Re: Netscape 6

Well,

I am yet to find a browser that is perfect, or even close. I tend to write
from specification, and then see what happens on browsers. Different browsers
seem to have different problems, and I have found that all the alternatives
have problems that require major changes to the way I do things :-(

Although I am surprised that Netscape doesn't get Javascript right, since it
was invented at Netscape - are you sure you are not using someone else's
adaptation of it?

I got earlier previews - they didn't run. But then, that's what a preview is
about. I suggest that it would be very helpful to provide your feedback to
netscape, or to look at the development of the codebase by Mozilla.

Charles McCN

On Sun, 6 Aug 2000, Charles F. Munat wrote:

  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
  

--
Charles McCathieNevile    mailto:charles@w3.org    phone: +61 (0) 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative                      http://www.w3.org/WAI
Location: I-cubed, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton VIC 3053
Postal: GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001,  Australia

Received on Monday, 7 August 2000 02:43:22 UTC