<small> in Mac Netscape 7.02

doesn't seem to read!

[nbdas]

We think that Netscape 7.02 on a Mac (OS9) simply seems to ignore

<small>

tags

We use css to format all the text on our site. However, we'd like it to make some kind of sense to people who might not want to download stylesheets. So we use <small> in the html - and format that in the stylesheet for those who want them.

What we are finding is that this browser reads the rest of the stylesheet fine. For instance it picks up the font face and colour from parent styles - just not the size for the small!

To check it wasn't just our stylesheets, I wrote a really simple test that was something like:

<h3>i'm big</h3>
i'm normal <br/>
<small>i'm small</small>

and that's when I realised that Mac/NS7.02 seemed to do nothing about <small>! It read the h3 just fine ..

It seems to be just this browser / platform combination that does this. PC/NS 7.02 seems to be fine, as do other Mac browers.

Is this a known bug? Does anyone have a workaround for it?

I'd be really grateful if anyone could throw any light on the matter!

[universalis]

<h3>i'm big</h3>
i'm normal <br/>
<small>i'm small</small>

Perhaps I'm on the wrong track here, but isn't <small> an inline element? Does this work?:

<h3>i'm big</h3>
<p>i'm normal <br/>
<small>i'm small</small></p>

(That works fine in Mozilla Firebird on Windows).

[hartlandcat]

Yes, <small> and <big> are both inline elements, like <b> and <i>

[Hester]

Damn, and I just replaced all my footers from spans to the small tag.

[nbdas]

Thanks for getting back to me on this. Am feeling a little sheepish I didn't think of that earlier.

Sadly though, it doesn't seem to have done the trick. I tried the code you suggested, and both small and normal are showing as what looks like Arial 11.

It's so bizarre because it works on every other platform I've tried - I just can't work out at what point I'm annoying the browser!

[Hester]

Oh I thought you meant the text in the small tags wasn't being shown at all. Phew.

[universalis]

It's so bizarre because it works on every other platform I've tried - I just can't work out at what point I'm annoying the browser!

There is a bug which is possibly related to this:

[bugzilla.mozilla.org...]

with the incredibly clear summary: "<big> and <small> are not playing well with each other anymore" - the notes mention that NS7 has the same problem. There is also a second bug:

[bugzilla.mozilla.org...]
Summary: "<small> ignored when inside of <button>"

I wouldn't put too much into this - the bug will be fixed for the next NS version as the problem doesn't appear to exist in Firebird, which is built on the Mozilla 1.4beta code (Mozilla 1.4 will almost certainly be used for the next version of Netscape 7). You also won't be likely to get many NS7 users surfing with CSS turned off.

[nbdas]

Thank you so much for finding those for me! I was starting to think that I really was going insane.

I'm going to run with your advice and stop obsessing about it now :)