SillyDog701

[jonathanwexler]

I have volunteered to do some Web development for a charity. I have been away from this since 1999, but I do remember there used to be a devedge.netscape.com site where documentation for versions like 4.03 and 4.52 was available. I cannot seem to find anything like that today.

I have the site mostly done (looks W3C compliant to me, runs swell on IE6), and I am trying to get it working in Navigator. Documentation would help enormously.

The console shows me things like "Permission error for Location.toString", which I suspect happens while parsing javascript, but this is just a guess. The console allows shows me a error running the Javascript eval of a call to a function I wrote, claiming the function is not defined. The DOM browser shows the IFRAME on the page, but the id field is blank. Does Navigator support things like document.getElementByID('iframe-name').src='http://www.yahoo.com'.

I do not expect anyone to answer this stuff, but absent documentation, I will be left with no alternative but to branch the home page for different browsers and build a crappy site for Netscape users.

UserAgent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)

[Pu7o]

For one thing, you could point to a website where your IE version might be, so we could help fix it.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20060118 Firefox/1.5.0.1 Firescape/0.1 wml/1.3

[jonathanwexler]

Thanks for the offer, but I tried Firefox, which displayed a much smaller set of issues. I stumbled across my problem. It turns out that -when it comes to [tt]<SCRIPT>[/tt] declarations, [tt]LANGUAGE="JAVASCRIPT"[/tt] is not the same as [tt]LANGAUGE=JSCRIPT[/tt] (who would have imagined this!?). Specificially

Code: Select all

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JAVASCRIPT">
function FS_callJS() {eval(arguments[0])}
</SCRIPT>
<SCRIPT LANGAUGE=JSCRIPT>
function populate_iframe(pg) {document.all.I1.src=pg}
</SCRIPT>
FS_callJS('populate_iframe("myOther.html")');

does not work in Firefox/NN because the populate_iframe 'definition' cannot be found by FS_callJS. This does not happen if the JSCRIPT is changed to read "JAVASCRIPT".

This fixed both Firefox and NN. However NN still has an issue that neither Firefox nor IE6 has with certain flyout menus items - the submenu vanishes when the mouse leaves the higher level menu item (the "mouseout" event can get triggered prematurely).

You can see this at my current draft of the site home.comcast.net/~jonathanwexler

Here is what I think is going on:

There is a table with a cell (TD tag) which has some menu buttons implemented as images embedded in absolutely-positioned DIVs. Mouseover events on certain of these buttons triggers the display of a submenu displayed as a nested DIV with submenu buttons. The submenu DIV is also absolutely positioned, and extends into an adjoining TD which hosts an IFRAME. The submenu DIV has a larger z-order, so when displayed, it overlays the adjoing TD/IFRAME.

The mouseout event is captured in the menu DIV, and such event hides the submenu DIV.

In IE6 and Firefox, the mouse pointer can leave the menu and float over the submenu without triggering the mouseout event. This also works in NN, EXCEPT that as soon as the mouse pointer floats over the part of the submenu which overlays the TD/IFRAME, the mouseout event is reported to the menu DIV.

Jonathan

UserAgent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)

[akbash]

It turns out that -when it comes to <SCRIPT> declarations, LANGUAGE="JAVASCRIPT" is not the same as LANGAUGE=JSCRIPT

But they aren't the same thing, and Firefox doesn't support Microsoft's proprietary language. These days the preferred declaration is

Code: Select all

<script type="text/javascript">

The older |language| construct was deprecated a while back. Some people are more comfortable using both declarations simultaneously, and some people use the older one to specify a specific version of JavaScript, but that seems overly ambitious to me.

Indeed there have been bugs in Mozilla browsers in the handling of mouse events over overlapping divs and frames. You may find confirmation for the problem you're seeing in the second testcase of the mouseout events lost moving mouse out of iframe Mozilla bug. It was fixed in Firefox last March, but I don't know what that means for Netscape, since AOL's development process is entirely opaque. It's a browser bug. You may be able to script around it. I'm not optimistic. Getting rid of the iframe would surely work By the way, while you're taking care to ensure your work is compatible with multiple browsers, are you concerned about Opera and Safari?

I do remember there used to be a devedge.netscape.com site where documentation for versions like 4.03 and 4.52 was available.

Ownership of all that wonderful devedge.netscape.com documentation also passed through AOL. It would seem they lost interest in it, killed it, then lost even more interest. Last I heard, it had moved in with more appropriate guardians, and it was still being updated. You can read more about it in this Netscape DevEdge lives on thread.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20060204 Firefox/1.5

[Antony]

It turns out that -when it comes to <SCRIPT> declarations, LANGUAGE="JAVASCRIPT" is not the same as LANGAUGE=JSCRIPT

But they aren't the same thing, and Firefox doesn't support Microsoft's proprietary language. These days the preferred declaration is

Code: Select all

<script type="text/javascript">

The older |language| construct was deprecated a while back. Some people are more comfortable using both declarations simultaneously, and some people use the older one to specify a specific version of JavaScript, but that seems overly ambitious to me.

Thanks for mentioning that.
I always use [tt]<script language="JavaScript">[/tt] or [tt]<script language="JavaScript1.5">[/tt] if I want to use more advanced JavaScript. Specifying [tt]language="JavaScript1.5"[/tt] and avoid Netscape 4 and IE 4 or even earlier interpreting the JavaScript code, hence saves me some trouble.

Just my two cents.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/417.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/417.8

[jonathanwexler]

Thanks for the feedback. Very, very helpful.

Opera seems to have a different problem, with a similar impact. The z-order of the submenu seems to get ignored in the part of the screen where the IFRAME lives, so the submenu is hidden in this part of the screen.

I am going to some script to play with the geometry of this stuff when Navigator or Opera is detected. I think it will be (barely) usable.

I would like to test the KHTML-based browers, but without a Mac, Safari is out of reach. I have not had a LINUX install in years, so I am not currently in position to test KONQUEROR. Any thoughts?

Thanks

Jonathan

UserAgent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)

[Don_HH2K]

I would like to test the KHTML-based browers, but without a Mac, Safari is out of reach. I have not had a LINUX install in years, so I am not currently in position to test KONQUEROR. Any thoughts?

If you just want to test in Konqueror, you can download a version of Linux that runs right off a CD. Knoppix is one such distribution with low system requirements. It's bundled with KDE, so you'd get Konqueror with it.

Alternatively you could get virtual machine software such as VMWare or Virtual PC. If you want something that's free, and can manage to figure out how to use it, you could try Qemu (note: you most likely want the one called "Qvm86"). Then you can just run Linux right on top of Windows.

UserAgent: Mozilla/4.8 [en] (WinNT; U)

[jonathanwexler]

Previously reported at http://www.quirksmode.org/bugreports/ar ... layer.html

UserAgent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)

[jonathanwexler]

I downloaded knoppix, wound up with KONQUEROR v3.2 (I think the world has made it to v3.4). No joy at all, cannot figure out if it is disliking the <DIV> tags, or for some reason the mouseover scripts are not running. Cannot find any useful help. I am putting KONQUEROR on the back burner until I have some time I really need to kill.

Thanks again for all your help!!!

Jonathan

UserAgent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)