Senseless rendering: Mac.Mozilla != Mac.Netscape6.01 ?!?!

[Roman Blöth]

Hello out there,
pls excuse if my xposting might fall into a false group - this is a quick problem which I should solve soon...

Why the heck would Mozilla 1.2.1 on a Mac (OS 9.x) render a HTML-page different from Netscape 6.01 on the same Mac?

The page in question is (temporarily)

http://www.gosub.de/felix/waitpage.html

For debugging I turned on the table borders and trans.gif-borders:

Netscape here always makes the spacer-gif table rows too high! It doesn't make any sense to me and I would be so thankful if someone could lead me back to the path of working HTML...

I tried to set the colspan of the spacer rows (to add an extra blank space between the form field rows) to 6 first, of course, and now changed to 6 identical td's - no difference.

I tried to set the table height - no use either

I've added a style to the form tag - no use, as expected.

I'm goin nuts soon...
Any advice much appreciated here,
Roman.
--
Roman Blöth
gosub communications GmbH | Fredersdorfer Str. 10 | D-10243 Berlin
T: 030 / 29 36 39 1 - 43 | F: 030 / 29 36 39 1 - 40

[Roman Blöth]

Dear Chris Morris <c.********@durham.ac.uk>,

Am 02 Jul 2003 11:11:39 +0100 hast du geschrieben:

Netscape 6.01 is based on an early (pre-release) version of Mozilla.
I forget which exactly, and don't have a copy to hand, but someting
like 0.6 sounds about right [..] It's a bug I remember seeing quite a lot from some Netscape 6s and
spacer gifs. If you use a CSS-based layout you won't need the spacer
gifs, but until then a possible workaround is to set style="font-size:
1px;" on the spacer cells (preferably through an external CSS file and
classes, obviously).

O.k., this indeed is an enlightenment to me. Thank you very much for your qualified answer and help!

And btw, I would love to use external CSS here, (and clean HTML 4.01), but this page has to be rendered on as many browser/os combinations as possible, and for example Opera 6.05/Win ignores spacer gifs of height=4...
Thank you a thousand times! You really saved my day.
Roman.
--
Roman Blöth
gosub communications GmbH | Fredersdorfer Str. 10 | D-10243 Berlin
T: 030 / 29 36 39 1 - 43 | F: 030 / 29 36 39 1 - 40

[Steve Pugh]

Roman Blöth <bl****@gosub.de> wrote:

Why the heck would Mozilla 1.2.1 on a Mac (OS 9.x) render a HTML-page
different from Netscape 6.01 on the same Mac?
Netscape 6.01 is based on a much earlier version of the Gecko engine
than Mozilla 1.2.1.
The page in question is (temporarily)

http://www.gosub.de/felix/waitpage.html

For debugging I turned on the table borders and trans.gif-borders:

Netscape here always makes the spacer-gif table rows too high!
Are you building a new web page with spacer gifs? How retro. ;-)
It doesn't make any sense to me and I would be so thankful if someone
could lead me back to the path of working HTML...
See http://www.hut.fi/~hsivonen/doctype.html

Your doctype puts Netscape 6.01 into Standards mode and Mozilla 1.2.1
into Almost Standards mode.
In Standards mode (Netscape 6.01) the table cells are sized according
to the CSS specification - this means that the <img> is treated as if
it was a text character and so space is left below it just as you
would leave space below the letter 'a' in case the next letter in the
sentence was 'g'.
In Almost Standards mode (Mozilla 1.2.1) the table cell heights are
rendered in retro-Netscape 4 fashion with no space below the images.
I tried to set the colspan of the spacer rows (to add an extra blank
space between the form field rows)

Why not use margin on the form elements? Or padding on the table
cells?

Steve

--
"My theories appal you, my heresies outrage you,
I never answer letters and you don't like my tie." - The Doctor

Steve Pugh <st***@pugh.net> <http://steve.pugh.net/>

[Jim Dabell]

Chris Morris wrote:

Roman Blöth <bl****@gosub.de> writes: [snip]

Netscape here always makes the spacer-gif table rows too high! It
doesn't make any sense to me and I would be so thankful if someone
could lead me back to the path of working HTML...

It's a bug I remember seeing quite a lot from some Netscape 6s and
spacer gifs. If you use a CSS-based layout you won't need the spacer
gifs, but until then a possible workaround is to set style="font-size:
1px;" on the spacer cells (preferably through an external CSS file and
classes, obviously).

Are you sure? It sounds like the usual problems with strict mode and table
layouts, not a bug in Netscape:

<URL:http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2002/img-table/>

Something to remember the next time somebody claims that table layouts work
the same everywhere.

By the way, if you're going to stick with spacer gifs, alt="" or alt=" ",
not alt="spacer".
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/alt/alt-text.html

Ditto.
--
Jim Dabell

[Lauri Raittila]

In article <20****************************@gosub.de>, Roman =?ISO-8859-
15?Q?Bl=F6th?= wrote:

And btw, I would love to use external CSS here, (and clean HTML 4.01),
but this page has to be rendered on as many browser/os combinations as
possible, and for example Opera 6.05/Win ignores spacer gifs of
height=4...

Then you must use external CSS (hiding from NN4 and IE3) and clean HTML4.
That is most supported after plain text. (Opera 6 has one of the best CSS
capability, BTW.)

There is probably 100 times more browser/os combinations than you know.

And if you mean rendered exactly same with rendered, you will fail. On
all browsers, at least with some settings.

--
Lauri Raittila <http://www.iki.fi/lr> <http://www.iki.fi/zwak/fonts>
Saapi lähettää meiliä, jos aihe ei liity ryhmään, tai on yksityinen
tjsp., mutta älä lähetä samaa viestiä meilitse ja ryhmään.

[Mark Parnell]

Lauri Raittila wrote:

(Opera 6 has one of the best CSS capability, BTW.)

Better than O7 in some cases :-(

--

Mark Parnell
http://www.clarkecomputers.com.au