Forum Moderators: open
Can someone tell me why?
Thanks!
[edited by: tedster at 7:32 pm (utc) on July 5, 2003]
There's a rule in the terms of service against writing your own url's here, so i guess it will be removed by a moderator.
Anyway, there's more than a couple of things wrong - try this url to get a list, only substitute "widgets.com" with your own domain name (in the browser address bar):
The W3C validator for widgets.com and html 3.2 [validator.w3.org]
Basically, you need to find out which DTD (Document Type Definition) you wish to follow, and then stick to that - this implies writing valid html code. It might be a bit too advanced at this stage, though, so i've assumed that you wanted html 3.2 (a very basic version that still support styles).
Hints: Start by replacing "font face" with "font family" and fill out the align="" statements with proper values, don't use bgcolor in the <table> tag, don't refer to classes that you have not specified in your style block...there's more, but I'll stop here.
This page - is it your own creation or did you hire/pay someone to make it?
You should also export the CSS to an external file. If you use the @import function you can then hide the CSS from early browsers (like NS 4.75 etc) that cannot handle it.
Even with coding errors, many browsers will still display a usable page -- but Netscape 4 is very particular. Since you say that NO page displays, my first suspicion would be incorrect <table> tags, including <tr> and <td>.
Definitely it will pay off if you work to get completely valid code. But for a quick fix, I'd suggest looking at the tables, and making sure that every tag which is opened is also closed and that all tags are nested properly.
After I posted, I upgraded to the lastest version of Netscape and the page loads fine.
Now my question is do you think there are enough people who still use Netscape 4.75 that I should worry about it?
You can think of a search engine spider as something like a version 2 browser -- and you don't want to scare these spiders away from indexing ALL your content. After all, search engines are one of the main ways that people discover a site for the first time.
Netscape 4 currently runs under 1% on all my client sites but one -- and there it runs about 5%. It's your choice whether to ignore these folks or not. But if I were you, I would be very interested in getting all my content into the search engines.
It takes some work though, to get to know all the things you're supposed to do and not to do. There's a lot to remember, but it's worth it in terms of better pages.
Regarding the 4.75... really i dont think it's that common anymore.
/claus
...officially in HTML 4, the closing </td> and </tr> tags are actually optional, just like </li> and </p>
Oh yes, and I never understood that one at all. Unclosed <td> and <tr> cause much mayhem, especially when compounded with colspan and rowspan attributes. Luckily my Homesite validator can be set to allow none of that nonsense.
Did you know that in many version 4 browsers, you NEED the </p> tag to execute right alignment properly? Without the closing tag, multiple lines tended to leave an extra character space instead of creating a sharp right margin. Nasty little bug that hounded me for quite a while until I stumbled over the fix and began always closing <p> tags.
larry: you have at least 38 errors in the page (see link above). They do all need fixing whether or not they actually appear to cause problems. Use @import with external CSS files to hide the CSS from older browsers as well.
Businesses are looking hard at this area. In the very near future you will want your site to render well on ANY device, and you will NEVER test them all.
But if you use standard, valid code, you've got the best chance. These little devices have very lightweight browsers compared to a desktop browser, and their ability to recover from errors is not nearly what a bigger disk drive would allow.
