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Netscape DevEdge Redesigns As Standards Showcase

Netscape DevEdge is now showcases standards-based, cross-browser techniques. Get sample code and learn how you can build engaging, effective sites that meet accessibility guidelines.

Correctly Using Titles With External Stylesheets

External stylesheets are often associated with HTML documents using the link element, but it is important to use the element's attributes properly. This is because there are three kinds of stylesheets, and the title attribute is key to the establishment of two of them. The presence of the title attribute in a link element that references an external stylesheet can cause the stylesheet to become a preferred stylesheet. This will in most cases cause the external stylesheet to be ignored, which is typically not what an author intends to do.

Download Netscape Gecko

Get popular Netscape Gecko-based browser builds and learn which versions of Mozilla the various browsers are based on.

Getting Started With Netscape Gecko Support

If the last time you thought about Netscape was 6.x, know that the world has changed. Current browsers embedded with Netscape Gecko are getting rave reviews for performance and security. Top sites, financial institutions etc. that did not support 6.0 are now 6.2+ and 7.0 compatible.

Supporting Netscape Gecko browsers may be as easy as updating your browser detection . We hope these steps help you get started evaluating how your site can provide a great user experience to the growing base of Netscape Gecko browser users:

Tracking Gecko Browser Statistics

Learn how to accurately track website visitors using Netscape Gecko-based browsers. For more information regarding detecting browsers related to content development, please see Browser Detection and Cross Browser Support.

Contents

Background
Tracking Netscape Gecko Server Side
Tracking Netscape Gecko Client Side
Conclusion
References

Displaying DevEdge pages in your Favorite Language

Netscape DevEdge takes advantage of a browser feature for delivering content in your preferred language, set in your browser preferences. This article provides some background information on this feature and what you can do in case you encounter a problem with it.

[Information in this article applies to Internet Explorer 4/5/6, Opera 5/6, Communicator 4.x and Netscape 6.x/7.x browsers.]

Popup Window Controls and Your Website

Netscape 7.01 allows users to control most unsolicited attempts to open new windows such as popup and popunder windows. Learn how to detect Popup Controls, how to ask your readers to enable popups for your site and how to get the benefits of popup windows without using popup windows.

Fixing Table Inheritance in Quirks Mode

Scripting The Flash Player Plugin

This article is about the interaction between JavaScript in a webpage and multimedia plugins such as Flash. For a more introductory article on plugins and Netscape Gecko browsers, read the plugin overview.

Often, websites use JavaScript to communicate with multimedia plugins such as Macromedia's Flash player. Using JavaScript to communicate with plugins allows developers to take advantage of both DHTML and multimedia to create compelling new user experiences. JavaScript can be used to toggle the plugin's features, allowing the creation of custom controls in DHTML to manipulate a media player. Similarly, the plugin can also make invocations into a web page's JavaScript methods, allowing the web page to be completely aware of events taking place within the multimedia plugin. This allows for tight integration between the classic elements of a web page -- JavaScript and HTML -- and the multimedia world of the plugin -- animations, video, and audio. In Netscape Gecko browsers, recent versions of the Flash Plugin allow this kind of JavaScript-to-plugin communication, as well as the plugin-to-JavaScript communication. This article uses Flash as a case study to show developers the kinds of things they can do using scriptability, and mentions the other plugins you can script in Netscape Gecko browsers. Links to the developer documentation of these other plugins can be found in the section on other plugins.

Editing Your Browser Preferences To Bypass Security Restrictions and Signing Code

Often it may be necessary to deploy or test code that has to function beyond the safe "sandbox" security zone of the browsing environment. An example might be a script that comes from one domain that is trying to invoke methods on scripts affiliated with another domain. Typically, such scripts have to be digitally signed with a code signing certificate to make such invocations in Netscape and Mozilla browsers. Though deploying signed code is the ideal solution for production environments that will be accessed by several users, often developers would like a way to make a quick test of their scripts without the additional step of signing the code. This article presents information on how to edit your Netscape or Mozilla preferences in order to accomplish this.

Creating a toolbar for Netscape 7.x

Learn how to create and install a toolbar for Netscape 7 using XUL and JavaScript.

Configuring Your Verisign Certificates to Avoid Warnings

If you've heard of customers reporting "website certified by an unknown authority" messages, read on.

Conference Presentation: Web Standards and The Future of The Web

I had the opportunity to speak at the Meet The Makers conference in San Francisco recently. The subject of the panel discussion was Web Standards and the Future of the Web. Though the format of the discussion was more an open "interview" style discussion, I put together a few slides showing some of the future directions in browsing technology from mozilla.org and Netscape. The goal was to assemble material that could be easily shared in around 5 minutes.

An Interview With Douglas Bowman of Wired News

Fixing Incorrectly Sized List Item Markers

Consistent List Indentation

One of the most common style changes made to lists is a change in the indentation distance-- that is, how far the list items are pushed over to the right. This often leads to frustration, because what works in one browser often doesn't have the same effect in another. For example, if you declare that lists have no left margin, they move over in Explorer, but sit stubbornly in place in Gecko-based browsers.

In order to understand why this is the case, and more importantly how to avoid the problem altogether, it will be necessary to examine the details of list construction.

Netscape Gecko Compatibility Handbook

How to diagnose and avoid common web site problems with Netscape, AOL for Mac OS X and other browsers based on the Netscape Gecko embeddable browser

Defining Cross-Browser Tooltips

The New DevEdge

Learn all about the new DevEdge site

Styling Abbreviations and Acronyms

XPInstall Guidelines for Plugin Installations

XPInstall is a JavaScript-based installer technology that works across all the platforms that Mozilla and Netscape browsers based on Mozilla (such as Netscape 7) are deployed. It can be a way to ensure a smooth user-experience when obtaining plugins, without obliging the user to exit the browsing environment to launch a binary installer (the classic setup.exe experience on Windows) or obliging the user to restart their browser. For plugin vendors who have already written a native code (e.g. EXE) installer, XPInstall can wrap this native installer and run it so that the user never has to leave the browsing environment and click on the EXE to run it. This article presents a guideline for improving the plugin installation experience for Netscape Gecko browsers using XPInstall.

Browser Detection and Cross Browser Support

Improper browser detection can lead to web maintenance nightmares. Rethinking the basics of when and how to detect user agents is crucial to creating maintainable, cross browser web content. This article reviews several approaches to browser detection, their usefulness in specific circumstances to arrive at a common sense approach to browser detection.

When reporting browser statistics, you should aggregate traffic for all Gecko based browsers. Please see Browser Statistics for more information on how to accurately report Gecko based users.

Visit Gecko Central for more specific information on supporting Gecko based browsers. Visit DHTML Central, CSS Central and DOM Central for more information regarding cross browser web development.

Netscape Gecko User Agent Strings

List of released user agents based upon Netscape Gecko^TM

Incorrect mime type for CSS files

Liberty! Equality! Validity!

Like a nation or a house, a page divided against itself cannot stand-- not in standards-compliant browsers, anyway. Every page has a structure, and it turns out that if you aren't careful with your construction methods, the structure will be weakened, flawed, and potentially dangerous. If you've ever loaded up a page in Opera or Netscape 6 or Internet Explorer and had it look totally mangled, odds are that you've inadvertently built a shaky structure.

Imagine building a house on a foundation of sand, or with rubber support beams. Most people wouldn't even bother, and anyone who did shouldn't be surprised by huge cracks in the walls, wildly uneven flooring, or even total collapse of the structure. Yet many authors are shocked to discover that their pages fall apart in recent browsers. The usual reaction is that "the page was fine before!" which is exactly like saying "my rubber-column house didn't collapse on the same day it was built!" Perhaps not, but it was always in danger of falling over.

So how does one ensure a good, solid Web house? Well-structured markup. A clean document structure is absolutely essential to ensuring that your pages will behave in browsers both present and future. Fortunately, fixing up a page's structure after it's been built is a lot easier and less expensive than trying to correct structural flaws in a house! In fact, there are HTML validators out there that can help you identify the problems and quickly correct them. We highly recommend the The World Wide Web Consortium's HTML Validator-- not only because it's provided by the same people who are responsible for the HTML and XHTML specifications, but also because most of its error messages provide a link to an explanation of what the error means. Eventually, of course, you'll recognize what each error message means without having to look up the explanation, but when you're starting out these help files are invaluable.

Your goal is simple: to bring your page to a state where it doesn't generate any errors at all. For bonus points, you could try to eliminate any warnings as well, but the important thing is to avoid having errors. There are, practically speaking, two general kinds of errors:

Warnings about elements, which are the most serious and can really mangle a page if left uncorrected. For example, an error like "element 'TD' not allowed here," which implies that you either have a TD outside of a table element, or else the validator thinks you do. Either way it's a major problem, and finding out why should be a top priority. An element error is equivalent to a contractor telling you that he left some critical support beams out of your house.
Warnings about attributes, which are less serious since most browsers will ignore any attribute they don't understand. This is not to say that attribute errors can be ignored, but they are generally less of a concern than element errors.

As you fix your markup to remove one error, you may find that you generate more-- or that suddenly several other errors go away. For example, if you add a missing end-table tag (</table>) to a document, you might fix every "element not allowed here" error that followed. In any case, the goal of every author should be to have no errors at all of either kind.

Windows Media Player and Netscape Gecko

Windows Media Player can be made to work in Netscape Gecko-based browsers like Netscape 6.x/7.x as both a plugin (embedded inside the browser via the HTML 'embed' tag) and a helper application (outside the context of the browser), with a few important caveats. Netscape recommends the Microsoft Windows Media Player 7.1 installer, which recognizes Netscape 6+ as well as the other browsers on a user's system.

Introduction to Web Applications

Some thoughts on Web Application Development

Understanding Underlines

It's fairly common for Web designers to want to get rid of underlines on some (or all) of the hyperlinks in their designs. Thanks to some non-standard behaviors in past browsers, however, there is some confusion as to the proper way to remove an underline from a link. The most common mistake is to do something like this:

<a href="link.html">
<span style="text-decoration: none;">a link</span>
</a>

Contrary to popular belief, this is not how one gets rid of underlines. The reasons why, and the correct approach to removing underlines, are explored in this article. The biggest advantage to doing things correctly is that it results in less markup and easier-to-read source code!

Object Oriented Programming in Javascript

An Approach to using Object Oriented Programming with JavaScript
using Netscape Navigator 4, Netscape 6, Opera 5, and Internet Explorer 4 and up

Scripting Viewpoint Content via JavaScript

Images, Tables, and Mysterious Gaps

Almost no matter when you started creating Web pages, odds are pretty high you have one or more designs based on the classic "convoluted tables and lots of images" paradigm. Whether you've sliced up a logo so it fits in well with the design, or used tons of single-pixel spacer GIFs, the principles (and perils) remain largely the same. Back in the early days, this approach worked, because browsers would usually make a table cell exactly as wide and tall as an image it contained.

Fast forward to 2001, and the rise of standards-based browsers that lay out pages using HTML and CSS instead of their own private layout algorithms. Thanks to an obscure corner of the CSS specification, every design based on a precise layout of small images in table cells have become visual disasters just waiting to happen. All it takes is a modern browser and the right DOCTYPE, and kaboom!

Flash solution to MARQUEE element

background-position Keyword Order

In early February 2002 an obscure bug was uncovered in Mozilla 0.9.8. This bug can affect authors who use the background-position keywords right or left in conjunction with the keyword center. The bug is triggered by the appearance of these keywords in either the shorthand property background or the property background-position. While a patch exists for this bug and it is expected to be corrected in Mozilla 0.9.9, the bug still affects Netscape 6.0 through Netscape 6.2.1.

Upgrading DHTML pages with xbStyle

Netscape 6/Gecko Browser Compatibility Handbook

Please refer to the Gecko Compatibility Handbook for the most current information regarding supporting Gecko based browsers.

The Netscape Technology Evangelism team is working to educate developers about cross-browser development techniques that follow the W3C Web standards to provide the desired experience Netscape 6+/Gecko browser users, as well as users of other browsers. This document gives an overview of common problems that occur on websites and how to resolve them.

In general, http://devedge.netscape.com/ is a great place to look for resources for developing along the lines of what's prescribed by the World Wide Web Consortium (http://www.w3.org/).

If you were familiar with pre-Netscape 6.2 versions, check out what's new in 6.2 for developers.

Spotting The Gecko

Notes on TLS/SSL 3.0 Intolerant Servers