Re: Netscape 6

Dear Charles,

I can't say about Netscape 6 because I haven't tried it yet, but other
versions of Netscape are just a plain pain when it comes to web design.  I
design business web sites and when they show up in Opera, Neoplanet,
Explorer...they look great and just as they should.  When I check these
pages through Netscape, it _never_ fails that I have to adjust something and
yes, it does add considerable time to each job.  Netscape renders pages
horribly sometimes.

It really is frustrating and now after what you have said, I dread checking
my sites through the newer version of Netscape.  {{groan}}  I have over 31
sites I have done and I know that they will look great in all the browsers
except Netscape.  I have even had comments about good they look on web TV,
and yes, I design accessibly to the best of my ability.  But Netscape lives
and breathes in a part of cyber-space where mortals should not be allowed to
go.  Only my humble opinion.

Joyce Taylor
-----Original Message-----
From: Charles F. Munat <chas@munat.com>
To: WAI Interest Group (E-mail) <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Date: Sunday, August 06, 2000 10:47 PM
Subject: Netscape 6


>I downloaded the preview release of Netscape 6 today and was astonished to
>discover that it is still broken.
>
>I don't know how many other people on this list build websites for a living
>or have any idea how frustratingly bad Netscape 4 is when it comes to HTML,
>CSS, and even JavaScript, but I estimate that having to kludge things all
>over my sites to make up for Netscape bugs probably adds 10-20% to my
>workload.
>
>So understandably I'm aghast at this latest release. Just a preliminary
>review discovered the following:
>
>1. Nothing from the Body element seems to be inherited by child elements.
If
>I set the body element to text-align: right, nothing happens, even though
>the child elements do not have text-align attributes set. Adding
>margin-right seemed to do nothing at all either. Does the Body element even
>work in Netscape's CSS implementation?
>
>2. One of my sites (I'm embarrassed to admit) uses images in a table to
>create a rounded-corner effect. The text then appears in a white rectangle
>with rounded corners on a black background. For this trick to work, I need
>the table cells to fit precisely to the images. And that works fine on
every
>browser that tables work on... except NS 6. On NS 6, extra space is added
to
>the cells, despite the lack of newlines, spaces, or anything else in the
>cells except the images. I have no idea how I'm going to get around this.
>
>3. MOST AMAZINGLY, the problem with exaggerated width form inputs (about
>twice the width that they should be) is not fixed. WORSE, it now appears to
>affect textareas as well! I've already got workarounds built into all my
>sites to deal with the problem on NS 4. Now it appears I'll need to add yet
>another workaround to deal with NS 6!
>
>Am I the only person in the world having trouble with Netscape products?
>Every now and then I hear others complain, but given the enormous hassle
>it's been for me, I'm surprised I don't hear more about it.
>
>ALMOST ALL of my sites will need work. These sites work fine on IE 5.5 and
>on Opera 4. I figured that when NS 6 came out I could just set my servers
to
>deliver "Opera" pages to it and they should work fine. But no.
>
>Not only is this bad for designers in general, it's a tragedy for
>accessibility. IMHO, getting browsers to the point where they comply as
>closely as possible with HTML 4, XHTML 1, CSS2, etc. is a very important
>step toward making web sites accessible. Netscape's apparent lack of
concern
>for the quality of their product is a giant step backward. And didn't they
>PROMISE that this next release would be standards-compliant?
>
>If I am wrong about any of this, I'd love to be corrected. Is something
>wrong with my version? Does NS 6 actually work on other people's computers?
>Please... say it ain't so.
>
>Sincerely,
>Charles F. Munat,
>Seattle
>

Received on Monday, 7 August 2000 00:33:33 UTC