Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Netscape Navigator 4.x

Thankfully, this archaic browser is finally on its way out with less than 0.3% market share according to most statistics, and probably even lower by the time you read this. Originally launched in 1997, Netscape Navigator 4 (NN4.x) was an impressive browser. Needless to say, it hasn’t aged all that well.

NN4.x’s CSS support is pretty basic and, although some people still spend time designing for it, most sites do not get the kind of traffic that would warrant spending much time discussing its numerous issues. In fact, most CSS designers and web standards advocates have, instead, embraced the idea of “graceful degradation” and provide only the most rudimentary styling (mostly fonts and colors) to this outdated browser.

Be sure to consult your own site’s browser statistics to decide when, and if, you need to degrade your design for a particular browser. Remember that percentages can be misleading: 0.3% of users who visit your personal photo gallery is likely to be a far cry from the same percentage visiting eBay. To make a design degrade gracefully for NN4.x, you need to serve it a simple style sheet and hide the stuff it doesn’t understand. This is easily accomplished by using NN4.x’s basic understanding of CSS against it in one of two ways. The first involves use of the @import rule, which is not understood by NN4.x:

    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="my_basic.css" />
    <style type="text/css">@import(my_advanced.css)</style>

In the above example, NN4.x ...