Netscape 4.7

[aac11]

I am having problems with the stylesheets on Netscape 4.7.
1) On the Exhibit Browser, the style for the thumbs (or microthumbs) are not being followed. And the resulting images are not clickable.
2) On the individual photo page, everything is not being followed including the font. Somtimes, the title is being displayed on the left side of the image. The microthumbs are displayed on the same row as the image itself. But this time, the microthumbs are clickable.

Do we have a minimum browser version requirement for Netscape?

[Pekka]

Hi,

In a word - EE is not compatible with NS 4.7 (or rather vice versa).

Here's why:

I have spent a LOT of time in trying to make EE 1.3 compatible with NS 4.7(9) and even older browsers but the sad truth is that NS 4.7 series is flawed in its html rendering and there is no way of making it produce usable pages from EE. The problem seems to be that NS 4.7 has not enough intelligence to deal with perfectly valid html structures and image links with similar link data (it does not seem to separate resources by full path, but by filename only which is plain wrong). The more data it gets the more warped it goes.

It renders each time differently: images go here and there and links to them are somewhere else than image itself. Also, NS 4 has poor support for style sheets, forms are bloated in width and height, it repeats TR background images in every TD etc.

I have been designing www pages for 6 years, and I know the benefits of valid html, and how to make pages downward compatible (i.e. new tags and javascript are not required to view pages). But the rendering of html to a page you see on your screen is purely a choice of browser designers and coders. NS 4.7 simply has a lot of bad code. There is a story its programmer said that its source code should ba taken out and shot. :)

I recommend trying NS 6, IE 6, Opera 6 or Mozilla 1 (open source derivative of Netscape) - they all work really well and most are free.

Of course, if solution can be found, I'd be glad to offer EE that works with NS4, too, but
a) is it worth spending a lot of time to e.g. code a completely new set of layouts just for one several generations old browser?
b) as the results from NS 4.X are random, there is can be no code that can fix it.

[aac11]

Thanks for the help and info. I agree with you on the problems with Netscape 4.x. We would just add a note on the website on recommended browsers. Thanks again.

Allan

Pekka wrote:
Hi,

In a word - EE is not compatible with NS 4.7 (or rather vice versa).

Here's why:

I have spent a LOT of time in trying to make EE 1.3 compatible with NS 4.7(9) and even older browsers but the sad truth is that NS 4.7 series is flawed in its html rendering and there is no way of making it produce usable pages from EE. The problem seems to be that NS 4.7 has not enough intelligence to deal with perfectly valid html structures and image links with similar link data (it does not seem to separate resources by full path, but by filename only which is plain wrong). The more data it gets the more warped it goes.

It renders each time differently: images go here and there and links to them are somewhere else than image itself. Also, NS 4 has poor support for style sheets, forms are bloated in width and height, it repeats TR background images in every TD etc.

I have been designing www pages for 6 years, and I know the benefits of valid html, and how to make pages downward compatible (i.e. new tags and javascript are not required to view pages). But the rendering of html to a page you see on your screen is purely a choice of browser designers and coders. NS 4.7 simply has a lot of bad code. There is a story its programmer said that its source code should ba taken out and shot. :)

I recommend trying NS 6, IE 6, Opera 6 or Mozilla 1 (open source derivative of Netscape) - they all work really well and most are free.

Of course, if solution can be found, I'd be glad to offer EE that works with NS4, too, but
a) is it worth spending a lot of time to e.g. code a completely new set of layouts just for one several generations old browser?
b) as the results from NS 4.X are random, there is can be no code that can fix it.