HTML validation help?

[Evoir]

it was like class="nav_font"

I changed it all to class="navfont" and changed it in the CSS definitions. Now, all is well. Whew!

[kitchin]

I did a yahoo search on "css netscape underscore bug" and apparently it is not really a bug, because the standards for css say no underscores! Weird.

For example, http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/ht...butes/core.htm

Netscape 4.x and Opera 3.5+ do not allow CLASS or ID attributes to contain underscore characters ("_".) Underscores are legal in HTML atributes according to the HTML standards but not according to the CSS standard.

I've found Blooberry useful before. But I'm not sure that "4.x" and "3.5+" are completely accurate, for what's it worth.

[Grendel]

I belive the common wisdom is:
don't bother trying to make CSS work in Netscape 4.
By now Netscape 4 users are used to funny looking pages and are just happy when the page doesn't crash the browser. At least I am. Hate to say it, but that's the css-truth, and newer Netscapes & Operas are available anyway. I've managed to design pages that work fine in Netscape 4, by avoiding CSS and using lots of font tags, but I can accept CSS is the way of the future. And has been!

I'd like to amend that to don't bother trying to make CSS-P work in Netscape 4. Fonts and colors work reasonably well in Netscape 4, although as Evoir discovered, even that is kind of quirky, and you will need to test, test, test. As for padding, margins, and borders, that's kind of dodgy... and when it comes to positioning, forget about it. The "float" property sort of works, but that's about it.

One useful trick is to put the "dangerous" styles into an import statement:

@import url("/styles/ns4hide.css");

Netscape 4 doesn't understand the @import statement, and ignores it. That means you can hide some of your styles in the "ns4hide.css" stylesheet, while keeping your Netscape4-friendly styles in a second global stylesheet.

[skolnick]

I'd like to see a practical review or technical article describing the approach take by the really big sites, like CNN, amazon.com, eBay, and the New York Times. I expect they are doing browser detection and serving targeted code to each, presumably with tailored templates populated from a CMS in front of a database. Speculation of course, so I'd like to really know, and I'd love to see an detailed description of an approach that scales down to our size sites.

<inserted>

In the meantime, I found this interesting, short article on CSS for multiple browsers: http://www.utoronto.ca/ian/books/xht...pt/css-4a.html

[Grendel]

A quick look at the source of those four sites in both NS4 and NS7 reveals the following:

- All have table-based layouts.
- All have brower detection scripts, but these are largely to make other scripts on the page work, not to produce different HTML. The exception is CNN: they seem to be trying to use Javascript to hide some of their CSS from NS4.
- CNN uses CSS. eBay uses no CSS at all. Amazon uses a mixture of SPAN and FONT tags, which is a bit strange. The NYTimes actually assigns classes to their FONT tags.
- Despite their DOCTYPES, none are HTML 4.01 Transitional compliant. The NYTimes even gave the validator a "Fatal Error!" message. Wow.

As for the back-end, now we move into speculation. I have it on authority from a "friend of a friend" that eBay and Amazon use CMSes in the way you describe, but that they are highly customized and not scalable down to smaller sites. The same is true for the CMS for my company, Sun -- it is also completely customized, and I doubt that it could be ported to a smaller site. I don't know about CNN and the NYTimes, but I do know that Knight-Ridder completely rewrote their CMS from scratch about a year ago. That's about all I know.

Edit: Not to give the impression I don't like the NYTimes. I read them on a regular basis. But sheesh, their code is messed up.

[kitchin]

Very informative, Grendel, and thanks Evoir for bringing this up.

As long as we're trading "insider" stories, I met someone fairly high up in the NYT web division, at a party a few years ago, and immediately said, "It's my favorite site, but I had to give up on visiting it in Netscape. The page takes forever to display because the ads do not have width and height attributes and often time out. Your NYToday site is even worse." Well, I didn't have time to say all that, but I was blunt. He looked a little unhappy, and I should not have been so blunt. At a party!

[Grendel]

(chuckle) Well, you know what they say -- drinking and giving website design advice don't mix.

Interestingly, nowadays the NYTimes renders reasonably fast in NS4 (well, by NS4 standards), and they seem to have height and width attributes for all their images as well. So maybe you had a good influence on them...