[ILUG-Social] netscape font rubish

Mon Dec 3 16:37:00 GMT 2001

Well the good news is it displays fine for me in mozilla 0.9.6

The reason it is horribly broken in Netscape 4.71 is that the page uses 
quite a lot of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets not Content Scrambling 
System) and the support of all the browsers for CSS was horrible back 
the the era of Netscape 4.x/IE4.x.   Personally I reckon designers 
should be shot for making pages that don't degrade gracefully (i.e. like 
this one with all its absolute positioning of elements) but it seems 
like I am in a minority as many, many sites degrade horrifically when 
you take them out of a latest browser!   Here is an example of the code, 
and if you look at the style information in the tags you can start to 
see the problem:

<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<div id="BG" style="position:absolute; left:0px; top:0px; z-index:0"><img src="/docs/CP/2/SUPP/BGdrivers_us.jpg"></div>
<div style="position:absolute; left:200px; top:10px; z-index:1"><img src="images/black_vert_rule.gif" width="1" height="155"></div>
<div id="gbnav" style="position:absolute; left:0px; top:0px; z-index:20">
<table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr><td width="145"><img src="images_globalnav/shim.gif" width="145" height="1" border="0"></td><td><div id="div01" class="flyout" ><a href="/view.asp?PAGE=home"><img name="img01" src="/docs/CP/1/SUPP/gnav_home_us.gif" border="0" /></a></div></td><td><div id="div02" class="flyout" ><a href="/view.asp?PAGE=drivers"><img name="img02" src="/docs/CP/2/SUPP/gnav_drivers_us.gif" border="0" /></a></div></td><td><div id="div03" class="flyout" ><a href="/view.asp?PAGE=products"><img name="img03" src="/docs/CP/3/SUPP/gnav_products_us.gif" border="0" /></a></div></td><td><div id="div04" class="flyout" ><a href="/view.asp?PAGE=powerof3d"><img name="img04" src="/docs/CP/5/SUPP/gnav_power3D_us.gif" border="0" /></a></div></td><td><div id="div05" class="flyout" ><a href="/view.asp?PAGE=companyinfo"><img name="img05" src="/docs/CP/4/SUPP/gnav_company_us.gif" border="0" /></a></div></td><td><div id="div06" class="flyout" ><a href="/view.asp?PAGE=newsandevents"><img name="img06" src="/docs/CP/6/SUPP/gnav_news_us.gif" border="0" /></a></div></td><td><div id="div07" class="flyout" ><a href="/view.asp?PAGE=support"><img name="img07" src="/docs/CP/7/SUPP/gnav_support_us.gif" border="0" /></a></div></td><td><img src="images_globalnav/topnav_end.gif"></td></tr>
</table>
</div>
<div style="position:absolute; left:0px; top:17px; z-index:3" id="search">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="725" border="0">
<tr>
<td rowspan="4" align="left" valign="top"><a href="/"><img src="images/black_logo.gif" border="0" width="200" height="57"></a></td>
<td align="right" valign="bottom"><img src="images/search_us.gif" border="0" alt="Search"></td>

Special note should be given to the z-index attribute which shows you that it is trying to layer the elements, and Netscapes 4.x interpretation of this is to put them on top of each other (no doubt incorrectly interpreting the CSS Specifications).

Guess your going to have to get mozilla or konqueror or some other 
reasonable browser up on your Solaris soon :-(

Niall

Paul Askins wrote:

>hi
>
>could anyone take a look at this and maybe explain what's going on.
>
>http://www.geocities.com/jack_daniels1798/netscrape.jpg
>
>this is what Nvidia's web page looks like on Netscape 4.71 here in work
>(Solaris 2.6).  I'm just wondering if this is a netscape problem or if
>something can be done about it.  For those who can't view the picture, it
>just prints all the text in the table rows on top of one another.  I've
>noticed this on a few different web sites and was curious as to the cause.
>
>I've managed to find the link for the linux drivers at least.  I must take
>a look at it on Mozilla at home later on.  All I have here is Netscape or
>IE5 <shudder> on a Win2k terminal server.
>