http://www.ohiolink.edu/~tdowling/netscape_dies.html

[JQ Johnson]

Tom,

I took a look at your problem page.  It also fails for me with Netscape
4.04 (the version I still am running on my NT box), so I debugged with
that version.  By binary search I narrowed it down to one property:

DIV.outer	{	border: solid thin #666; }

If you eliminate that property, it works for me.  Try it with Netscape
4.5 and see if it works for you as well.  In this particular case,
eliminating the box doesn't seem to dramatically degrade the appearance
of your page.

Netscape, as you know, has very severe bugs associated with its CSS
support, e.g. in its handling of borders and box properties.  The CSS
support was added piecemeal in 4.0 rather than as an integral part of
the rendering engine.  Very few changes were made in 4.5 in this area,
so one expects the same bugs to be present in 4.5.

Although Explorer 4 also has many bugs in its handling of CSS, they seem
to be more benign, in part because the CSS support is more integral in
the display rather than added as an afterthought.

Given the current state of affairs, my general advice on using CSS
continues to be "caveat auctor" and "test with multiple browsers, but
don't try to use CSS for anything fancy". Maybe if Netscape 5 is ever
released of if MS wins the browser wars...

JQ Johnson                      Office: 115F Knight Library
Academic Education Coordinator  mailto:jqj at darkwing.uoregon.edu
1299 University of Oregon       phone: 1-541-346-1746; -3485 fax
Eugene, OR  97403-1299          http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jqj/