PHP and Netscape 4.x

Anon

Hello! I am having some WIERD stuff happen with my php results and Netscape 4.x communicator browsers. Hopefully some of you may have had this problem before and can help. I am using php to return results from a database using a while statement. here is the PHP code for the WHILE statement:

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($sql_result))
{
$name = $row["name"];
$address = $row["address"];
$city = $row["city"];
$state = $row["state"];
$zipcode = $row["zipcode"];
$phone = $row["phone"];

echo "
<table border=\"1\" cellpadding=\"5\" cellspacing=\"2\" width=\"750\" bordercolor=\"0066cc\">
<tr>
<td width=\"23%\" height=\"70\"><font size=\"2\">web address</font></td>
<td width=\"46%\" height=\"70\" valign=\"top\"><font size=\"2\">
$name<br>
$address<br>
<b>$phone</b></font></td>
<td width=\"31%\" height=\"70\" valign=\"top\"><font size=\"2\">review</font></td>
</tr>";
}
echo "</table>";

this create rows in a table until there are no more results to be had. This code works perfectly in all IE browsers and the new Netscape 6 browsers. However, in Netscape communicator 4.7x, it only returns the very last item in the database. Want to know whats really wierd? when I look at the source file for the completed page, I see ALL the results. I can't figure it out. anyone have a clue? if so, lemme know. thanks in advance for your help!

blue

Anon

view->source and drop the resultant html into a wysiwyg editor like dreamweaver. (if that's what you use, the errors will show up in yellow)

or run the results through a validator such as validator.w3.org it sounds likely to me that your html is slightly broken, but for the life of me i can't see where.

actually NN4.x has a 'sort-of' validator in the view->source box. broken html will flash on and off.

since php is proceessed before it ever gets to the browser, and it works OK in IE, i'd say the actual php code is fine

Anon

Your PHP code is technically fine. It is the HTML that it produces that has the problem. IE and NS6 are slightly more tolerant of bad HTML than NS4x browsers.

If you look closely at your script, you are outputting a <TABLE> tag with every database row. As such, the only table tag that will end up with a closing </TABLE> tag (the one outside the WHILE loop) will be the LAST outputted row.

NS4x browsers will not display an incomplete table, row, or column where as IE and NS6x will try to guess where your containers are supposed to end. Personally I like the stricter browser better as it forces good HTML.

-- Rich Rijnders
-- Irvine, CA US

Anon

You hit it on the head!
I absolutely HATE the road MS took with IE accepting
wildly invalid code (tables esp.).

Folks using tools that make garbage like this (can you say frontpage?), are really going to be in hurts the day XML gets back on track and they need to read what will then be legacy pages with tons of bad tables.

Write For 4.x - validate in everything else and leave the pretty prettys behind unless it's a personal home page.