Re: Fwd: GNUstep.org with netscape 4.x

[Jeff Teunissen]

Scott Stevenson wrote:

> On Jan 7, 2004, at 7:41 PM, Alex Perez wrote:
>
>> This is clearly b0rken. Deek has a suggestion in #GNUstep
>
> The unfortunate truth is that Netscape 4's rendering engine is very
> old, extremely broken and not at all compliant with W3C standards.
> Sites built from validated HTML and CSS usually won't work right in
> NS4.

The above is simply wrong. Netscape 4 is pretty-highly compliant with the
web standards that existed at the time that it was released (certainly more
so than most other browsers of the same age), and it is highly presumptuous
to categorically state that Old Viewers Aren't Worth Supporting. The Web is
supposed to be about information exchange, not a forum for "look at me, I'm
a web designer" types. There is room for the latter, but not when it
overrides the former.

And in fact, there is a simple, effective, and CORRECT way to make just
about any design work with any browser, of any vintage.

This method is as follows:

Never use CSS/2 in a stylesheet referenced by a <link> tag, because that tag
was defined for CSS level 1 (which did not cover layout control).

Instead, use the @import CSS directive, created for Level 2.

This gives you:

<LINK rel="StyleSheet" href="css/level1.css">
<STYLE type="text/css">
        @import url("css/level2.css") screen;
</STYLE>

This is not a "work around for specific browsers" issue, it's a Web
standards issue -- and frankly, you're not using them properly.

[snip]

-- 
| Jeff Teunissen  -=-  Pres., Dusk To Dawn Computing  -=-  deek @ d2dc.net
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| Core developer, The QuakeForge Project        http://www.quakeforge.net/
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