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if people are saying to hell with NN4, then are these same people still testing for netscape compatibility? if so, what version? NN6? NN7?
when i originally redid my site, i DID pay attention to how it looked in NN4.72. i have now gone the route of, "is it functional?" rather than "is it pretty?". i fully agree to just stop worrying about NN4 (but that's just my opinion, and another argument, better left elsewhere). but now my main concern is what version to use, now that v4.72 is not my Netscape browser of choice?
-Matt
The question you posit, emphasizes the entire philosophy behind the Web Standards movement. The need for browser to interpret valid page code as a priority, thus descreasing the need to "test a page" or site, using every possible browser/OS/Internet device available.
NN7.x is the second cousin to Mozilla, the "poor relation" that gets the "hand-me-down" shoes from its more advanced, more up-to-date, famliy member. Even as such, NN7 has very good support for the various Standards.
Mozilla, Firebird(the soon to be core of the up-coming redesigned, trimmed down, modular, Mozilla), and Opera all have superb Standards support.
IE5(bad) and IE5.5/6(not so good and just passable) are the baseline browsers to test against due to their incomplete and often, incorrect rendering of CSS Standards. The tricky part is, coding in a manner so IE variants will not break valid pages. It is IE's misinterpretations that are so troublesome.
NN4, and virtually all older browsers can be protected against the growing use of advanced CSS through several well documented methods. The key here, is, to serve unstyled pages that are fully functional.
Dealing with NN4 by hiding styles and following good, logical document structure, that ensures ordered functionality, is the easiest of the two noted issues. For example, I build and test pages using Opera as my primary test browser. The convenience of being able to view newly coded pages with CSS disabled (Ctrl + G) as well as Opera's Debugging Alternate stylesheets, allows for quick work when ensuring that unstyled pages retain funtionality. It's a great tool set.
Ensuring that NN4(and other v.4 and older browser) users have functional content is not difficult at all.
More time consuming, but not really so bad after you become familiar with the pitfalls, is testing against IE(as compared to the more advanced Standards support of Moz/Op, etc.).
Write valid code and follow good document structure practices and you are 99% of the way home.
