Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/07/06
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Brian Reid writes: > It is rare to find a hand-made file that follows > the rules and works properly on all browsers. For > examples, Anthony's exquisite handmade web pages > are almost unviewable in Netscape 4.76 on my Windows > 98 PC, but look fine in MSIE. I made a deliberate decision to stop supporting the old 4.x versions of Netscape last year. Netscape 4.x contains literally thousands of bugs--so many, in fact, that you can either create a page that validates as perfect HTML and CSS, or you can create a page that looks okay on Netscape 4.x--but you can't do both. Tweaking the page to make it work on Netscape 4.x prevents it from validating as standard HTML, and conforming the page to make it standard HTML prevents it from displaying correctly on Netscape 4.x ... because of all the bugs that browser contains. I noticed last year that less than two percent of visitors to my site are still using any version of Netscape. This fact, plus the fact that an enormous amount of work must be put into each page to get it to work with Netscape, and that doing so usually prevents the HTML and CSS from validating thereafter _and_ causes the page to display incorrectly in every other browser, made me decide to stop supporting Netscape 4.x entirely. The latest version of Netscape, version 6.x, displays my pages correctly, except for one or two bugs left over from previous versions of Netscape that have not been corrected (or have been left in to ensure compatibility?). All recent versions of Opera display the pages correctly. All recent versions of MSIE display the pages correctly. Even Lynx (a text-only browser) handles the pages correctly. And the pages validate without errors for both HTML and CSS. The problem, then, is in the old Netscape 4.x browser, and since almost nobody still uses Netscape browsers, it is not cost-effective to write pages specifically to accommodate bugs in Netscape. As for the use of software generators, of all the portals I visited just now, only Adobe's appeared to have been written with any kind of generator (GoLive, not surprisingly). All the others (AOL, Netscape, CNN, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others) contain hand-written HTML. Small sites with a homogenous user base and limited development resources can justify the use of generators to speed development, but high-volume sites with a very heterogenous user base need to write HTML by hand, or at least rework whatever HTML is produced by generators.