Re: how to square netscape 4 compatibility with css

----- Original Message -----
From: "Julia Collins" <julia@we3.co.uk>
>
>I have to stress that the site works in NS4, it just looks awful.

Contrary to popular belief, you CAN get CSS-Positioning to work in Netscape
4. I must stress however that you need to be very gentle with it though.
It's easy to give NS4 a fatal crash from completely valid stylesheet so
proceed with caution, test in multiple versions (4.72, 4.5, 4.08, etc.) and
save out dated working copies as you go.

We are currently working on a site like that. It was designed as XHTML
compliant with a table-free layout before the developer sent it to us
requesting that we "fix" it in Netscape 4. The other two developers here
wanted to re-write it with tables because they didn't understand it, but I
saw it as an opportunity to jump on it and deliver a W3C compliant site to a
government agency long-overdue for a technology upgrade. IE4 (gasp) is also
important to our QA team so the technique we're using so far is:

<link rel="styelsheet" type="text/css" href="ns4.css" />
<link rel="styelsheet" type="text/css" href="all.css" media="all" />

Of course, because NS4 takes some heavy convincing, a good portion of
"all.css" is resetting the styles we defined for Netscape 4. "all.css" also
contains a few browser-specific comment hacks to hide styles from various
versions of IE, etc.

I personally don't care about IE4 so I use a server-side switch for the
stylesheet on my personal website. You could also use that approach even if
you do care about that browser. The reason we are moving away from it though
is because User-Agent strings don't always remain consistent.

I'll try to give you an update on any snags that we run into if you decide
to use this method. Let me know if you have some questions.

Cheers,
James Craig

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Received on Thursday, 20 March 2003 10:47:54 UTC