[WEB4LIB] Re: Netscape 7

[Thomas Dowling]

At 12:59 PM 5/22/2002, Catherine Buck Morgan wrote:
>I've loaded Netscape 6 on a few machines.... and the experience has not
>been pleasant. It destroys address books, esp. the groups. It doesn't
>interpret javascript well... scripts that ran well on 4.79 and IE (all
>versions), don't execute properly in Netscape 6, 6.2, etc.

Problems like this often need closer examination.  There are a lot of 
scripts out there that, in essence, ask the browser, "Are you Netscape 
4?  If not, I'll assume you're IE."  The scripts then continue to do things 
in a way that is either proprietary to NS4 or proprietary to IE4+.

To the user, of course, broken is broken.  But at this point it's 
unreasonable to expect newly created browsers to reverse engineer every 
hack from five years ago in obsolete browsers; on the other hand, it is 
reasonable (IMO) to call web authors' attention to their reliance on 
non-standard code.


Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu