Re: one of the intro slides crashes NN 4.07 on WinNT

David... 

Thanks for identifying a particularly puzzling problem, or PPP as I am
starting to call them.  I have looked at the code and there is nothing
obvious that would cause the Netscape crash.  However, I notice that
Netscape 4.04 on Windows 95 has a bug which, by extension, might be the
cause of your problem in 4.07 under NT.

I used an (as yet unsupported)  element in that introductory slide:

<ABBR TITLE="Cascading Style Sheets">CSS</ABBR> 1.0

Netscape 4.x, which doesn't support <ABBR>, is supposed to ignore the
element completely and just display "CSS 1.0".  However, I notice that it
forces a line feed after the </ABBR> (between CSS and 1.0).  This leads me
to suspect that some versions of Netscape that have inherited this bug may
get so confused that they crash. (I tried the above example with <ACRONYM>
instead of <ABBR>, but Netscape does the same thing.

Actually, quite a few seemingly minor HTML variations are death to Netscape
4.04 (at least).  Putting quotation marks around the named style in a <DIV>
statement can cause 4.04 to break a style sheet.  E.g. <DIV
class="style_name"> is bad in 4.04.  Unfortunately, the HTML spec requires
the quotation marks for full DTD compliance.  (By the way, IE 4.x) doesn't
have either of these problems.

So, the question is, do I refrain from using an element because of a bug in
one browser?  If anybody out there has a pipeline to Netscape, why not ask
if they can rig up a patch for this bug and make it available on the Web.
Perhaps it is fixed in Navigator 4.5 or later.

Can anybody let me know?  I'd appreciate it.

Regards,
Chuck

At 15/06/99 04:58 PM , David Dierauer wrote:
>I am using your site as part of HWG's web-based class "Designing
>for Universal Accessibility with HTML 4.0". I was working through
>the Introduction slides and noticed that wai/three/int5-0.htm
>consistently crashed Netscape Navigator.
>
>Here's the system info:
>Navigator 4.07
>Windows NT
>Gateway with a Pentium II processor
>
>The machine was equipped with Dr. Watson software (apparently
>some sort of crash debugger), which gave the following
>information about the crash:
>
>Exception: access violation (0xc0000005), Address: 0x00000000
>
>Hopefully that will make more sense to you than it does to me.
>
>I then looked at the page on a Power Macintosh 6100/60 running
>Navigator 3.0, Mac System 7.6.1. No problem.
>
>-David
>---------------------------------------------------------
>David Dierauer          dierauer@student.lansing.cc.mi.us
>Computer Science student
>Webmaster, Nat'l Assoc. of College & Univ. Food Services
>      http://www.nacufs.org/nacufs/
>Reference Librarian, Library of Michigan
>

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Received on Tuesday, 15 June 1999 22:21:11 UTC