Netscape 4.7 (Windows) and CSS

I always have used px for fonts no matter what browser I'm designing for. If you are doing everything in .CSS for NS 4 then you need to be aware of how things will translate across other browsers. I use Browse Master you can get it here: http://www.applythis.com/browsermaster/default.asp It's a great program and it helps me out with the different sizes, etc. What are you using for the .CSS? Are you writing it from scratch? If it validates, (I could be wrong.) it should work in all browsers. I use Top Style for that, you can get it here: http://bradsoft.com/topstyle/index.asp

Good luck!

I can't imagine why you'd have to serve N4 at this point in time. That's ridiculous. put your CSS in an @import and serve default stuff to N4 and lower browsers. If necessary, split it out.

Pixels are not ideal, but are the best option for N4.

It's been awhile, but form element styling (borders and padding) can cause crashes. Look up the archives and search for N4 CSS resources if you really must. It would be better to spend your time bringing sense to the client.

Most 'standard' CSS things will work on NS4.7 (I love that browser), But anything involving layers, postioning (CSS2 or above) wont work. You have to remember NS4.7 was released just before CSS was released.

px works fine for fonts, as does pt, think you can even use em as well.

If you will be working with NS4.7 for a while, look up JSS on the Netscape site (was Netscapes version of CSS which W3C wasn't interested in) to give you an idea of what can be used, will have to convert to it CSS. If your not don't worry about the JSS as it was never used and just do the CSS thing.

Southern gal, your not quite right, if it validates it doesn't mean it will work on all browsers, just means you have clean trouble free code that should work across the board. It is always good to work with valid code thou, does help a lot.
W3C has nothing to do the browsers themselfs and just sets the standards the browsers should work to, but as we all know all browsers are different. One day hopefully all the browsers will conform to the web standards.

thanks folks. That pretty much answers what i need.

The client uses thousands of N4.7 browsers. All their in house stuff works with it and they don't want to rock the boat right now.

NS4.7 is one of the most unforgiving browsers which is why it's perfect to learn to code on, If you can make your pages display how you want in there your pretty mush set everywhere else.

Introduce them to mozilla, still the same family but a whole lot more forgiving

I switched to Firefox a few weeks ago, used Mozilla before that and IE 6 before that. It's totally different than IE, totally. I still load up IE for 2 sites, one is a bank that has some banner rotation thing and keeps refreshing in Firefox so I can't view the site. That's okay, at least I can balance my checkbook.

I thought that valid code was good for something, Busy.

Ack, why are they making you develop for *that* browser? There has to come a time where we let go of ancient - non-compliant - browsers such as this (ok, so everyone still uses IE but you get the idea!)
Anyway, rant over... Check the following link:
http://www.ericmeyeroncss.com/bonus/trick-hide.html

The above technique should allow you to create a seperate style sheet for compatible browsers (and IE), whilst having an NN4.X specific style which other browsers will ignore.

As for specifying font sizes, this is against useability guidelines. A W3C note on the subject (found at: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-CSS-TECHS/) states:

Quote: Checkpoints in this section: 3.4 Use relative rather than absolute units in markup language attribute values and style sheet property values. [Priority 2]

This is in part 3 of the note, you may think I'm being pedantic but I think it's important to create web pages that are accessible to everyone

Personally I make as much of the design "liquid" as is possible (unless impossible because of bitmap sizes), this means that the entire design resizes in line with text - I stole the idea for this technique from the Elastic Lawn design at CSS Zen Garden (http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/063/063.css&page=2) ... Watch what happens - especially in IE - when you resize the text