Any browser or other issues using layers?

[Marcia]

I have never used or even done reading on layers. Are there any browser compatibility issues, or should there be a conversion to tables?

Someone is doing their own site in Dreamweaver 3, and I'll take over at a certain point to work on it and do the submissions and followup. I have Dreamweaver 2, and haven't felt a need to upgrade.

Will there be any additional issues besides browsers to consider?

[tedster]

The LAYER element was a propietary feature in Netscape 4.x that was not adopted by the W3C in HTML 4. MSIE never supported it, so there are MAJOR cross-browser considerations.

BTW, this is one of the big, important changes in HTML 4. A lot of code out there tests for the Netscape browser by looking for document.layers, and that code must be updated.

Pretty much, depending on what you're trying to do on the page, you can accomplish it with either CSS or frames.

Here's a reference on mozilla.org [mozilla.org].

[Marcia]

tedster, I've asked to see a rough copy of one of the pages to see what they're doing, to make sure it's search engine friendly before they go too far with it. Yes, they're using layers, and I will let them know about the issues.

After what I've just read I really don't care to get involved with layers(and I won't).

Thanks.

[seth_wilde]

A couple sites that I market use a version of layers. They don't use the <layer> tag described in that article, they just use modified div tags......as far as I know any 4.0 browser reads them perfectly......