Andrew Thompson / 2003-08-10 16:47:
On another tack. It is very disconcerting that 'bad styles'
can actually freeze a browser, I would have hoped that
at worst the browser would simply ignore the CSS and
render the page poorly.. :-(
The "clear" property is known to crash both Netscape 4.x and some
older versions of MSIE under some situations (I've hit it with
floating DIVs inside a table cell, but I never examined the actual
reason for the crash. It went away when I removed the clear
properties from the stylesheets.)
Every time a browser crash for whatever the reason is (plain HTML,
CSS, Javascript, Java or some plugin) there's a potential security
hazard going on and one should do whatever it takes to prevent that
(usually one needs to turn on all scripting support but sometimes
one has to change the browser).
Note that at least MSIE 5.5- has known security flaws and if
scripting is enabled, any web site can run any code they like on
your computer. I see no reason to support such a browser and if
that's upsets the user, it's good because perhaps he'll upgrade his
browser. Note that this doesn't mean that I don't support, for
example, lynx or links (both of which I regularly use). It just
means that I don't support browsers with known security flaws.
--
Mikko