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Debugging for Netscape 4.7, everytime a page loads successfully an angel gets his wings.

Have you tried doing it in layers?  DW has a quick command called convert tables to layers or something like that.  If you wanted to try it the long way, it looks to me like you could do a top, middle, and bottom layer using div tags, and then next any tables that are actually necessary inside them.  This will allow for using CSS for positioning and text, if you want to.

But again, some CSS properties are not supported by NN 4.7, including background color.

Good Luck!

I'd agree...You can checkm your stats to see how many of your users are using Netscape 4.7. But I'm willing to bet it's not many. If you start getting complaints, fix it - but if not, I wouldn't worry about.

Who uses Netscape 4.7 anyways?

netscape's crappy support of CSS is manifested not only in freaky positioning of elements, but in the fact that it does not import style sheets. 

You will need to add all the CSS to the actual HTML page.

This way, Netscape will at least know it's there.  Rendering it properly will be another matter, but it will render some (maybe even most) of it.

Continue to bash? What? OK...

I have NS4.7 on my computer. Wanna know why? Because my school (gave us all iBooks... nice) and they won't give us the newest versions of ANYTHING. I still have shockwave 5. Bah.

netscape's crappy support of CSS is manifested not only in freaky positioning of elements, but in the fact that it does not import style sheets. 

You will need to add all the CSS to the actual HTML page.

That is not entirely true.

Correct, it does not import style sheets.  But the most common way to  use style sheets is to link to them, as almost everyone does.  Importing is rarely done. 

But in the case of netscape 4.x it is an advantage.  Say for example you want to modify form element style attributes.  If you add a border to a text box it is all screwy in NN4.  So you put all your styles that NN4 has problems with in a seperate style sheet and us the import command on it.

NN4 can't import so it ignores that style sheet and uses only the other.

... or just screw it.  If someone uses NN4 for surfing, they are having problems in a lot of places.  It's a free upgrade fer crying out loud.

That is what I intended to say. my point is, if the CSS is external to the HTML, Netscape ignores it. I'm currently gutting and rebuilding my corporate intranet and no matter what I tried, NS would NOT see a style sheet unless it was embedded in the HTML.  NS 6 won't do it either.

Sorry that is still incorrect.  NN4x doesn't support the @import command, that's all.  It can still be external to the HTML, that is the most common way to do it.

The most common way to use an external style sheet is to link it:

<link href="main.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" title="main"/>
<link href="alt.css" rel="alternate stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" title="alternate" />
<link href="print.css" rel="alternate stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" title="print" />

etc...
That works in NN4.x, always has. 

I wish I could take that path. Horrid for a macAddict to say, but I'd rather just design for IE and let the others suck hot air. IE has the best adherence to standards on both major platforms than any other browser.  period.  Sad but true.

Sorry, once again not true. Mozilla and other Geko browsers are the highest on both platforms. Especially in terms of correctly interpreting recommendations.  IE blows layout in its sloppy rendering with regards to the box model.

Mozilla should be your target browser for dev.  If you dev with standards in mind, Moz will render correctly. (bear in mind that the next versions of AOL will be using Geko.)

I apreciate you pointing out my obvious close-mindedness.  I've just been so sick of NS since AOL took over that I'm highly reluctant to use it.  I'll take a closer look.

Oh, Netscape still sucks... don't get me wrong.  It's bloated and ugly.  Mozilla still is a little bloated, but over all solid.  On the PC I use Phoenix and on the Mac I use Chimera... both slimmed down versions of Moz.  But still uses the fine rendering engine.

I like what Safari has to offer, especially in term of size and speed, but it has a ways to go before it is finished.  Still some bugs with CSS rendering. (try using the pseudo-class :first-letter for some fun results!)

I have found that 99% of the time if I target Moz I get clean code and it works just fine in IE.  One thing that I used to dig about IE is that it is very forgiving in terms of code.  It will render just about anything even if the basic structure is way off.  It's easy to make things that will work in IE, but don't in stricter browsers.  I got sloppy about coding.  Since Moz is stricter, if it looks good in Moz, it should look good in IE.  Also the nice thing about Moz is that rendering is all but identical across platforms.  It's a safe bet that it will look exactly the same in Win&Mac-Moz/Win&Mac-Netscape/Chimera/Phoenix  and in most cases Safari, as it adheres to recommendations.

I know what you mean though about Netscape.  I was slow to come around to Mozilla.  Netscape sucked and still does, they stopped caring for along time.  But Mozilla is not the same as Netscape.  I would like to see Mozilla slim down though.  KHTML and Safari have real promise for the future.

Why all the fuss about Netscape 4.x's lack of standards compliance when the page the guy was having trouble with ('http://www.troysparty.com.au') is tag soup --complete with font tags, spacer gifs, presentational tables, and improperly nested tags? From my experience, if that's the way you design your pages, Netsscape 4.x does a pretty competent job of rendering them.

  what... you expect me to actually click on links?



:: clicks on link ::

Uh... David is right, standards and style sheets are the least of your problems. Ugh.... mixed rowspans and colspans, always gonna cause problems.  A page clean up would be a good start.