Topic: Netscape not reading files on host right - HELP!!!

Hey everyone --

I'm working on a freelance project for friends who own a local printshop, who were commissioned by a law firm here in Columbus to redesign their site. Netscape is driving me NUTS!

On my computer at home, the site files in question display great both in Netscape & Internet Explorer. They look exactly the same, more or less. But when I upload these same files in the same folders to the client's webhost, Netscape glitches out -- it's refusing to read the stylesheet for the body of the inline frame. It's the exact same coded files that it read just fine on my computer -- the only difference is that one copy of the folder is on my computer and the other copy is loaded up on the webhost.

I've gone over and over the HTML & CSS & stylesheet coding, and cannot find a reason for Netscape to be doing this. The pages display just fine with IE, both on Windows & Mac, both on my system and on the webhost; it's Netscape (Windows & Mac) that's refusing to display the page right on the host side, and I can't figure out why.

The URL is http://www.cpmlaw.com/test/cpmgray/index.html The file that should load into the inline frame is cpmgray/about_firm.html, which I ran through the HTML validator, and it passed just fine. The stylesheet is cpmgray/cpmmain.css -- the validator keeps reporting " You have no color with your background-color : body" (and the same error with my a:link, a:visited, and a:hover lines), and damned if I can figure out why. The validator gives no clues and according to the CSS & HTML books I have, the colors I'm using are web-safe and my code is valid CSS.

Can ANYONE help with this?? Please?? While I still have hair left?

Chris
(Moth's wife -- and Moth's tired of his wife spending more time with Netscape than with him )

[Emp edit: Fixing link]

[This message has been edited by Emperor (edited 08-30-2003).]

Dunno what the issue is, but the correct link is here.

I did notice that the resize sets the page size too small for IE 6.0 SP1 on Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows 2003, and Longhorn. You get scrollers for horizontal and vertical! :-(

First of all, you should clarify what you mean by "Netscape." I assume you're referring to Netscape 7.x, as opposed to Netscape 6.x or Netscape Navigator 4.x (*shudder*). The difference in appearance is likely due to a difference in browser versions. Check Help -> About.

You may also want to try the page in Mozilla, which is what Netscape 6+ is based off of. I'm afraid I don't have Mozilla installed on my new computer, so I can't test the site for you at the moment.

(This is off-topic: Please, if you have any sense, remove the javascript which resizes the user's window. It is not only incredibly obnoxious, but in my case actually resized the window so that your page did *not* fit inside it, creating both vertical and horizontal scrollbars. Remove that code, it's not helping your page in any way.)

quote:

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the validator keeps reporting " You have no color with your background-color : body"

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Those are just warnings, right? Don't worry about it too much. It gives you that because if you don't specify a background color every time you specify a foreground color (and vice-versa), then your color choices may conflict with user's default color choices (or ones set in their user stylesheet), creating unreadable text.

So, which version of Netscape is causing you trouble?

[edit: yeah, I'm getting the problem on Mozilla 1.4. If you visit the problematic page directly, at http://www.cpmlaw.com/test/cpmgray/about_firm.html , the style doesn't work. So I'm assuming it has nothing to do with being in an IFRAME.

According to the DOM Browser, the link tag is there, but its style is not being used when rendering the page.

I dunno, this is weird. Anyone else?]

[This message has been edited by Slime (edited 08-29-2003).]

Huh. That is weird. Never seen anything like this. This calls for further investigation

In the meantime, I recommend you remove this:

<font style="font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold">

I can see that you're sticking to CSS (which is a good thing), but in this case, it's entirely useless. The whole point of CSS is to seperate the structure of the page from the presentation.

I suggest you ditch the font tags, as well as the inline styles. Then replace them with a more meaningful tag such <strong>, and simply add the style rules to the external stylesheet, like so:

strong {

     font-size: 14px;

     }

-----------------------------
EDIT:

Hmm, I think I've almost got it. When I downloaded the web page to my hard drive, the CSS file was, for some reason, converted into a *.txt file, making it unreadable to Netscape.

You might wanna check with your web host on how their servers deal with CSS files.

Also, I'd recommend changing the encoding to something more standard, like iso-8859-1. I don't know why you've got that weird US-ASCII encoding in there.



[This message has been edited by ozphactor (edited 08-29-2003).]

[This message has been edited by ozphactor (edited 08-29-2003).]

Thanks for the responses, folks.

I have removed the page sizer -- it was used so there wouldn't be a lot of blank space at the bottom & right margins for visitors using 1024x768 res. When I tried the pages on 800x600, the only semi-important part of the page cut off was the bottom bar -- trying to design for both common resolutions and keep the site legible has been another headache, especially since the Law Firm In Question is insisting on a specific unusual font that doesn't crossover well. But that's another story.

Slime, sorry for the confusion. It's Netscape 7.0 for Mac OS X and 7.0 for OS 9; the error happens in both browser versions. IE for Windows & Mac (versions 5.5/5.2.3 display the frame correctly, as does Mac's Opera-based Safari. I downloaded Mozilla 1.4, and got the same display problem -- though Mozilla turned the background lime green?

Ozphactor -- I'm still new to CSS, so please forgive the use of inline styles! When I first ran the pages through the validator, it griped about the lack of a character set, and of the valid options presented, us-ascii was the only one recognizable that I thought would be safe. I'll get the inlines corrected after I figure out this Netscape crap.

(a quick edit -- you're onto something, I think. As a test, I loaded the files onto my own personal webhost space http://holyshrineofjourney.com/cpmtest/index.html and netscape 7.0 AND mozilla display them just fine. Next stop's the lawyer's server support...)



[This message has been edited by ZenFrodo (edited 08-30-2003).]

quote:

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I did notice that the resize sets the page size too small for IE 6.0 SP1 on Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows 2003, and Longhorn.

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Pugzly, how the hell did you get your hands on a copy of Longhorn?



[This message has been edited by ozphactor (edited 08-30-2003).]