The buttons up top are broken in Netscape 4 on 'doze, and presumably on other versions of Netscape, although I haven't bothered to reboot the one machine to test it in Navigator 4.7 on linux. I'm sure they're probably broken there too. I'm about beyond the point of caring, although I'll probably make one more stab at getting the scripting to work for the sole purpose of slaying the beast, with the benefit that Blivet will be able to click a button and sign my guestbook.

At this point, it's all Netscape's fault. Netscape is the Al Gore of the browser wars. The battle was theirs to lose, and whaddya know but they lost it.

I've always made a point of installing both Navigator and IE, ever since there was an IE you could even get to run on a Mac, which was what I had at the time. That would be IE2, which suck-diddly-ucked. But Netscape versions have always had this terrible habit of exploding when something went wrong -- with such frequency that I always kept the latest Netscape installer on my hard drive, so when the program shattered like so many Legos, I could just delete everything but the Netscape preferences folder and start over. This is a habit I've kept to this day, and it's just as well 'cause I tried the NS6 pre-release versions, and one of them rendered itself impotent on this here 'doze 2000 box and couldn't be restored to vitality. So I'm back on 4.7 on this machine.

Anyway, I banged my head against cross-platform compatibility issues with the new layout, and a combination of CSS and Javascript will do exactly what I want it to do (those handy captions under the small images above), and is supposed to work in Netscape as well, but there's something wonky with the Netscape implementation of "layers" (since you can't toggle CSS visibility with Netscape) and the link status of those images vanishes as soon as Netscape gets all its Javascript variables initialized. Oh, and since it's decided that there's some "layer" thing going on, Netscape also refuses to respond to an onClick, even if you specifically set up an event capture for the purpose.

All of this is to say that everything works just spiffy in IE5 on 'doze, and I've been told it works fine in Mac IE5 too. I looked at it in Navigator 4 on a Mac, and everything seemed okay, although the text was smaller than I expected. IE, however, actually behaves as you'd expect it to, and its behaviors resemble how they're documented. Netscape is a nasty, steaming pile of dung in this regard.

Enough of my complaining. New design. New guestbook. Go fill it in and tell me if the page works in your browser. And I promise there will be more content up here soon.

link (11 dec)