[thelist] NS 4.7 compatibility?

Shawn K. Quinn skquinn at speakeasy.net
Sun Jul 30 20:38:30 CDT 2006


On Fri, 2006-07-28 at 08:31 -0700, FayeC wrote:
> Here's my question:
> Is it a valid point to maintain the site compatible with NS 4.7? 
> And if not what would be a VERY valid argument I could use to propose
> the change to a more current version?
> We would need major re-engineering of the site to make everything fit
> nice and look nice but with less constraints we can play with layout
> much easier.
> Any comments and ideas are welcome,

The old Netscape Navigator versions were terminally ill with regard to
CSS compliance; this is the reason we now have the Gecko engine which
Netscape-branded Navigator 6 and later, Mozilla, Firefox, etc. are based
on. I personally think the legacy Netscape Navigator versions are
closed-source, non-free junk that nobody should bother trying to use on
the modern Internet; at minimum I would assume anyone still trying to
use them will have given up on coherent CSS handling by now and turned
off that feature (yes, back then you could actually turn CSS off).
Essentially this means get rid of the Navigator 4.9 and older hacks in
the CSS.

That said, there's no reason to make a current site using modern CSS
which will display enhanced on the new breed of browsers while still
remaining usable on less sophisticated browsers (including browsers like
Lynx, and often if one is using Lynx, that may well be all one has).

Also, do realize some privacy-oriented proxies such as the original
Junkbuster proxy replace User-Agent to identify as things like Netscape
Navigator 3.0 on MacOS. Privoxy has a similar option but simply
identifies as "Privoxy/3.0 (Anonymous)" or whatever the version number
is out of the box.

-- 
Shawn K. Quinn




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