netscape drives me crazy

danielle

Have any of you seen this w/ netscape 4 -- I have nested tables in a form and the innermost table will not display if any php variables are in it. Displays just fine without variables and the variables display in the outer tables.

jerdo

Netscape 4 is a total mess and is quite possibly less standards compliant than even IE, which is almost completely non compliant. Netscape 6.x and 7 are so much better they follow the W3C standards pretty well.

danielle

It's terrible. Too many bugs and so much less attractive. We are required to support it at my job or else I would can it.

coditoergosum

Yeah, NS 4 really sucks. Very buggy. NS 6+ can also be hard to develop for, but usually when you run into problems with it it's actually because of a coding error. IE just fixes a lot of the errors for you.

As far as your specific problem, it's hard to really say without seeing the offending code. You say it works when you don't have PHP echo any vars, but messes up when you do? Well, it almost sounds like maybe you're echoing the vars in the wrong place. That's just a guess though.

Show us your code. 😉

Weedpacket

If I could, I'd call Netscape 4.x out of its kennel, give it a feed, and go for a walk with it down to the back paddock.

And I'd take my .22.

You have to be humane about these things.

[Really: The reason why there was never a Netscape 5 is because it was based on Netscape 4 and had to be aborted.]

Bunkermaster

Netscape is totally weird when it comes to TABLES, does the cells contain the info you want displayed??

My advice on Netscape tables :
Close all them TRs, TDs and TABLEs and don't put no crap between TRs or outside TDs. I just spent 2 days migrating a totally cool looking web application to netscape and it felt like giving a hummer or a SGI Server to an amish community... (no disrespect intended on the amish people)

greg252

Problem is, according to my site stats, Netscape<5 is used by about 15% of my users.

Bunkermaster

/me waves good bye to 15% of the site's users

😃

or you can (eeeeeek) do a browser detection script and have 2 sites, a crappy one for NS 4 and a nice one for Opera 5+ and IE 4+

dalecosp

Originally posted by greg252
Problem is, according to my site stats, Netscape<5 is used by about 15% of my users.

Seems a bit high, might prompt a joke about who your site's audience is (but I don't want to cause animosity 😉 ) so we might just assume that these are "other" browsers ID'ing as "Mozilla.xx" or somesuch?

Browser Joke
Support: "What browser do you use?"
Customer: "Microsoft Netscape"

dalecosp

Well, a quick overview of 4 'stats' sites didn't show NN4 at anymore than 5% of users anywhere. If you add NN<4, maybe an additional 2 percent max, and then there's "unknown", which in one case was as high as 15% (how do you code for that?)

On a side note, the other week I was called to a customer's house who "wanted to get on the 'Net" --- yes, you read that right.

I got 'em hooked up --- you oughtta see even M$'s site in IE3!!!

(On 2d though, maybe not....) Let's forget about the old browsers and code for modern stuff...we don't want these virus traps all over the place, do we? Besides, I made >$100 bucks updating 'em to 5.01+ (You CAN'T go from IE3 to > 5.01 !!) Another visit next week, heh heh....

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" - Benjamin Disraeli (quoted by Mark Twain)

jstarkey

Originally posted by danielle
Have any of you seen this w/ netscape 4 -- I have nested tables in a form and the innermost table will not display if any php variables are in it. Displays just fine without variables and the variables display in the outer tables.

danielle, if you're coding XHTML Trans or Strict you should have no problems - they are compatible back to the 3s.

One very quick way to point out the problem - without digging through code - is to run it through http://validator.w3.org

Weedpacket

Originally posted by jstarkey
danielle, if you're coding XHTML Trans or Strict you should have no problems - they are compatible back to the 3s.

The drawback is, though, that XHTML (Strict, at least) is none too keen on any style elements beyond stylesheets; and it's precisely those that give NS4.x the most grief.

But that said, It is still possible to use XHTML (or even strict HTML4) and stylesheets to put together sites that are still usable in NS4, modulo some design and layout. For example A List Apart manage it; their site is still completely usable even in Lynx.