Ns 4 and CSS

[aroach]

Sometimes NS4 displays my site right and sometimes it mangles it. Hitting reload is all it takes to get a totally different version of my site in NS4.

Sometimes it displays it without any style sheet applied at all, which is fine.

I've read that I can hide my style sheet from NS 4 and force it to display without style sheets. Should I do this to stop the random mangling? Site looks fine without style although it's pretty bland and the left nav panel is a bulleted list at the bottom. Not necessarily a bad thing.

[AlexW]

It comes down to your market to an extent. If your NS4 audience makes up a significant proportion of your audience (whatever you decide that is) I suppose you do what you have to.

From a coding perspective, if there's one thing I've learnt about NS4 is it hates inline styles. Try to keep your 'Style=' out of your code if you like NS4.

Secondly there's a well known resizing bug in NS4 that causes problems with the redraw after after the window if adjusted. DreamWeaver automatically includes a javascript to fix it when you add your first DIV to a page.

 function MM_reloadPage(init) {  //reloads the window if Nav4 resized
  if (init==true) with (navigator) {if ((appName=="Netscape")&&(parseInt(appVersion)==4)) {
	document.MM_pgW=innerWidth; document.MM_pgH=innerHeight; onresize=MM_reloadPage; }}
  else if (innerWidth!=document.MM_pgW || innerHeight!=document.MM_pgH) location.reload();
}
MM_reloadPage(true);

It just forces a reload when it's dimensions are altered. You can put it in script tags in the head or link it as a .JS files as I prefer to do. This should help your problem.

[earther]

Secondly there's a well known resizing bug in NS4 that causes problems with the redraw after after the window if adjusted. DreamWeaver automatically includes a javascript to fix it when you add your first DIV to a page.

It just forces a reload when it's dimensions are altered. You can put it in script tags in the head or link it as a .JS files as I prefer to do. This should help your problem.

Yes, that script works on resize but unfortunately, CSS pages also break in NN 4 on font resize. I have not yet found a way to fix that glitch but I'll keep asking.

[AlexW]

Are you talking about the browser's text size controls, or an actual javascript powered font size changing script?

[earther]

Are you talking about the browser's text size controls, or an actual javascript powered font size changing script?

The browser's text size controls under options.

[AlexW]

I wouldn't be too worried about that. People don't alter their text size settings often, and few use Netscape 4. The amount of people that use NS4 and change their text setting while at your site won't be large.

If you can make it work, fantastic, but there are probably other things that you could spend you time on before that.

We were down to less than .5% for NS4 just before we launched the new SitePoint layout. What are your figured like?

[earther]

I wouldn't be too worried about that. People don't alter their text size settings often, and few use Netscape 4. The amount of people that use NS4 and change their text setting while at your site won't be large.

If you can make it work, fantastic, but there are probably other things that you could spend you time on before that.

We were down to less than .5% for NS4 just before we launched the new SitePoint layout. What are your figured like?

About 10% are using NN 4. Good point though that people probably won't be changing their settings very often. I am actually working on another possible solution to the NN4 problems. Stay tuned.

[fatnewt]

(I'd be willing to guess that a portion of that .5% is just webmasters who are seeing how SitePoint deals with the issues they have with older versions of Netscape. )

[vgarcia]

(I'd be willing to guess that a portion of that .5% is just webmasters who are seeing how SitePoint deals with the issues they have with older versions of Netscape. )

Yep, that's about all of the Netscape 4 hits on my site at work!