{"id":200,"date":"2003-08-24T10:05:56","date_gmt":"2003-08-24T14:05:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/wordpress\/nobody_beats_up_my_little_brother_but_me"},"modified":"2003-08-24T10:05:56","modified_gmt":"2003-08-24T14:05:56","slug":"nobody_beats_up_my_little_brother_but_me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/2003\/08\/nobody_beats_up_my_little_brother_but_me.html","title":{"rendered":"Nobody Beats Up My Little Brother But Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

Deep within the comments of Dave Shea’s recent post on browser dependencies<\/a>, Jeff Croft summarizes his design methodology<\/a>. It’s so excellent that I’m going to go right ahead and reprint the thing:<\/p>\n

\n

In practice, I often find myself doing a bit of an “outside-in” thing. Since my University job forces me to make sites look reasonable in Netscape 4.7x, I have a general design process that looks something like this:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Mark up content in XHTML. Test in Lynx to esure proper flow and such.<\/li>\n
  2. Link to a basic stylesheet that Netscape 4 will see.<\/li>\n
  3. Write styles for basic (NN4) stylesheet. Typically, this is fonts, colors, and not much else.<\/li>\n
  4. @import an advanced stylesheet, for modern browsers.<\/li>\n
  5. Write styles for advanced stylesheet, taking full advantage of as much CSS as possible, not really caring whether it works in “mid-level” browser such as IE5 or IE6. At this point, I’m just getting it to look perfect in Safari\/Mozilla\/Other near-perfect browser.<\/li>\n
  6. Revert to a mid-level browser (usually IE5 and IE6) and tweak styles to satisfy them.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    Right on, Jeff<\/a>. Methodical and comprehensive.<\/p>\n

    I can also sympathize with Jeff and the requirements of his University job. After all, for three-and-a-half<\/em> years, I had to target Netscape 4.7 as my organization’s primary browser. I was waiting for years<\/em> for the company to switch to Netscape 6… then Netscape 6.2… then Netscape 7… but it never happened. Be<\/em> with me here, people. Feel my pain.<\/p>\n

    So these days I’m of two minds when I hear people ganging up on poor old Netscape 4. On the one hand, Netscape 4 deserves<\/em> to be bashed. It is truly a lousy piece of software in all respects: standards compliance, rendering speed, user interface, system resources consumed, you name it.1<\/a><\/sup> On the other hand, most of the people doing the bashing don’t really know<\/em> the horror. Sure, they’ve thrown up their hands in disgust at its CSS bugs.2<\/a><\/sup> Who hasn’t? But have they fought with it for hours? Have they tried to scroll through a styled table with hundreds of cells on an old UltraSparc? Have they had to explain to users that disabling JavaScript also<\/em> secretly disables style sheets (even though the two options are separate checkboxes that sit right next to each other)? In short, have they bled<\/em>?<\/p>\n

    I dunno. I know it’s perverse, but sometimes I feel like I should defend battered, dying old Netscape 4 from the general population. Journeymen! Dilettantes! Feh. If anyone has the right to bash Netscape 4, it ought to be me<\/em>.<\/p>\n

    <\/a>1. The one area where Netscape 4 made signficant strides was stability. Early Netscape 4 was horribly<\/em> crashy, but as we moved up through Netscape 4.71, 4.72, etc., it actually became fairly stable. Go figure.<\/small><\/p>\n

    <\/a>2. Incidentally, Netscape 4 sorta kinda understands the float<\/code> property. So with some tweaking, you can produce primitive tableless sites that display (imperfectly) in Netscape 4. This very site is only one example.<\/small><\/p>\n

    <\/a>3. Regarding the title of this entry: I don’t actually have a little brother, and I wouldn’t beat him up if I did. It’s just an expression.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    But have they fought with it for hours? Have they tried to scroll through a styled table with hundreds of cells on an old UltraSparc? Have they had to explain to users that disabling JavaScript also<\/em> secretly disables style sheets (even though the two options are separate checkboxes that sit right next to each other)? In short, have they bled<\/em>?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}