More netscape bashing

[ChrisHunt]

I've just noticed a rather weird, ahem, "feature" on my website at

http://www.infolinx.org

If you have Javascript switched on, you should see a drop-down list near the top of the screen allowing you to go to various areas of the site.

However, NN4.7 is ignoring the <form>, <select> and <option> tags and just printing the whole thing in an ugly mass.

I know we're not supposed to worry too much about NN4.7 any more, and I really don't care that, for example, it can't handle the stylesheet. However I don't want it to be a complete mess. Before I reach for the browser-detection script to disable the dropdown on NS4-, does anyone know what might be causing the problem?

-- Chris Hunt
Extra Connections Ltd

http://www.extracon.com

 

[xutopia]

did you try it in IE4 to see how it rendered?

Why do people continue to use NS4?

It looks great in Netscape 7.

Gary

http://www.xutopia.com

Haran
==========================

 

[ChrisHunt]

I don't have a copy of IE4 any more, and unlike Netscape it won't co-exist with later versions. The site may look even worse in IE4, but what I can't test I won't worry about

Dunno why people still use NS4 when it sucks so much. My understanding is that some organisations selected it as their standard browser years ago (when IE sucked even more!) and haven't upgraded. I blame the pointy-haired bosses!

However, I do want my site to be legible (if not pretty) to such luddites and this bug is irritating me!

-- Chris Hunt
Extra Connections Ltd

http://www.extracon.com

 

[dwarfthrower]

I do a lot of Intranet work for large corporates and government agencies. It's amazing the number of organisations that still use old browsers as part of their SOEs.

 

[tviman]

Just for S & G's, pull the dropdown out of your javascript file and put in in you page in HTML.

There's always a better way...

 

[ChrisHunt]

There's two reasons NOT to put the dropdown code in a series of document.writes in a javascript file, rather than plain html.
[ol]
[li]The list of links may change in the future, I want to be able to change it in one place rather than editing each page (SSIs aren't an option here because of the way some pages are generated)[/li]
[li]The drop-down only works if you have javascript switched on. Putting it into a script means that paranoid JS-skeptics won't see it at all, rather than seeing a control that doesn't work for them.[/li]
[/ol]
Thanks for looking at this, those that have, I think I'm going to try to sniff out NS4 users and hide the dropdown from them. Let's hope it works...

-- Chris Hunt
Extra Connections Ltd

http://www.extracon.com

 

[vbkris]

can u give what it prints? u may have missed a '/' or a '>', Netscape is pretty sensitive u know...

Known is handfull, Unknown is worldfull

 

[Genimuse]

I see that you've coded out NS4 now, but I was just looking at the code a few minutes ago (before you coded NS4 out) and changed some things around and discovered that if you replace the called menu script with the form itself it works fine in NS 4.7. I looked at the code to see anything funky in the script but couldn't find anything.

However if you simply include the menu as a standard server include rather than as a Javascript script it will work fine with NS4.7.

Are server includes available to you?

 

[ChrisHunt]

Though about SSIs, but the problem is that site is a mixture of static pages, pages generated programatically (from an ORACLE database) and pages generated from XML using XSLT. The latter two couldn't (I think) call the SSI, so I'd have to maintain the list in two or three places.

It's not worth the hassle just to provide users of obsolete browsers with a nice-to-have facility. The site now works for them without obvious bugs - if they could get a prettier, more usable experience with an up-to-date one that should be interpreted as a hint...

-- Chris Hunt
Extra Connections Ltd

http://www.extracon.com