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RE: [OM] [OT] two OM items for sale -> browsers [Long]

Subject: RE: [OM] [OT] two OM items for sale -> browsers [Long]
From: "Olaf Greve" <o.greve@xxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2002 10:58:55 +0100
Hi Larry and Les (and others),

Again, thanks for taking the time to reply to my message and for testing the
page a bit, it's appreciated!

[Larry]

> Looked rather similar on Netscape on my computer, except the words being
black
> rather than red.

The colour of the text is but a minor nuisance, the Opera browsers also
display the text in the select fields in black, but at least the text still
looks fine, on my machine in NS4 however, the text in the drop boxes looks
too small, in fact it's almost illegible, so that's a bigger issue to me.

> Anyway, if there are drop down selection styles that you know of that work
well on both
> Netscape & IE (as there are countless), might as well use them instead of
using a W3C
> style to hopefully make sure us Netscape users will long for that red type
(again, there
> are other ways to get dropdown red type.)

Well, the real issue in doing this, is that the proper way to go about it is
to set up a style sheet in which one defines the lay-out styles of the fonts
etc. to be used. Then, one assigns the style to the select field like this:
<select name="aname" class="redtext">. This way works fine for IE4+ and NS6+
and is the way it ought to be done. In Opera it seems to work for many
things, but not for all of them (e.g. Opera shows the proper font in the
correct size, but it doesn't output the text in dark red in select fields,
whereas it does do so fully correctly for normal text used throughout the
page), but the proper way seems to be supported incorrectly in NS4.

There may or may not be fix-ups for this (I tried defining the select field
as follows: <select name="aname" class="redtext" style="color:#800000"> but
even with that, still no luck in NS4), but this is not the proper way to go
about it, and I do not really want to have to add fix-ups all over the place
just because NS4 doesn't properly support styles. Nonetheless, as the select
fields are (PHP) script generated, I'd only have to add fix-ups in very few
places, so if anyone has a fix-up that does work, I'll add it (though
conceptually spoken I'm very much against doing so), so at least the select
fields do not look completely b*ll*xed up in NS4. :(

> I stay away from IE as much as possible.

Up until version 4 I did the same, now the picture has turned around for me:
I hardly ever use NS4 for real browsing, I use it for my bookmarks, for
downloading TOPE entries, and for testing pages for their lay-out (as NS4 is
the crappiest browser, if a page looks O.K. in NS4 it will probably look
O.K. in all browsers :) ).

> I can't stand its look, and some of its operational methods, way of saving
pics, pages,
> and other miscellaneous gui stuff.

I agree that the look and feel isn't equally great in all aspects. NS4 has
some nice advantages over IE in this respect. NS6 looks plainly horrible
(IMO), but at least the pages it displays look o.k., in Opera I can't stand
the ads in the top of the browser.

> At Pentium 166, and 64MB of RAM, I think my computer is too slow for
Netscape 6.2, which
> is close to perfection, compared to 6.0 which was problematical.

Hey, I use the same machine at home! :) Nowadays, a machine with the above
specs is really slow (and I run Win2K on it, go figure, arrrgh) but last
year I could get a pretty O.K. deal on that machine (2nd hand, of course).
As a web-dev machine it's o.k. as long as one doesn't open too many windows
at once (I know, I know, I really _should_ upgrade the memory to 128MB).
Still, IE6 and NS4 are not too slow on that machine. At home I don't have
NS6+ so I don't know about that one, but at work NS6+ seems to work fine
(needless to say, my machine at work has _quite_ better specs than my home
machine)... Anyway, you wirte "I think...", so I was wondering whether you
have tried NS 6.2 on your machine. The advantage of NS browsers is that you
can install NS6.2 next to NS4, so if it doesn't work, there's no damage
done.

> I'll use 6.2 (or whatever is out) on my next machine. :)

It's not all too likely NS will be around for much longer, in fact, I
believe your very "favourite" company (AOL) bought the rights to the
browser. I do believe they intend to continue with the browser in one form
or another, but apparantly NS usage has dropped to some 5% (I don't remember
the exact source, so perhaps this figure has to be taken with a grain of
salt). It's a pity, for initially I very much favoured NS over IE, but over
the past two years they have stacked mistake on top of mistake, to make
their evemtual demise inevitable :/ Now I just use IE6 as it's the browser
that best supports style sheets and DHTML features, but I must say Opera and
NS6+ are looking more promising already, perhaps next versions of these
browsers (re Netscape: if there'll ever be one) will fully support
everything properly...

[Les]

>Both were set to 1024 x 768. The page *was* slightly larger in IE. But the
detail was
>equivalent in both. I believe that the IBM NS 4.61 is roughly  equal to the
MS/NS 4.7x, so
>it satisfies one of your criteria.

The thing to look at, is whether NS fills out the background image to the
proper size of the main frame, or whether it is too small. On the PC, in NS4
(and Opera), the background image is not properly sized at 1024x768, but it
is in IE browsers and in NS6+. So by saying that the results were roughly
equivalent, do you mean that the background image _did_ actually get set to
the proper size (i.e. frame filling)? If so, that would be great news!

Next up: Unix browsers, aaah, I can see the headaches come in already...8~{


Cheers!
Olafo


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