Netscape 4

[mmcirvin]

This blog doesn't look that great in Netscape 4's broken CSS rendering. Oh, well, it's still usable. (Maybe. I haven't yet checked to see if this dropcap trick breaks it.) I think I can safely assume that anyone still using Netscape 4 either is used to pages looking weird, or has CSS turned off (in which case this page looks perfectly all right, if plain).

It's funny that it's still even an issue. A wisecrack about zombie Netscape 4 from almost three years ago is the single most .sig-quoted thing I ever wrote.

(Now a bunch of people are going to be upset for wanting them to use a fancier browser. Actually, Netscape 3 was easier to deal with. And NS4's fine too as long as you turn off the horrible, defective style sheet support. Turning off Javascript will do it too, because NS4 rendered style sheets through Javascript.)

Comments

It kind of works.

[(Anonymous)]

When I pasted the url into NN4.51 that I keep around for just this purpose, nothing happened. I just got a blank white screen with "Done" on the status bar. Reload did nothing. I then backtracked to livejournal.com, and unsuccessfully tried to search for your page from there. When I then hit the back button one too many times: Wa la! There was your page. Without dropcaps.

Now we will find out if Mr. Takki reads your LJ.

Re: It kind of works.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Thanks. The blank window thing is, I think, a problem with many, many CSS layouts on NS4. I forget what causes it; it wasn't the dropcap trick. It's interesting that reload didn't work for you; it does on the Linux NS4.7x that I sometimes use out of curiosity.

LJ has a technical restriction that keeps you from serving external CSS files from LJ's servers, else I would use the famous @import hack to hide stuff from NS4. (I could serve the stylesheets from my other Web site, but that seems an inelegant solution with a second point of failure, and in principle I'm paying more for bandwidth over there.)

Re: It kind of works.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Hmm... The blank page thing is most famous for popping up when the window is resized.

I found some site that referred to a mysterious "Netscape resize fix" available at Macromedia, but then Macromedia booted me for using a browser they disapproved of (even though it uses the same engine as a browser they support) and for disabling cookies (which I have not done). Yeah, I'm going to trust a cross-browser fix from them.

Forget it. I'm going to assume that the approximately 1% of people still using NS4 today are the kind of people who turn off Javascript, in which case this site should pose no problems for them at all.