Re: Margins and standards

todd fahrner <fahrner@pobox.com> wrote:

> Unless you resize the window, in which case NS4 loses this 
> information on redraw.

Except for sometimes when it doesn't, apparently at random.
Er, hooray!

> I agree that this works, but as an academic aside, I believe 
> that padding - not margin - most closely describes the area
> we're talking about

Yeah, I raised this on www-style (though I can't find the link
now). IE moves the margin *into* the body element, inside any
border, whilst Opera and Mozilla move the background settings
out of the body element and onto the viewport. Since this only
happens with <body> I personally find both these solutions rather
undesirable warts, seemingly hacked on just to allow the
'body { margin: 0 }' idiom to work.

(The difference is because IE treats the viewport as <body>,
as you can see if you set a border on it, whereas Opera and
Moz treat <body> as an element inside the viewport, with a
different height.)

> Users of this software typically have no idea how expensive it is to
> "support" its retrograde cussedness.

Every programmer-hour at Netscape fixing Navigator 4 would have
saved at least a thousand frustration-filled webmaster-hours, I
reckon.

> Whenever I have any say in the matter, I let NS4 eat rocks

It's great to be working on a project where one can do that
(or at least, confine Netscape hacks to optional external
.js and .css files). Unfortunately when many of your biggest
customers have thousands of workstations set up with Netscape
you just have to grin and bear it.

At least they've got an upgrade path now. Five years from now
we might actually be free of the damned thing.

-- 
Andrew Clover
Technical Support
1VALUE.com AG

Received on Thursday, 14 December 2000 06:49:16 UTC