Netscape 4 screen co-ordinates

Why are they different to the rest?

[morris minor]

I have a graphic in a div being placed by CSS so it matches up to the background image. This is fine in FireFox, IE6, Netscape 7, 6, but in NN4 the image gets shifted down and across a few pixels - thereby not lining up with the background image.

Any ideas?

Thank you.

[DrDoc]

Welcome to Webmaster World!

Short answer -- because it is too buggy (and no, there is no simple workaround).
NN4 cannot handle CSS very well at all. Stay away from all CSS other than simple font properties (in NN4).

Now... why do you have to add the image to the div at all? Can't you just leave it transparent and let the background "shine through"? Then you wouldn't have to worry about anything lining up

[morris minor]

Thanks DrDoc . . .

My reason for having the graphic in a div is that I have a gradient page background that I want in as small a file as possible - a thin slice, and I need to hide all the graphic layers, menus etc for a printer friendly page - selected by calling the page again with an ASP query string loading a different stylesheet.

It seems my only solution is to have a big background graphic . :(

[TheDoctor]

a printer friendly page - selected by calling the page again with an ASP query string loading a different stylesheet.

Why not just have print rules in your standard stylesheet(s)?

[morris minor]

I also want my printer-friendly page to be an "accessible" page - easier for talking browsers and the like.

But as a relative newbie to using CSS for anything other than font control, I'm probably missing the point here!

[TheDoctor]

I haven't seen your page, don't know what you're trying to do there and so forth, so I may be talking rubbish, but I suspect you are not using CSS to its full power. You can certainly use CSS to make pages more accessible. There is considerably more to CSS than control of fonts. Have a look around this forum and see what you can find that's useful to you.

And may I add my welcome to Webmaster World to DrDoc's?

[Guran]

But really. How many are using NN 4 these days? You should be able to put some demands on the users of your webpage. Some day these people need to move on from their old browsers.
Currently the statistics for my page is that 97.3% of the users use IE. 1.4% use netscape. The largest netscape version is currently 3.01 (?) which has 0.5% of the hits.
So in my opinion why even bother with that old versions of browsers. The effort is not worth it.

[TheDoctor]

Demands on the users of your web site, Guran? Good grief! Remind me not to visit your site. Users should make demands on webmasters, and it's actually not that difficult to give NN4 users a basic layout that gives them access to the content.

But I think there's a consensus that Morris Minor should not try aligning background images in NN4. DrDoc's advice here about keeping to simple font properties is correct. I would add centering headings and colouring text to his suggection. In addition to giving the (now) incredibly small number of NN4 users access to a site, doing this makes NN4 useful as a debugging tool, since you can see what a page looks like before positioning etc is aplied.

Incidentally, Guran, your figures seem a little suspect as a generalisation. 14% of my current users browse with Mozilla. And I don't think it's useful talking about IE users as a whole, since IE5, IE5.5 and IE6 have different problems associated with them.

[PCInk]

>Incidentally, Guran, your figures seem a little suspect as a generalisation.

So I repeat what I have stated before. If your site does not work with Netscape, you cannot use the figures from your browser log.

What you are doing is counting the number of Ferrari's on the road and coming up with the figure of 45%. Well, that may be correct outside the Ferrari factory gates but it is a biased counting method....

You are counting page views from IE when users are viewing multiple pages and spending time on your site. Then, you compare this to the Netscape crowd who are taking one look at the site and back out immediately. An unfair comparison.

I find well over 10% use Netscape (a site that functions perfectly in IE5, IE6, NS6 and NS7).

And that 10% who back out will go to your competitors. By making my site Netscape compatible (a long time ago by correcting coding errors!), my sales increased by around 20%. Probably because Netscape users will back out of one site that does not work until they find a site that does work.

Don't forget that a site that works well in IE6 (Windows), may not work in IE for Apple Mac. Making it work in as many as possible does help.

Netscape 4 is used by many corporations and machines do not allow users to upgrade the browsers. These people may search while at work for research for when they get home. CSS for NS4 is very limited (also CSS was not so commonly used when NS4 was released).

It is my belief that all sites should work in all browsers to some degree. Functionality is critical, appearance is secondary.

Forgetting everything except IE5 and IE6 is very bad advice. You may find that some specialist software (including screen readers and a braille software) may not work. In the UK and Australia there are laws against this - you can be fined for this. (Look up Sydney Olympics website to see a previous successful fine for not providing access to the disabled).

[morris minor]

I can't afford to ignore v4 browsers (unfortunately)!

And I have another issue (which may have been aired elsewhere - sorry).

I have a "content" div that doesn't always expand downwards in NN4 - content spills outside. I have a feeling some kind of nested div may be the answer.

If the content is in a series of <p> tags things are usually OK. Put a table in, and the content container stops at the last <p> and the table continues downwards outside the content container. Newer browsers are Ok . . . .

Help!