Re: Getting the styles to work under Netscape?

On Sun, 27 Aug 2000 10:20:28 -0700, "Maury Markowitz"
(maury@sympatico.ca) wrote:
> 
>   I hope this is the right group to ask such questions of.

I'm never sure whether questions like this are appropriate for
www-style.  I like to think that the purpose of the list is similar to
www-html [1], and that questions like this should be on
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets.  However, I'll respond
here anyway.

>   I re-did my site using CSS. Sadly when a friend looked at it under
> Netscape/Mac (recent) it was unreadable because all of the positioning was
> wrong.

If the site works well in Netscape on other platforms, the differences
are probably due to mixing of physical units (in, pt, cm, etc.) and
units that make sense to use in web pages (em, %, and occasionally px)
or assumptions about browser width or font size made when mixing the
latter units.  The ratio of physical units to px depends on the logical
resolution (which is 75ppi by default in XFree86, 72ppi on Mac, 96ppi
on Windows with normal fonts, and 120ppi on Windows with large fonts)
and the ratio of em to px depends on the font size.  Mixing units in
incorrect ways can cause things to become unreadable when these ratios
change.  It's hard to tell more without the URL.

> Is there a good place to turn to learn about ways to get CSS based
> sites to work on both platforms?

It's no more difficult to get CSS based sites to work well on both
Linux and OSF1 (Tru64 Unix) than it is to get them to work well on
Linux alone.  Netscape 4.x and Mozilla use the same codebase for both
platforms.  I don't know if Konqueror is known to run on the latter,
but if it does it's also the same codebase.  (Those are both the
platforms I use every day. :-)

-David

[1] http://www.w3.org/Mail/Lists

L. David Baron        <URL: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~dbaron/ >
Rising Junior, Harvard                           Summer Intern, Netscape
dbaron@fas.harvard.edu                               dbaron@netscape.com

Received on Sunday, 27 August 2000 10:42:52 UTC