client side includes

[netcastles]

I'm trying to get client side includes to work on this site. I'm using java (document.write).
It works fine in IE, but in Netscape you end up with a blank page. I'm not even sure if the includes are the reason for that. I've looked around and can't see what's wrong with the code for the includes.
Any thoughts?

Bogeys (http://www.bogeysandbirdies.com/template2.html)

Thanks,
Melissa

[Catweasel]

Originally posted by netcastles
I'm trying to get client side includes to work on this site. I'm using java (document.write).

I'm assuming you mean Javascript, not Java. They're different things, and almost totally unrelated except for the name...

And "client side includes"? I can't fathom out whether you mean Javascript includes, or Client Side imagemaps - you've got both on that page...


It works fine in IE, but in Netscape you end up with a blank page. I'm not even sure if the includes are the reason for that. I've looked around and can't see what's wrong with the code for the includes.
Any thoughts?

A few. I can't tell you much about your Javascript, as it's included (so I can't do a simple "View Source" to see it). But it's quite probable that it's at least part of the problem - the Netscape DOM is totally different to the IE DOM in all but the simplest of ways.

Another thing is that Netscape's support of styles/stylesheets/classes is ... umm, how can I say this politely? ... oh, I can't ;) Let's just say it's "very very bad" and leave it at that ;)

What that means is a lot of the layout you're doing of the table elements using "style=..." is going to break in Netscape.

Another thing I noticed - you have a mixture of absolute sizes (e.g. "width=154") and relative sizes (e.g. "width=100%") in your tables. Another thing Netscape handles very badly...

And finally, you have at least 1 occurrence of "width=1051" in a <td> declaration. That's pretty wide. Certainly wider than my browser window (currently 800-and-something, even though my screen resolution is 1280x960 - remember, not everybody runs with their browser maximised!). God knows how Netscape will render that, particularly with non-absolutely-positioned content in the <td>

Now, I'm not knocking Netscape - I used it for many many years, but frankly it's getting on and, like any good pet that's getting old and lame, should be humanely put down. Unfortunately, it's still the de-facto browser on most any non-MS or Mac OS, so for real world websites you really need to take it into account. The easiest way to do this, without lots of browser checking either at the client level or the server level, is to design in Netscape and tweak for IE.

FWIW, anybody still using Netscape should seriously consider trying Mozilla. It's fast, it's stable, the DOM is sensible and follows W3C recommendations (and is close enough to IE's to make compatability relatively simple). It's just nice ;)

So I think you really need to ask yourself : Do I need to cater for Netscape users? If the answer is "yes", and I'm guessing it is, then you need to go back and redo your site from scratch to suit Netscape. When that's done, you can worry about getting it right in IE.

That's probably not what you wanted to hear, is it? Sorry...

[netcastles]

That's exactly what I wanted to hear! I took over for someone else and am tired of finding new little headaches, I want to tear the whole thing down. Thank you.