Mozilla
IE 6
Opera 6
Netscape 4.x
The original layout of this page was rather simple: one big block containing everything. However, I wanted to make this page accessible to everyone and it became a nightmare trying to do so with my original color scheme and layout so I was forced to simplify it. Basically I went from something very similar to my homepage (ca. 2002) to the bland black and white you are currently looking at. The reason: Netscape 4.x.
Please, if you're using this browser, do us all a favor and upgrade to something else as soon as possible. Netscape 4.x has, by far, the worst lack of standards support out there. Surfing the web with Netscape 4.x is like riding a bike with no seat on. Many people have praised Netscape 3 as the best browser ever, however it's old and consequently does not support CSS. Netscape 4.x provides some CSS support but leaves a lot to be desired.
To give you an idea, here is how a portion of my homepage is rendered by a few browsers:
Mozilla |
IE 6 |
Opera 6 |
Netscape 4.x |
You should see that, aside from Netscape 4.x, all the others render the page similarly. There'll always be a few exceptions: note how the font size differs, I imagine because of the default user setting of each browser. Also, IE 6 does not show bullets for the list items even though the page validated (using the W3C's web validator). I have no idea what's going on there.
Regardless, there's no denying that Netscape 4.x bites the big one here: what's with the white space between the border and beige background? And what about the hideous green? And why is the box only around the left list? And why is the font different? And why is the list indented so much? (And remember: we're just dealing with a page that contains primarily text. Add some simple things like images with borders specified via CSS and things start getting real ugly real fast).
Please, abandon all hope for Netscape 4.x as soon as possible because we're now about to get into more advanced use of CSS (be aware that the next pages get a bit more technical).