shhh: what to do about netscape?

[Brett_Tabke]

I am wanting to go full blown css on several sites (including this one), but the bugs and problems with netscape seem insurmountable pile of page management hell.

What is working for you?

[knighty]

I could'nt live without CSS - it gives you excellent control and power over your site.

Netscape can be REALLY buggy but as long as you try to keep it simple you should be OK. www.richinstyle.com has some bug tables

[rpking]

Out of interest... when you say full blown, how much of the layout do you mean? Will you still have tables etc.?

I'm a little fuzzy on how much can be done with css. Anybody got an example page and style sheet that I can check out?

[luckynh]

I just make 2 css files
1 for NS
href='style_ns.css'>
1 for IE
href='style_ie.css'>

then have a JS call one or the other This way I can controll both

if (navigator.appName == "Netscape" && navigator.appVersion.charAt(0) == ("4" ¦¦ "3")) {
document.write("<link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' href='style_ns.css'>")
document.close()
} else {
document.write("<link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' href='style_ie.css'>")
document.close()
}

I have not seen it's affect on 6.+ though (I refuse to install it)

[mivox]

I just make 2 css files
1 for NS
href='style_ns.css'>
1 for IE
href='style_ie.css'>

You could download Opera, and create a third sheet called 'style_dom.css'... since both Opera and Netscape 6 are supposed to support the W3C's DOM standards, if it tests out OK in Opera, it *should* be OK in NN6.

For Netscape, in my little CSS positioning experiemtn, everything looked great in IE, but my text area div overlaps the left-hand navigation bar... If you can run your navigation bar horizontally above and below your 'content' area, CSS should work fine on Netscape.

[Brett_Tabke]

RP, I'd keep the tables for positioning, but all fonts, colors, and style would be in the css. The biggest problem is with various line height bugs of NN.

lucky, I don't care for agent sniffing. As an alternative browser user, I continue to suffer the wrath of agent sniffing on a daily basis. I wouldn't put a user through what that can put them through. This is the main reason I am trying to figure out what to do here, because I don't want to add to that whole mess.

I've thought about using the W3C core style sheets. Examples:
[w3.org]

[gmiller]

The line-height problem is a killer. I recommend wrapping all your line-height rules in @media all { } (which NN4 will ignore) and just let NN4 pick its own heights.

If you get any appreciable number of IE3 users, you might want to install IE3 on a spare machine and check the site with it. Reputedly, IE3 is to colors, fonts, etc. what NN4 is to CSS positioning (well, OK, maybe not quite that bad). Personally, I'm guilty of just ignoring IE3.

[mousemoves]

i find the "browser style compatibility charts" at webreview.com helpful.