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Netscape scrollbars missing

I am TOTALLY baffled...

         

mivox

12:01 am on Apr 28, 2001 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



OK, I'm trying to do a new site design [absak.com]... The head, body and foot of each page are separate tables. The body table is very simple, & comes first in the html. The header & footer are called via SSI, and positioned via CSS. (I had to kludge the positioning for NN4.X by inserting <LAYER> tags...)

The page works great in IE-Win/Mac and Opera-Win <added>and even in Netscape 6!</added>... But in NN4.X (both Win/Mac - which a good number of our visitors use) the left hand scroll bar is missing on the page. If you re-size the browser window small enough that you'd have to scroll down to the bottom of the page, there's no scroll bar to scroll with. Certainly a bad thing for our longer pages, and smaller-monitor visitors...

Can any NN users/CSS experts tell me why the NN scroll bar diappeared? Other than that bug, they layout allows our pages to resize to fit most monitors, allows positioning of the 'real' page content at the top of the HTML, and allows me to use a single header and footer file across 99% of my pages... all very good things.

As much as I'd like to say, "if NN 4 is THAT standards incompliant, forget it," it's a business site and we can't afford to alienate visitors.

knighty

9:57 am on Jul 6, 2001 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



>why my NS 4.7x simply refuses to render the scrollbars when i put my content in <div>'s

I use absolute positioned DIVs which are longer than the browser window and have no probs at all with Netscape on PC and Mac.

In fact the only wierd thing I have seen is on IE for the Mac where it does'nt scroll properly unless you resize the window

Are you guys setting the height of the DIVs?

Xoc

11:45 am on Jul 6, 2001 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



marc-

Welcome to WebmasterWorld. Generating complicated HTML to be rendered in Netscape is a rapid way to wind up going bald.

dorkus

2:13 pm on Jul 6, 2001 (gmt 0)




thanks for the greeting Xoc...

netscape DHTML really sucks. its javascript engine really sucks too. like tedster said, the bigger your DIV, the worse it gets. i've noticed tables and forms can really mess it up in particular... e.g. form.element.length properties go bezerk, layers don't hide or show properly, etc. etc. usually there is some hack to work around things, but a lot of times there is not. have you ever tried using an inline CSS style while using DIVs? e.g. <font style="size: 12px">. it completely destroys your DHTML in netscape. bleh. add to this what seem like random memory leaks in the javascript engine, and you can have some fun hours of debugging. IE does some strange things too, but usualy its behavior is nowhere near as dysfunctional as netscape's. i've managed to come up with some javascript libraries that do universal handling of layers reliably in all the major browsers (NS 4.x/6, IE 4.x/5.x) but you still have to keep things simple to keep it reliable.

ok, i'm done ranting and raving now, you guys already knew that stuff anyway... ;)

marc

knighty

2:19 pm on Jul 6, 2001 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



dorkus,

Netscape and DHTML do work!

I have successfully used it to drag, clip and close layers on PC and MAC and on NN4, NN6, IE4 and IE5.

I have also used it successfully to scroll and hide/show layers as well as nesting layers which show the corect CSS etc.

dorkus

2:36 pm on Jul 6, 2001 (gmt 0)



hi knighty,
yup, it does work, most of the time... i've gotten plenty of DHTML to work consistently in all the browsers, including netscape. what's infuriating is when everything *should* work, and it does work in IE, but Netscape has some ridiculous bug like the disappearing scrollbars or the form object addressing problem which just leaves us "TOTALLY baffled" as this column is aptly titled. you can definitely get stuff to work, but netscape's DHTML implementation is definitely suspect at times. i think i tend to see these problems more because of the type of pages i do and things i try to accomplish - lots of forms, data structures, modular routines, etc... more ecommerce-related functional stuff that needs to be really scalable. simple trick layer stuff for UI is easy enough, but when you try to start coding more deeply, netscape gets hairy. it also seems to memory-leak like crazy, though with each 4.x release they seem to reduce the leaks little by little... still, complex object-oriented javascript (which you really need to use if you want to make your DHTML code decently reusable) which IE handles fine tends to make netscape choke much more easily.

dorkus

mivox

5:33 pm on Jul 6, 2001 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Are you guys setting the height of the DIVs?

Nope. That would defeat the purpose of the layout, in my case... The idea is to have a simple template that I can use for all of our site content, whether the page has one paragraph of content or 20. The template also needs to be able to resize smoothly with the window size at 100% width.

Having to set the body <div> length on every single one of our many pages would totally defeat the time saving purpose I started out with... but everything seems to be working on my site for now.

grnidone

8:15 pm on Jul 7, 2001 (gmt 0)



Noticed you used the <span> tag...I didn't think that would work in Netscape. Am I mistaken?

-G

mivox

3:09 am on Jul 8, 2001 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



The only thing I use the <span> tag for is font formatting... haven't noticed any glitches yet. :) Don't know that I'd try using it for positioning at this point.

mooseman

9:20 pm on Jul 15, 2001 (gmt 0)



Hi All,

I am glad I found this page, though it sure took me along time. I was searching on netscape layer visibility problems instead of missing scrollbar. Doh!

I was having troubles getting the bottom of my layer to show up in netscape 4.77 for one long <div>. Both the <p>&nbsp;</p> trick and removing margin height and width from the <body> worked for me.

tedster

12:09 am on Jul 16, 2001 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Welcome to Webmaster World, mooseman.

Closing the paragraph tag often helps poor old Netscape to render a page. It's been my first recourse, since I accidentally stumbled over it in deep frustration one day. And it doesn't need to be CSS, either.

I had some code like this:

<p align="right">Foo foo bar
<br>bar foo
<br>bar

<p> etc, etc, etc,

Many versions of Netscape will not render a straight alignment on the right with this code. Close that first <p> tag and voila!

I'm thinking it's time to start writing XHTML, where all the tags need to be closed. Probably save a lot of frustration.

icebox500

5:11 pm on Aug 25, 2001 (gmt 0)



I've run into this problem as well. Here is a working sample of long <div>s that work fine. [seattleu.edu...] . The right nav is all in a div. When I built the new site for the law school [law.seattleu.edu...] I ran into missing scroll bars.

Why? THe only reason I could think of was order of loading information. The basic page laout was coming first - Netscape rendered the page, then added the layer without a scroll bar. When I changed it so the content layer loaded first, the scroll bars reappeared EXCEPT in Win2K - &^$# wierd or what?

That's why I'm here, I'm going to try some of the above suggestions. My current fix covers Win 95+ with IE and Nav 4.7+ as well as Mac 9x with IE and Nav 4.5+

tedster

6:38 pm on Aug 25, 2001 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Yes, the order of information, the length of the page, and the use or not of absolute positioning are the factors I've isolated. And like you, I find that Win2K is more reluctant than other OS to render the code.

AjayG

11:27 am on Aug 27, 2001 (gmt 0)



Dear Sirs

I very badly need to create a web page that has a scrolling table that contains around 200 data rows. I want this table to work in such a manner that only 10 data rows are displayed on the web page and the table has its own scroll bar. When I scroll up or down the title (or header) row remains static but only the data rows scroll.

I managed to do it in IE5 by putiing two tables (header row table and data rows table) in two separate div tags. But am unable to get this effect in Netscape Nav 4.75

Can somebody please let me know how to achieve this in Nav 4.75

Also in IE5 because I am using two table tags, the header row and data rows are not properly aligned. Can someone please tell me how to do it.

Carol

11:45 pm on Mar 22, 2002 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Well it's now 2002 and i've only just found this forum! I expect you've all got really bored with this old scrollbar topic by now! I had the missing right scrollbar in NS (Communicator) 4.5, when i tried to place a 'watermark' background using a DIV with position:relative. The page content was in another DIV using position absolute. I found the <P></P> worked a treat - thanks NODENS! But i eventually found that, as suggested by icebox500, if i placed the DIV containing the background, after the page content DIV the scrollbar returned!!!

Can i ask if anyone knows the answer to why this version of Netscape refuses to move anchors/links when using DIVs with position:relative? Visually the page looks fine, but when you click on a link it doesn't work... it took me a while before i discovered that the links were actually exactly where they were in the HTML and although invisible could still be clicked when located.

How do i get them to move with the rest on the DIV content?

Many thanks to all.

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