X-Cart forums

[Cameron]

Hi All,

I decided to check my site in netscape 4.8 today... I hate that browser. It absolutely IGNORES all the important .css information such as the DialogBox background color!

This means that all of my dialog boxes have no background color and their black text is impossible to read on the regular site's background. Very annoying. It also makes all text input boxes (search, login, etc) the size that IT wants, not the size that *I* want. VERY annoying since it totally fuxors my table sizes.

So I decide to check it in Netscape 7, which is usually good about reading .css info and even that version doesn't have any DialogBox background colors!!!! That sucks bad, and I wonder if there is a way to make this work in netscape? I think that what I will have to do is edit all of my templates that have a class=DialogBox table in them and manually set the background color then hope that I never want to CHANGE that color again...

Any other suggestions?

Thanks,
Cameron

[deb]

I literally developed the American-Retro site's relaunch with XCart with MSIE for my admin access and a copy of Mozilla up and running simultaneously for anon/user access.

There are some kinda funky css tags in both 3.2.* and 3.3.* that I had to correct.

So you might look first to the css syntax.

As for Netscape 4.x working with a style sheet ... If I recall correctly, the support was pretty limited for css in those versions.

deb

[Cameron]

Deb, did you use the DialogBox tag? If so, did you have that color something different from the site background? Where I'm having the main problem is that it's ignoring the DialogBox class tag. To have 4.8 be compatible, though I think I will probably end up changing all "class=DialogBox" distinctions in the .tpl files to add in bgcolor.

If only netscape coerced people to upgrade like microsoft does...

[Cameron]

Finally figured it out. I'm using a background image of ocean waves that is specified in the first table of the site. It blends nicely with the top banner I'm using: www.dolphinlovers.com/ The PROBLEM is that with that background in place, Netscape 4.8 does a weird thing and ignores the background color of the product tables, and every other inner table. It shows my table colors if I don't use the background, but that just isn't an option. It works find in NS7, IE5 and Opera...haven't tested in NS6, but I think that more people use 4.8 than 6 anyway.

My big question is this: Is there a way to use a browser sniffer to alter what source code is displayed? I would need it to determine if the browser is NS4 and then NOT put in the background, but instead just put in a solid background color. It will lose a TON of looks, but at least the NN4 lusers will be able to use the shopping cart. I've been looking at browser sniffers, but so far haven't found a way to make it alter my source code depending on the browser.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Cameron

[deb]

Cameron,

You'll find all manner of style sheet examples for browser specific solutions out there in tutorials on the web.

One of the most ingenious I read recently was from Eric Meyer, and is REALLY good stuff.

http://www.ericmeyeroncss.com/bonus/trick-hide.html

deb

[Cameron]

Deb, you rock! That is a great link! I used the @import trick to hide my .css sheet from NS4 and just used basic alink= text= body tags to tell Netscape to use readable text. It is still damn ugly compared to how it should look, mostly because NS4 also does a terrible job with implementing a table background, but that's OK! At least somebody viewing the site with NS4 will be able to read the text.

Thanks!
Cameron

[brian]

Cameron,

You could also try explicitly stating background="" (empty, nothing, nada), in the table cells (each and every <td> tag!). This tells netscrape to allow any lower (behind) background images to show through.

I don't know whether it works for CSS or not, you'll have to test.

It's a pain to do, but it works (or did the last time I used it).

Brian

[Cameron]

Thanks for the tip, Brian. But what was happening was that the background was coming through but I didn't want it to. Any color that I had in my table cell was being ignored IF I had a background image set for the master table. At this point, I'm so DONE with worrying about NS4... I made it so that NS4 users can at least view and use the site, even though they will miss all of the aesthetic beauty that everybody else on every more modern browser will see. Oh well.

[B00MER]

Don't forget www.bluerobot.com