this, that and of course, the other…

NETSCAPE. F*cking netscape.it’s been a long time since I did any heavy html lifting, and netscape has got […]

NETSCAPE.
F*cking netscape.

it’s been a long time since I did any heavy html lifting, and netscape has got my goat. if anyone has a clue why my comments field doesn’t show up in netscape, please write. Oh, and what are those wacked out squares? I don’t get it.

later that same day

charles of little green footballs is a god. visit his blog view tips on netscape 4 workarounds and tell him he rules. he gave me the code that fixed my problem.

it’s because of this, in your stylesheet:

input, textarea {

font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

font-size: 10px;

color: #333333;

border-color: #000000;

border-width: 1px;

padding: 2px;

margin-bottom: 4px;

}

netscape 4 doesn’t like stuff like this. the border settings in particular. it’s probably better to give netscape 4 a stylesheet that doesn’t do anything to INPUTs and TEXTAREAs.

what i did was to separate out that style into a separate stylesheet and then make sure that only IE loads it with this trick:

link rel=”stylesheet” href=”/css/weblog1.css”

then add

style type=”text/css” media=”all” @import “/css/weblog2.css”;

(this goes in the head section, of course.) all the styles that work in both browsers are in weblog1.css. the INPUT and TEXTAREA styles are in weblog2.css. netscape 4 doesn’t understand the @import method of including a stylesheet, so it ignores the second sheet.

poncy old netscape.

next question: how does one deal with the fact that forms are sooo much bigger in netscape than in ie? I’m not writing two sets of code for two browsers. jeez louise, I want to love netscape, but it is a giant bug fest. ‘scuse me now, gotta go buy some roach motels.

it’s a personal site, so I don’t care if it looks lousy in netscape, but it does have to work…

still later… charles continues to rock my world– he’s explained the deal with netscape forms.

by the way, i can also tell you a way to fix those huge netscape form fields. the reason that happens: netscape calculates the width of form elements based on a monospaced font, while IE calculates based on the current font. how IE derives a width from a proportional font — i don’t know.

there are a couple of ways to handle the discrepancy. the quick and dirty way is to use CSS to set the font for form elements to a monospaced font, like Courier or Courier New. the other way is to get it looking right in netscape, then adjust the width using CSS so it looks the same in IE.