Netscape HTML & Cascading Stylesheet Tips

I spent many hours updating the code on all my pages and previewed everything in IE5. "Looks great! I better fire up Netscape and have a look -- What!?! Where's my navigation bar, my fonts, my background? Uggghhhh!" Back to the drawing board to find out what is making Netscape stupid...Hours spent scouring the internet, notes and books to find the answer...adding, deleting and rearranging bits of code, previewing the results at every step. Totally frustrating! Here's a few points to remember so your page will look just as good in Netscape as in IE.

Border Backgrounds -

I love border backgrounds, but if you don't get the proper code in your HTML, Netscape users will never see that gorgeous background you found or designed for your page. To make sure Netscape can see your background, insert this code on your page following the <body>tag:


<table align=right width="70%"> 
<tr><td>

You may, of course, change the "70%" to whatever number works best with your particular border. Add your text and images and end your page with:


</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>

Cascading Stylesheets -

So, your website has grown to 50 pages, but it's time for a change - new background, new fonts - hours of work ahead of you to update the information on each and every page -- SO TEDIOUS! Enter Cascading Stylesheets -- changing the background and font information on just one or two pages can change the whole look of your site.

There are some great tutorials on Cascading Stylesheets, at Webmonkey and The House of Style, from beginners to advanced. A good beginners tutorial can be found at Essential Style. I found a tutorial on using CSS to create a Navigation Bar at The House of Style. It was very similar to my old frames menu bar which was done with graphic files and I wanted to use it on my site. It looked great in IE5, but half the page was missing in Netscape. If you want to know how I finally got it working, check out my webpage notes. Netscape is very picky about the order of the codes and ending tags.

Here's an example: While typing this page, I wanted the HTML codes to be shown in a typewriter font. Netscape would not accept the <tt></tt> codes until I had added </P> tags to the end of each section which started with <P>. So if you are using codes that Netscape should understand but it won't, try closing each <P> tag and see if that solves the problem.

If you want to see my entire stylesheet you can find it here. You can play with fonts and backgrounds easily until you find a look you want for your webpage. If you want to have different styles for different groups of pages, just create a stylesheet for each group of pages. I have a different stylesheet for my photo album, recipes and Paint Shop Pro pages.