Re: CSS and Netscape

> 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.

Thor, I think you ferreted the disagreement out quite admirably. When you 
say standards you mean no tables for layout. When I say standards I mean 
simple tables for layout.

I agree that in an ideal world, we would only use tables for data, but 
tables are a perfectly acceptable part of the XHTML 1.0 specification. You 
can create NS4 compatible websites using XHTML 1.0 and CSS, without 
sacrificing your visual design.

>> If you're limiting CSS to
>> basic text formatting and background colors ....
> There we go again, limiting ourselfes to use a tiny subset of what is
> available to cater for one deprecated browser

But these limitations easily cover everything you could do with a font tag.
  The font name (verdana, arial, times), the font size, the color of the 
text, and bold or italic or both.

>> 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".

CSS positioning and line-height are two that come to mind. Advanced in the 
sense that they're not reliably supported in NS4. As a side-note, 
line-height isn't *that* important. And the positioning can be handled by 
tables. Other formatting like borders, like line-height, are also not that 
important and degrade perfectly (to nothin, which isn't so bad).

>> From a business perspective, there is no reason to use 50% of your
> ressources on an everdiminishing 5% of your users.

Simple tables with CSS formatting help avoid the above statistics.

--
Austin

Received on Friday, 30 August 2002 08:04:36 UTC