Re: Netscape and IE Questions

I am so frustrated by the way Netscape renders web pages.  I still cannot
understand why pages can be brought up in Explorer, Opera and some other
browsers and look wonderful!  Yet Netscape does a hack job of them when  it
brings the same page(s) up.  I hate the fact that we have to code for
Netscape as if it were a prima donna.  Just my thoughts!

Anon

*Smile* (really it's just me, Joyce)


-----Original Message-----
From: Joel Sanda <joelsanda@yahoo.com>
To: WAI Interest Group <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Date: Friday, March 03, 2000 3:55 PM
Subject: Netscape and IE Questions


>I have some general "philosophical design questions"
>I'd like some feedback on - based upon my experience
>as a webmaster. I've built several site that meet WAI
>Level A recommendations, and several that do not. What
>I'm most interested in, based upon my experience, is
>some feedback from developers on these questions.
>
>Building an accessible site for Internet Explorer is,
>in my experience, a piece of cake. With IE's support
>of style sheets, I've created sites that don't use
>tables for layout.
>
>But when that same site is viewed in Netscape, the
>whole thing falls apart. In fact, I immediately
>noticed two problems: the "resize bug" in Netscape
>destroyed the site's layout if the window was resized.
>Of course, the second is Netscape's poor support of
>CSS-P.
>
>Further, in many cases, the <TITLE> tag was either
>ignored by Netscape and/or destroyed the positioning
>in the DIV tag.
>
>Several of us worked on the site for about two months,
>trying to reconcile these differences. We eventually
>did, but are still exhausted from the effort of having
>to recode portions of the site when we tested it in
>one of the many versions of Netscape 4.x versions.
>
>The upshot is this: we had to "water down" our code to
>make it work in Netscape, which meant is was less
>accessible according to WAI recommendations than
>before. While we could have sniffed for browser
>version and redirected, that means twice the
>maintenance and essentially creating an accessible and
>a non-accessible site.
>
>What are your thoughts on this? I don't think
>accessible web design is that problematic for
>developers. What is problematic is Netscape.
>
>While this sounds like Netscape bashing, I think the
>discrepancies between IE and Netscape in their support
>of W3C and WAI recommendations means developers either
>have to build two sites, or build one that is not that
>accessible - a rock and hard place.
>
>Any thoughts?
>
>Thanks - Joel Sanda
>joelsanda@yahoo.com
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>

Received on Friday, 3 March 2000 17:37:38 UTC