Some of my Netscape users have reported strange display problems since we switched to UBBT. I know that Netscape v4 had horrible stylesheet support, but am not sure how to work around it. I have forums looking nice in IE/Mozilla/Opera for both Mac and PC users, but can't find the solution for Netscape users.
For example, one user today reported that all he gets is text on a white background .. no table colors, table borders, etc. This is using Netscape 4.61. The obvious answer is to tell them to upgrade, but that isn't realistic. Is there a way to make the forum displays backwards compatible for "broken" browsers?
Yep, I just blew the cobwebs off my Netscape 4.0 and went to your forums...it is just black text on a white background. I did notice that you don't have any optional skins available for your users, other than the default one; I wonder if you could do a workaround by providing some alternate skins?
We are definitely trying to serve the majority, but there must be something we can do about those folks who are using the older Netscape versions...has anyone else here has experimented with using skins to solve this problem? (JC...are your ears burning? I've got you in mind...)
I have the same problem on my board. Users using Navigator 6 are sometimes unable to view usernames and/or the colors are really screwed from what I see in IE.
Is the problem that Netscape doesn't have good support for Cascading Style Sheets?
Yes, I have the default theme set. I've done some more testing tonight with even stranger results. Thinking that maybe I modified the default stylesheets a few weeks ago, I went to both threadsdev and ubbcentral and downloaded a couple of stylesheets from them to install. Even though those two sites look fine in my copy of Netscape, selecting those stylesheets in Netscape for my site still displays everything with white backgrounds. I disabled the header/footer thinking maybe my code caused it, but I still get the same thing.
So, even though threadsdev and ubbcentral render correctly in Netscape for me, using their exact stylesheet doesn't render correctly on my site. This is very confusing. I hope someone can shed some light on it because I'm out of ideas.
I visited Threadsdev with 4.73 and their main index page (.html) is giving me probs, with text too small to read etc, but the board was fine. I emailed MattyJ to see if he has any ideas. Will keep you updated or he'll reply here.
After much reinstalling, file comparing, pulling of hair, and gnashing of teeth, I was finally able to find the problem.
We use Apache with the mod_gzip module to save bandwidth .. especially on text pages. For some reason, Netscape doesn't properly display pages using stylesheets if the output from the server is compressed. I have no idea why this is so, but that was what was happening. To work around this, we set the "mod_gzip_min_http 1001" directive in the main Apache config file. That tells mod_gzip to only compress output to HTTP/1.1 and higher compliant browsers. Netscape v4.x is only HTTP/1.0 compliant, so output to it is not compressed. This fixed the problem and I now have much more happy Netscape users.
I just wanted to post the results in case this ever happens to anyone else.
There is no need to use mod_gzip on a PHP website <img border="0" title="" alt="[Smile]" src="images/icons/smile.gif" /> . PHP 4.0.5 and higher has already native gzip output support that are compatible with older browsers.
Some of us have other web content, such as html files, that we want to compress. In that case, it makes much more sense to handle compression at the server level.
