what you had in the TABLE/FONT-based
layouts of the past.

> Netscape 4 compliant CSS is well-documented.

So are (a minute subset of) its errors. Know your limits at
http://richinstyle.com/bugs/netscape4.html

> If you're limiting CSS to
> basic text formatting and background colors (as most of your CSS will be,
> i.e. fonts, colors, size, bold, not bold, link colors, etc.), then you
> will need NO HACKS and NO WORKAROUNDS to work in NS4.

There we go again, limiting ourselfes to use a tiny subset of what is
available to cater for one deprecated browser - and even that subset will
have to be divided into several stylesheets, as NS4 _does_ have severe
errors with it and need workarounds or limitations imposed to even work at
all, without crashing.

> If you used more advanced formatting, or even positioning, all of your CSS
> hacks and workarounds would be placed in a second stylesheet (as is best
> practice), so there would be NO problem tracking the workarounds.

Please define "more advanced formatting".

In my case, I use no tables for my layouts as tables are indeed intended for
tabular data. Instead, CSS positioning and floating through reuseable
classes take their place, sometimes nesting themselves in an equal depth as
tables would but nonetheless being managed centrally. Putting this in a
second stylesheet that NS4 would not get would do the exact opposite of what
you're aiming for, since it would remove any and all layout from NS4 and
leave it with plain basic text formatting. That does not exactly sound like
a design that works in NS4.

What you think of as "more advanced formatting" is in my humble opinion the
crude and bare minimum support for basic formatting using standards.
Netscape 4 will not be able to handle this.

Netscape 4 is the only browser on the planet that you will leave behind if
you go for a standards XHTML/CSS-based layout. It has been a dying browser
for years now and several of its own generations have surpassed it. Let it
die peacefully instead of wasting your hardearned money.

>From a business perspective, there is no reason to use 50% of your
ressources on an everdiminishing 5% of your users. If your client wants you
to do double the work, I hope you are billing him for double the money.
Going back to real life, it's not even 5% globally, but 3%, and looking
locally you will find huge variations - as an example, Denmark has less than
1% Netscape users - in total, with all versions combined.

For the ontopicness of the list, standards evangelism, we should really urge
Mike to go for the XHTML/CSS design - even if that means NS4 users will get
no layout but only basic text formatting. After all, it can hardly cope with
anything more advanced.


Thor Larholm
<URL: http://www.jibbering.com/faq/> FAQ for comp.lang.javascript
<URL: http://jscript.dk/unpatched/> Unpatched IE vulnerabilities

Received on Friday, 30 August 2002 06:39:54 UTC