I dislike netscrape and tables... 1

[FranckM]

I'm just looking for a brainstorming session on my problem which is the following:

I'm troubleshooting a website which fully works in IE but which dosen't look well on netscape... I have a parent table with a child table who also has a child table. Now in the second table, in the last column, I am putting a border image and a background image to make the border seem to continue forever if the content of the page is long. Everything works in IE, with borders set to 0 and what not. In netscape it's a whole different story. In netscape the background image dosen't appear, the picture dosen't start where the other cell ends. Any ideas? ways out? plots to destroy netscape?

 

[mrgone4662]

Any plot to take down netscape count me in. -- cut here --

 

[starway]

From my experience all those who shout about "crappy netscape" only look for a justification of their lack of knowledge. I don't mean to offend anyone, but this comes to my mind first when I hear such things.
On the other hand, real professionals stay calm and make everything working and looking properly with the help of one simple clue - follow the rules.

If you need help show your code and don't say useless words.
I think it's a good idea to add this note above the textarea for posting.

 

[FranckM]

I agree with 100% starway though posting 500-600 lines of code isn't something I want to do hehe. And I am doing what you are saying, i'm going back to the basics, changing the format of the table to a simpler one. I was just looking for common problems in this post, not a solution.

 

[starway]

OK, this is one of the things I can say in general:

>>In netscape the background image dosen't appear, ...
The most safe way to put an image in the table background is to create a new table with 1 cell and place your existing table in it, like this:

<table>
<tr>
<td background=&quot;some.gif&quot;>

<table>
<tr>
<td>
c o n t e n t
</td>
</tr>
</table>

</td>
</tr>
</table>

The same story if you need a border over your table.
These sugestions are applicable to all browsers (IE, NN4.x, N6, Opera or whatever it is). The most safe way to use image backgrounds is to put it into the cell's background and not for entire row or table, expecially if we talk about complex layouts.

Also note that NN4.x doesn't have border=0 by default.

 

[xutopia]

I give a star to starway for his sense. But :

Netscape 4 is old. NS6 is far better but it doesn't use the DOM (document object model) that Internet Explorer uses but a new one that is an open standard that IE is started supporting as of version 5.

When netscape 4 came out people stopped supporting version 2 and not long after version 3 was dropped as we noticed that NS4 was capable of doing far more things. It is essential to computing today to move forward. Not very many people use a 286 computer anymore. And we park our cars in front of our house, not our horse. People move forward.

Is it time we move away from NS4 and towards NS6?

Think of things like improper CSS, HTML and DOM support that NS4 just cannot do.

When the page is resized NS4 has to call the server again.

display:block; and display:none; are features that ease the creation of web application but is missing in NS4.

If you have a div within another div you have to reference it specifically. <div id=parent><div id=child></div></div> needs to be referenced using : document.layers['parent'].document.layers['child']. Compare that to the now standard document.getElementById('child') that works with IE5.0 and above as well as all standard compliant browers.

The problem here is not Netscape being a bad browser. It is simply that it is a deprecated technology and had great features that just weren't found useful for the majority of programmers. Too bad that is life. Go to Netscape.com and click on download please.

Unless you prefer having to remember where you parked your horse.

There is no excuse everyone should be using at least a 5.0 brower so long as that browser supports standards set by

http://www.w3c.org

My 2EUR cents. Gary

http://www.xutopia.com

Haran

 

[FranckM]

Thanks for the help starway, i'll see what I can do with what you said, things get harder when you're not the creator of the website. xutopia, I completly agree with you, though it's 4.7 is a goverment standart at the moment

 

[starway]

I agree with you xutopia, except one point.
There's no excuse of dropping NN4.x support if we talk about such simple things as tables. Also remember that many government/offical networks still use it as internal standard.
In case of complex DHTML it is really very hard to support it and very often doesn't make sence.

I just hate to hear such things as above... If you look at it, it is just said &quot;Netscape&quot; - without specifying what version it is (FranckM, I don't talk about you). I assume that many of those who say this doesn't even know about Mozilla and all related stuff. They stayed back in late 90th and are proud of it.

 

[FranckM]

and you're right, we are suppose to support 4.47. So netscape isn't my problem, 4,47 is eheh