Tables and Netscape 4.79

[reub77]

I'm building a web site in Dreamweaver MX. I've battled hard to get my tables, cells, and nested tables to look right in IE 6, and Netscape 7. It works now. It scales for different screen resolutions and just when I thought all my problems were gone I tried it in Netscape 4.79 and it blew up.

Problems:
1. A table cell I had hard-coded to a specific size is expanding. The cell beside it is a percentage of the rest of the page. It looks ugly because I have the title of the page showing across the two cells (a split image, one animated the other not). It shows a white space between.

2. I have solved Netscape table background issues in the past by nesting tables. Table cells in Netscape 4.79 have always been problems. The nesting table solution, which is to nest a table and then place the background inside the table background, isn't working for me. The images aren't showing up.

3. And of course CSS is screwed up.

4. I have a number cells without some dimensions, just enough to get by. I have some that need to remain the same dimensions when the page expands and some that need to expand. So I have percentages as well as fixed values. The page scrolls horizontally in Netscape 4.76.

These are the issues that I have. I can't show the code because I don't have access to it at the moment because I'm at home. The code works in MSIE6, Netscape 6, 7. I was very shocked to discover it won't in Netscape 4.79 but not that shocked as I know it's a troublesome browser. Why don't we just all upgrade? Any ways please inform me of all possible quirks this platform has as well as inform me of any code I can insert at the beginning of my code to correct any browser difficulties.
Thanks.

[brothercake]

1 - in netscape 4 empty cells - <td></td> - don't show the background color - you have to put a non-breaking space in the cell. As for widths - TD widths are not reliable; ns4 will try to make table cells as large as it can get away with, unless you create a tension structure to counteract the effect.

2 - an image as a table background does not tile with the table in ns4; it tiles with the individual cells

3 - this is what we find

4 - just don't get me started ...


It is possible to get it to work ... but DW will not help you out in that respect. You might find that the manual insertion of the odd image spacer here and there does wonders. You can also persuade tables to be narrower by what I alluded to before - tension structire. Try stupid hacks like - set the table width to "1%" and then force explict widths in the cells that add up to the width you really want for the table.

Imagine how the people who built Stonehenge must have felt ... :rolleyes:

[reub77]

You can also persuade tables to be narrower by what I alluded to before - tension structire. Try stupid hacks like - set the table width to "1%" and then force explict widths in the cells that add up to the width you really want for the table.

This would be wonderful if I wasn't trying to scale the web page for different resolutions. Having a fixed page would solve all my problems. Unfortunately, even though it sounds clever there are people who don't like the white space that would be left to the right on a large resolution (1024x768).

So I'm back to the drawing board. I'm faced with restructuring a web page that works on all browsers but early versions of Netscape.

I'm hoping someone knows of tricks to get images to appear in a table backgrounds, or a way to test the browser and alter the code to suit for the browser. Any help to stop the tables from growing larger than 1024x768 but being able to shrink with the page to 800x600 would be greatly appreciated. Any advice on using percentages along side of fixed cells would also be appreciated. But only for use in Netscape.

[glenngv]

Trying to make it work with NS4 is a waste of time :D
Read this long thread: http://codingforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10318

[zoobie]

People are still try to code for that old clunker? Good Lord...LMAO! Keep trying! http://geocities.com/zoobie007/rotflmao.txt

[Zvona]

Originally posted by zoobie
People are still try to code for that old clunker? Good Lord...LMAO! Keep trying! http://geocities.com/zoobie007/rotflmao.txt

Bah, I've just build 2 valid XHTML sites, which works also with NN4. Although layout has little differences, they still look very nice.

..And no, layout isn't built with tables and images ;).

[Borgtex]

Originally posted by reub77
inform me of any code I can insert at the beginning of my code to correct any browser difficulties.
Thanks.

alert ("still using this relic? update your browser, for God's sake!")