[thelist] DTDs, character sets and Netscape 4 hell [was: keeping table cells closed in NN 6.0]

[Andrew Forsberg]

>it's probably the DTD
>
>you're not gonna believe it until you read this article --
>
>   Does Netscape 6 Break Your Table Layouts?
>   http://evolt.org/article/Netscape6/17/4427/index.html
>
>i have read it a couple times, including the comments, and i'm still not
>sure which DTD i should be using -- i've always used the "long" one but
>according to dogfood's comments, netscape 6 isn't picking it up correctly
>(it's "too long"!)

Hi Rudy,

Perhaps DTDs aren't the only thing to worry about. I recently had a 
really interesting problem (well, bugger me, I thought it was 
interesting) with Netscape 4 and CSS styles. I'd read Joshua's evolt 
article  (several times too):

Don't let Netscape cramp your styles 
http://www.evolt.org/article/Don_t_let_Netscape_cramp_your_styles/17/3268/index.html

and so, naturally, thought that my style sheet trouble had something 
to do with shonky tables. Even after following those guidelines, 
though, Netscape 4 was chucking the font attributes inside tables. 
All the other attributes (line-height, font-size, color...) were fine 
-- but the font-family attributes (Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Geneva, 
sans-serif) weren't registering with Netscape 4.

Anyhow: long story made short(er) -- even stripping the tables out 
completely didn't fix this problem, nor did using different DTDs 
(XHTML Transitional / Strict, HTML 4.01 Trans / Strict, HTML 4 Trans 
/ Strict). The problem was that I was trying to use a UTF-8 character 
set. It didn't matter what doctype I used at all -- if I used:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

the type would all be times new roman, and if i used:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

I could use style sheets to set my font-family.

This was with Netscape 4.75, 4.51, and 4.05 on a Mac. Netscape 6, and 
IE 4 and 5 on mac were A.O.K. I didn't try any other platforms... 
that was enough for two in the morning. Has anyone else noticed this 
sort of behaviour, or is my machine just freaking out on me?

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Forsberg
http://www.thepander.co.nz