SillyDog701

[miah]

I've made websites for free, for friends for years. Recently I made a site, my first paid site ever. I am no expert in HTML, but do make nice looking, easy to nagivate sites. This was the first time I used Tables, on her main page only, and the results were horrifying to say the least. The page looks fantastic in IE, which by the way, I rarely use IE unless forced to. But in Netscape 7.1 the page looks like a child made the page. I spent weeks trying to bring the 2 pages together, to no avail. I can't believe, that the 2 browsers can look so much different. I'm glad, that the lady I made the site for, uses IE.....so she is extremely happy with the site. But I'm not. Anyone browsing the internet, interested in her Kennel, (one of her dogs was just in the Westminster dog show last week) might decide to view her site in Netscape, and think that someone knowing nothing about website building put this page on the net. Anyone else have this problem? I used both my Netscape 7.1 and my old 4.79 and still they looked terrible. Thanks ahead, for any ideas.

UserAgent: Mozilla/4.79 [en] (Win98; U)

[DJGM]

You need to use a proper DOCTYPE declaration, and also ensure your webpages are validated correctly.
Doing so, will ensure that the recommended web standards are adhered to, and that your webpages
will be displayed exactly as you intended in all current web browsers, on all operating systems.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1

[miah]

Thank you for your reply. I did try all of the DOCTYPE's listed on that site, and each made my Netscape pages look worse and worse, it even messed up my IE pages badly. I also tried the HTML validator, but as a website maker (limited knowledge), that has never taken any courses, and not able to take any in my area, this was most confusing to me. Thank you anyway, for all of your help. The Internet Explorer page still looks great, and since I made the page for the lady that owns that Kennel, and she uses that browser, she is very happy with it.

UserAgent: Mozilla/4.79 [en] (Win98; U)

[akbash]

As a webpage author you already know this, too. But I feel like pointing out the obvious.

All web browsers try to emulate the standard, by which I mean IE. But it's difficult to exactly duplicate another browser's behaviour at the limit, where one begins to push the basic HTML elements into complex service.

In the early days, IE put a lot of effort into emulating Netscape layout. More recently, Mozilla has put a lot of effort into emulating IE layout. A more recent build of Mozilla may do a better job on your site than the aging Netscape 7. Netscape 4 is another beast, completely. If Mozilla is a modern human, Netscape 7 is a cro-magnon, IE 6 is a neanderthal, and Netscape 4 is an orangutan.

In the end, web standards aren't. In a W3 standards compliant browser like Mozilla, for tricky layout it's usually better to use style sheets, rather than tables. If you're really motivated, you may need to deliver different content, depending on the browser being used. It's a very common trick; the web is full of such sites.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7a) Gecko/20040220