Retro Coding: CSS and Netscape 4x

[Nicolai P. Zwar]

I am about to start on a quite large (and ever growing) site (with two
implemented databases), lots of pages, (maybe) a discussion forum,

Now here's the rub: the page has to function and look fairly
decent in Netscape 4x browsers, too. Haven't coded with Netscape 4x in
mind for quite a while, but there are several options I can think of
right away:
Code the entire page in a transitional tag soup, including lots of
tables, gif spacers, etc. (Urgh!) That way, it'll look more or less okay
on different browsers including Netscape 4x, but the code will be murky,
maintenance will be higher, and I'd have to provide much more commentary
as usual for possible follow up designers/coders. Anyway, that's clearly
the way I would least like to go.

Code two different pages, one for modern browsers, one for classic
browsers. (Another Urgh! Highly impractical, completely inefficient and
twice the maintenance work.)

Or, and that's the option that at this point seems to me the most
prudent option, is to code the site in strict XHTML 1.0 (or maybe even
HTML 4.01... does it make any difference in Netscape 4x?) , use a basic
set of tables for positioning, and then feed Netscape 4x a different
stylesheet based on the stuff N4 understands, and try to get it to look
halfway decent. To me, that seems to be the way to go at this point. I
usually test sites in Lynx, too, to see if the basics are there even if
all the layout's gone, so the site should be usable no matter what, but
Netscape 4x should be considered when designing the site, as quite a few
visitors will be using Netscape 4x on Unix.

Has anybody else coded with Netscape 4x in the back of his mind lately
and has anybody maybe suggestions/warnings/pieces of advice/mistakes to
avoid/other stuff that I might/could/should consider?

 

[Spartanicus]

Now here's the rub: the page has to function and look fairly
decent in Netscape 4x browsers, too.

Proper marked up content looks fine to me sans presentation, users
typically don't give a hoot for presentation, they want sites to work.

Dezigners are the ones who typically have a problem with the idea that
God forbid someone might not get to see their cherished "dezign", I
suggest tackling that problem at the source (fix the dezigner).

 

[Nicolai P. Zwar]

Proper marked up content looks fine to me sans presentation, users
typically don't give a hoot for presentation, they want sites to work.

Yawn... some people here could use certainly a bit originality in their
replies... this type of answer has a beard longer than a dinosaur.
Anyway, certain HTML coders here may not give a hoot about presentation,
and you may not care about presentation, but having a well designed page
is part of what pakes a site work for a user.

Dezigners are the ones who typically have a problem with the idea that
God forbid someone might not get to see their cherished "dezign", I
suggest tackling that problem at the source (fix the dezigner).

Seems to me more as if certain hard core HTMLers are the ones that have
a problem with the fact that the Internet is no longer a dry text
information desert (like the sites they usually program themselves...
often at Universities or informatics circles) but has become, among
other things, a multimedia playground.
In fact, if you would truly not care about presentation, you would't
even have bothered to reply to this thread just to point out that you
don't care about presentation. Obviously you do care about presentation.
It's one thing to say that you don't care about presentation, it's quite
another to assume that the rest of the world out there doesn't either.
In this case, I have been hired specifically as a designer by people who
know enough about HTML to code pages themselves, so obviously there's a
market out there for people who do care about design.

 

[Spartanicus]

Seems to me more as if certain hard core HTMLers are the ones that have
a problem with the fact that the Internet is no longer a dry text
information desert (like the sites they usually program themselves...
often at Universities or informatics circles) but has become, among
other things, a multimedia playground.

No problem with that, but you are proposing to sacrifice proper markup
for the sake of presentation on a marginally used badly broken UA, that
is silly.

 

[Leif K-Brooks]

Proper marked up content looks fine to me sans presentation, users
typically don't give a hoot for presentation, they want sites to work.

Design does matter, or CSS wouldn't exist at all. Content is king, and
the web shouldn't be a "multimedia playground", but pages should
generally be pretty.

I don't care too much about NS4 for my own sites, so I just hide all
stylesheets from it, but this
http://www.saila.com/usage/layouts/nn4-layouts.shtml has a list of
all-CSS layouts which claim to work in NS4.

 

[Leif K-Brooks]

No problem with that, but you are proposing to sacrifice proper markup
for the sake of presentation on a marginally used badly broken UA, that
is silly.

Let's say this page is being made for college students at a college
where (like most) old browsers are heavily used. "Proper markup" would
sure be nice, but if using old hacks is the only option which will make
the pages look pretty, why not use them?

 

[Michael Wilcox]

Has anybody else coded with Netscape 4x in the back of his mind lately
and has anybody maybe suggestions/warnings/pieces of advice/mistakes
to avoid/other stuff that I might/could/should consider?

A lot of people simply don't code with NS 4.x in mind because it's a broken,
old, non-standard technology. If you make your page with proper, structured,
logical markup, you can style it with CSS and hide the style sheet from NS
4.x so it won't break the code. This method uses the @import rule.

<style type="text/css">
@import url("mystyle.css");
</style>

Without the style your page should (theoretically) maintain usability and
readability for those using a technology 6 years behind the times.

 

[Nicolai P. Zwar]

Design does matter, or CSS wouldn't exist at all.
Indeed.

Content is king, and
the web shouldn't be a "multimedia playground", but pages should
generally be pretty.

Of course, content is king, but sometimes design or multimedia _is_ the
(main) content. While I would say that the web shouldn't be a
"multimedia playground" _only_, I do believe that multimedia on the web
has its place and purpose. I accept that there's a multitude of Users
out there with a multitude of different attitudes and demands.
Obviously, the W3C page caters to a different audience than Barbie.com,
yet they are both part of the Web, both have their purposes, and I've
got no problem with that.

I don't care too much about NS4 for my own sites, so I just hide all
stylesheets from it, but this
http://www.saila.com/usage/layouts/nn4-layouts.shtml has a list of
all-CSS layouts which claim to work in NS4.

Thanks, that's quite helpful. I already have reference books in which N4
compatible CSS tags that supposedly work in N4 are listed, but it's very
practical to have an HTML doc at hand. I agree, personally I have
dropped N4 already quite some time ago. Now I have to re-install it to
check what can be done with it. Are there problems when installing
Netscape 4 on Windows XP that already has a Netscape/Mozilla
installation? Anybody knows?


--
Nicolai Zwar -- http://www.nicolaizwar.com

"I don't post off-topic digests. I consistently ask the antagonists
what their postings have to do with classical music, which happens to be
the topic of this newsgroup."
(Dr. David J. Tholen, Astronomer, in his "Antagonists Digest, Volume
2452972, posted in rec.music.classical)

 

[Spartanicus]

Let's say this page is being made for college students at a college
where (like most) old browsers are heavily used.

Wanna bet that this isn't the case?

 

[Nicolai P. Zwar]

Spartanicus wrote:

No problem with that, but you are proposing to sacrifice proper markup
for the sake of presentation on a marginally used badly broken UA, that
is silly.

The main point is that I have to design (yep, design) pages that will
work and look good in both modern browsers and N4. If you know of a way
to achieve that with fully compliant code and no layout tables at all,
I'm all open to suggestions. It's not as if I don't give a damn about
valid, accessible code myself.
As I have said, I do not wish to code tag soup if it can be avoided, but
NS4 compatibility is at this stage more important than W3 validity (and
it's not so "on a whim" but because a larger than average portion of
Users of this site will be using this very browser on Unix), so there's
the rub. I believe that using a basic table set (as simple and with as
few cells as possible) to position things and then feed different
stylesheets to modern browsers and NS4 is the most reasonable way to
achieve that goal, _and_ the code will be even valid. I'm even aiming to
achieve strict and not transitional code if that is in any way
reasonably possible, so believe me, I do give a damn about accessibility
and Web standards, I'm just not religiously zealot about it. In fact, a
basic layout table set creates practically no problems, not even for
browsers such as Lynx (I test all my pages in Lynx, too) or other
browser implementations, such as screen readers. So it seems the
reasonable way to go. But the bottom line is that these pages have to
not just to function (any well structured HTML document will do then),
but to _look_ good in NS4, as the site itself will have a largely
presentational purpose. To solve this problem is why I've been hired.

 

[Nicolai P. Zwar]

Wanna bet that this isn't the case?

You pretty much lost. It's not so much college students, as it will be
scientists and researchers, but a large part of the visitors _will_ be
using Netscape 4x on Unix. That's a given in this project.

 

[Leif K-Brooks]

Are there problems when installing
Netscape 4 on Windows XP that already has a Netscape/Mozilla
installation? Anybody knows?

Shouldn't be.

 

[Toby A Inkster]

Are there problems when installing Netscape 4 on Windows XP that already
has a Netscape/Mozilla installation? Anybody knows?

My test box has a Windows NT partition that includes 6 different versions
of Netscape side-by-side (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7) as well as Mozilla 1 and
Mosaic 0.6, 1, 2 and 3. They all live very happily together.

 

[Nicolai P. Zwar]

Shouldn't be.

I just checked out some of the links of the link you provided, Leif.
Very helpful stuff. Seems that, while Netscape 4 is hopelessly behind
the times when it comes to stylesheets, there are still quite a few
things that can be done with it. Thanks again.

 

[Jeff Thies]

Are there problems when installing Netscape 4 on Windows XP that already

My test box has a Windows NT partition that includes 6 different versions
of Netscape side-by-side (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7) as well as Mozilla 1 and
Mosaic 0.6, 1, 2 and 3. They all live very happily together.

Wow , NS1!

Curious, when did tables come into existance? Was it NS3? or NS2.

Jeff

 

[Steve Pugh]

Curious, when did tables come into existance? Was it NS3? or NS2.

One of Mosaic 2 alphas. Earliest Netscape support was in 1.1

Steve

 

[mike jones]

Of course, content is king, but sometimes design or multimedia _is_ the

(main) content. While I would say that the web shouldn't be a

Content IS king, as you say, and if I were still using NS4 in the present
day, that's all I would care about - that I can read what the page is trying
to tell me. So my advice would be to do all your content first (as you would
anyway, I'm sure) using divs and spans and whatnot (NO TABLES for layout)
use your unordered lists for your links and all that jazz. Make sure it
makes sense without stylesheets, just markup, and then leave that for the
NS4 users while you work on making it look good for the later browsers. You
could always apply a little alternative style for NS4 but forget about
trying to position this exactly there and all that, it's not worth the
trouble. So long as it looks clean and is easy to use, I'm sure the NS4
users will be happy as pie.

check what can be done with it. Are there problems when installing
Netscape 4 on Windows XP that already has a Netscape/Mozilla
installation? Anybody knows?

I've installed NS4 with NS6 already installed and that was fine.

 

[Nicolai P. Zwar]

Content IS king, as you say, and if I were still using NS4 in the present
day, that's all I would care about - that I can read what the page is trying
to tell me. So my advice would be to do all your content first (as you would
anyway, I'm sure) using divs and spans and whatnot (NO TABLES for layout)
use your unordered lists for your links and all that jazz. Make sure it
makes sense without stylesheets, just markup, and then leave that for the
NS4 users while you work on making it look good for the later browsers. You
could always apply a little alternative style for NS4 but forget about
trying to position this exactly there and all that, it's not worth the
trouble. So long as it looks clean and is easy to use, I'm sure the NS4
users will be happy as pie.

To not worry about the design for NS4 and just deliver plain markup for
this browser is not an option; the site will have a largely
presentational nature and a plain old black and white doc look won't do.
(They wouldn't have hired me to do that anyway... they know their HTML).
I agree with you that before everything, an HTML doc should make sense
without stylesheets, but some pages will require special plug-ins, there
will be password protected areas, a discussion forum (one that has to be
usable with NS4, too), so while I again agree with you that I shouldn't
worry about positioning everything _exactly_ on the screen, I cannot
risk to have things positioned completely at random. Keep in mind the
site will have a presentational nature.

I've installed NS4 with NS6 already installed and that was fine.

Thanks. Super.

 

[Nicolai P. Zwar]

Nicolai P. Zwar wrote:




My test box has a Windows NT partition that includes 6 different versions
of Netscape side-by-side (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7) as well as Mozilla 1 and
Mosaic 0.6, 1, 2 and 3. They all live very happily together.

Super. Thanks. I was worried there might be some conflicts because of
the Mozilla name, either when installing or when de-installing later on.

PS: Just for the heck of it: can you still get a copy of Netscape 1,2,
or 3 anywhere? Or Mosaic 1 or 2?



--
Nicolai Zwar -- http://www.nicolaizwar.com

"I don't post off-topic digests. I consistently ask the antagonists
what their postings have to do with classical music, which happens to be
the topic of this newsgroup."
(Dr. David J. Tholen, Astronomer, in his "Antagonists Digest, Volume
2452972, posted in rec.music.classical)

 

[Steve Pugh]

PS: Just for the heck of it: can you still get a copy of Netscape 1,2,
or 3 anywhere? Or Mosaic 1 or 2?

http://browsers.evolt.org/

Steve