Strange NN4.7 problem

crashes on some pages, not others

[dickbaker]

I know, I know...it's Netscape. But I have a site with about 1,000 pages already constructed.

Anyway, on all of the pages there's a table nested within a layer. Within one table cell is the text and photos. I tested it on every browser and platform after the first few pages, and things worked fine. Now that I'm this far along, though, I'm experiencing problems.

Even though the pages are identical except for the text and photos, some will display properly, while on other pages the text and photos don't show up at all, or are hidden under other layers, or Netscape crashes (Mac), or in Windows I get an "illegal operation" message and the browser shuts down.

I'm using the same CSS styles across all pages. And I've used tables nested in layers on other sites without a problem.

Any ideas?

[DanA]

Try closing all tags (as in XHTML), it fixed the problem for me.

[dickbaker]

Hi, Dan. I've gone through the code looking for empty tags, removed any I found, but still have these problems.

What's weird is that the same page may work one time, but not the next.

Dick

[RammsteinNicCage]

You may want to try the html validator at w3.org - it will catch problems that you might have skipped over.

Jennifer

[Reflection]

I'm using the same CSS styles across all pages. And I've used tables nested in layers on other sites without a problem.

Some versions of NN will crash if you are linking to a css file that isnt there.

[tedster]

NN (and other browsers) may also crash depending on the past browsing history of the open window -- and the current page doesn't even enter into it. It can crash on a page with just one line of text inside the body tag, and no mark-up at all.

I don't claim to understand it, but I do see it happen. It's like the internal code for the browser just gets impossibly tangled and that's that. It's one of the reasons I now test in the last release, NN 4.8 - it doesn't do those "out of nowhere" crashes as often.

[isitreal]

If you are using margins on images or td tags, that's almost for certain the cause of the problem. NS 4 has really bad margin support, especially on those two tags, I usually escape anything with margins on it if I want the page to run decently in NS 4. Borders sometimes can cause problems on td tags.

tedster: I'd have to question the value of testing in NS 4.8 to avoid crashes, to me the point of testing is to find crashes, not avoid them, especially given that almost nobody uses 4.8. I've found that there is always a cause for these crashes, annoying as they are, and difficult as they are to resolve, especially since you have to reboot to get ns 4 running again once the error has gotten stuck in ns 4's memory.

As noted, missing stylesheets will cause crashes, but they always cause a crash, not the intermittent behavior you're getting.

If you sticky me a url for your site I'll take a look at the css, I was giving full NS4 support on all my sites until the beginning of this year, so it's still sort of fresh in my head.

[dickbaker]

I checked out everything suggested above, but that wasn't the problem. The problem is that the crashing pages had unordered lists on them with <p> and </p> at both ends. Removing the </p> after the </ul> tag solved the problem.

In other words, this is what I had:

<p>Features:<ul>
<li>something</li>
<li>something</li>
</ul></p>

Who would have thought that not having a closing tag for a paragraph would solve a problem? It also doesn't affect the appearance in other browsers by removing the paragraph closing tag.

[isitreal]

That's not surprising, good you found it. The real problem NS 4 had was it's horrible error protection, I've seen this kind of problem too, I accidentally sliced off the closing table tag for a site using search and replace, the page worked fine in all browsers, except ns 4, where it would crash instantly.

To be fair to NS, I've found that almost always when I get a display error (except the margin type error with ns4) , it's caused by an actual coding error that at least one browser will catch even the rest ignore it.

[bcolflesh]

As previously suggested, always validate page via W3C, always clears up (non-CSS) NN 4.x probs for me.

MS Word proprietary single and double quote encoding seems to kill NN 4.x as well.

[dickbaker]

Interesting. But aren't you _supposed_ to use a </p> closing tag on a paragraph? That's the way I was taught.

[Reflection]

Yes but you arent supposed to nest a list inside a <p>

[encyclo]

Interesting. But aren't you _supposed_ to use a </p> closing tag on a paragraph?

In XHTML, yes. In HTML, the closing tag is optional (but recommended). You can leave out </p>, </li>, </td> and loads of others and still validate.