Re: how to deal with inconsistencies of css in netscape

At 07:05 PM 6/20/2002 -0400, cbirds wrote:
>Martin Clifford hunted and pecked out this message on 6/20/2002 4:51 PM
>
> >First of all, you're designing backwards.  If you want to design
> >cross-browser sites, you should be designing for Netscape, as IE is MUCH
> >more forgiving, and will usually display working docs from NS properly.
>
>I guess I had the same reaction to Nate's rant that Martin did. I simply
>design for 4.7, add in features for IE such as hover, and all is well,
>never any complaints.

Interesting. I take the exact opposite approach and design for browsers 
that are compliant and render my markup the way the W3 says they are 
supposed to. Then, and only then, will I create an additional stylesheet 
(or add browser detection to redirect to another set of pages, depending on 
the budget) to compensate for obsolete rendering engines.

The 'too forgiving' thing may have been true up until recently, but believe 
me, there is little forgiving about IE6 in strict mode.


>It CAN be done when you see nifty menus coded like
>the ones that were posted here earlier....and no large business would
>think of hiring a designer who plunks the code into a page editor, checks
>it in IE and posts it to the web.

I'm not sure what old Netscapes inability to parse CSS has to do with the 
use of WYSIWYG editors. Anyway, a Dreamweaver generated page is far more 
likely to work in NN<6 than my lovingly handcrafted (in a plain text 
editor) stylesheets are. The tools have *nothing* to do with the finished 
product.

>In fact, many of my  jobs are
>"redesigns" of sites that were like this. I came along and submitted  a
>whole new page, and was instantly asked to do the job.
>If you were going to have a house built, would you hire a builder who
>went out and bought a "kit" and threw the thing up without knowing
>anything about building, or one who knew how buildings were put together
>from scratch? (Even if you *wanted* the house made from the kit?) Maybe
>that's a poor analogy....but it's the best way I can express it.

To take your, admittedly poor, analogy a step further.

I happen to bang nails seasonally and have for most of my adult life. 
Though kit built homes are rarely comparable to a custom one-off structure, 
one thing you can be sure of is that the wiring and plumbing will be up to 
current code. Netscape <6 doesn't work because it is old, it doesn't work 
because the web has grown and it hasn't... it would be like using aluminum 
wiring or knob-and-tube for an electrical system... it'll work for a bit 
(maybe a long time), but when it inevitably breaks it's gonna burn down the 
house.

Anyway, you ever try to put one of them suckers together... holy smokes, 
I'd rather build a space shuttle.

>There
>may be many people on this list who turn up their noses at Netscape, but
>my ability to make things work everywhere has been good to me. And more
>and more people are turning back to Netscape (the original one) because
>the new one and IE just don't cut it.

Who's doing this? Do you have any quantifiable data to back this up? My 
logs and the logs of sites that I have access to (some quite large) show a 
constantly diminishing NN4.x user base. With AOL's move towards the gecko 
engine, this is trend that isn't likely to change anytime soon.

I'm also curious as to why you feel NN6 and IE "don't cut it"?

>I even went to one site, a very
>large one I was dealing with that serves the public with dynamic content
>information (banking or such) that specifically said DOES NOT WORK IN
>NETSCAPE 6, please use Netscape 4.7, or IE.

This is not a reflection on a particular browser but rather a display of 
the designers inability to properly craft a site.

For some reason many people seem to feel that this is an either/or 
situation and that a page that validates to a current DTD can't work 
properly cross browser. In fact, a page that separates content from 
structure in a semantic manner will prove much more portable and degrade 
gracefully. There is NO reason not to write markup that takes full 
advantage of the current standards; your work will be more accessible, will 
function better in other web capable devices and still provide a decent 
experience in obsolete browsers.

By catering to a ever smaller user base of NN users you are only 
reinforcing a static view of the web. If we as developers and designers 
cannot manage to work in todays environment, taking full advantage of the 
DOM, CSS-P and XHTML, how can we ever expect our users to upgrade.

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