If you would like to try the CSS pages to see if they work for you, www.tinymicros.com/pmcss will take you there.

Unfortunately, Netscape 4.7x (Windows) renders your table cells with a black background.

There may be a couple of tricks that might help.

• Consider embedding CSS into the content instead of using an external stylesheet (which shouldn't be too difficult as you're using PHP).

  (Update: ichimunki raises a good point. Sadly, Netscape 4.7 has a bug regarding linked stylesheets. This is only one reason why I occasionally rant about non-compliant browsers.)

• Make sure you define rules for <TD>, <TH>, and <TR>.

• Make sure you use and close your <P> tags.

Note sure if you've seen this site, but it contains a lot of CSS related information, including a page documenting many of the most egregious problems.

Hope this helps...

--f

P.S. As far using CSS and cookies go, I'm with Blue: Go for it.

My own bias would be against embedding style information into the HTML document unless absolutely necessary to assist the user agent in displaying the information (i.e. layout is integral to the information being displayed). Usually this is not the case. Putting the CSS into its own document makes the original document smaller, and heightens awareness that style is not content on the part of the designer.

Actually, If you EVER close a P tag, you need to close them all, I've had better results never closing them. Also, I've learned not to mix inline style with external stylesheets since you can't ever tell what will happen when you do. All major browsers seem to have one issue or another with mixing inline and external.

--
$you = new YOU;
honk() if $you->love(perl)

Under Konqueror 2.1 beta2, the new stats page looks good.

If you try doing CSS with Netscape, you might want to consider the two tricks I know about CSS and Netscape :

1. Netscape CSS JavaScript reload : When resizing a NetScape browser window, all CSS information gets lost from time to time. The ugly fix is to have a JavaScript onresize handler, which reloads the complete page after each resize.
2. You can manage to load different CSSheets for IE and Netscape by using two or more <link rel="..." id="foo1"> links and one link without the id attribute. Netscape will be oblivious to all link tags with the id attribute, while you can select under IE (via nasty JavaScript) the "correct" CSS by setting the enabled attribute to "1" (if I remember right).

If it's just a vote you're looking for, I vote for CSS.

2. I still don't understand the anti-cookieism attitude. Most browsers have options such as "accept cookie only from originating site" and I think Mozilla even has a mechanism to accept cookies only from certain hosts. If you want to give into the evil tracking paranoia (which I will admit isn't 100% unfounded), you do have options here. Non-mandatory cookies seems like a nice compromise. If people want to live without them, they just won't see those nifty features. I think that's fine. Everyone is happy that way.

Looks like Netscape 4.7 on windows doesn't pick up the nwp class so it looks like black on black. So I would suggest for anyone back there to upgrade to 4.75 which looks fine. Better in fact than it looks under the old way.

IE 5.0 & 5.5 look fine.

I'm actually in favor of CSS, now that I've looked at it. As long as you don't get carriedf away with some of the features, since even the browsers that are CSS compliant are really only 60% functional. And you can get some wierd results with borders, DIV, and floating elements.

On cookies: Non-mandatory cookies sounds good to me.

Update: Just read your rants about netscape. You're right, IE does do better than NS. They seem to fail in different spots, IMO NS will fail in some of the more used areas. From what I've read Netscape 6 is supposed to be very compliant to CSS, but I haven't bothered with it yet.

YAU: Hmm. The black on black is because of the javascript needs to be on to use CSS properly under netscape.

The aforementioned Netscape bug is especially brutal but that JavaScript insert is a wasteful, unneccessary hack. "Let's dare to be JavaScript free." (Right, Petruchio?)

While cookies are an option, another simple thing you may want to consider is simple CGI browser recognition where you send me and Mozilla 4.7 folks to the non-CSS page and the rest (or those that can handle it) to the "new" page. Frankly, I don't see a whole lot of benefit from cookies unless you've thought of something impressive that I haven't. Honestly, at least in my iCab, your page looks great right now as it is. I'd prefer to use that despite its HTML pitfalls rather than some JScript hacked, variable CSS, cookie monster.

AgentM Systems nor Nasca Enterprises nor Bone::Easy nor Macperl is responsible for the comments made by AgentM. Remember, you can build any logical system with NOR.

I think most of the currect browsers will support non-inline CSS (excect anything AgentM runs {grin}).

As for cookies, when I don't have them disabled I have them pop-up a window, which is annoying. But the functionality you mention would be nice. So as long as it doesn't try to re-set them every page, I'm fine with them. You're adding additional functions for people who don't mind them, adn not taking away from the people who don't. That's fair.

=Blue
...you might be eaten by a grue...

CSS: the main problem with CSS-enhanced sites is that I don't see them properly because f****ing Netscape (4.7) simply drops CSS if JavaScript isn't enabled. Maybe it would be possible to set this in my user-settings? Having a box saying "Use CSS" sounds great to me.

Cookies: As I'm used to clicking away mere loads of cookie warnings I'd say yes to cookies. Yet again: it would be nice to have it user-defined. Or you could set a cookie which decides whether the visitor accepts them or not. It is _very important_ that I don't have any cookie windows whenever I hit the Reload-Button on the Newest Nodes page, which appears to happen quite often (at least 3 times an hour on a usual work-day)
Regards
Stefan K

$dom = "skamphausen.de";   ##   May The Open Source Be With You!
$Mail = "mail@$dom;  $Url = "http://www.$dom";
[download]

But what I was going to say... It looks great in Mozilla.

- p u n k k i d
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." -Albert Einstein

1. CSS - go for it. NetScrape 6 is not quite as broken as NutScape 4, but the main table still has no border, and there are different font faces and sizes on the "news" page between IE5.5 and NS6. I personally prefer the smaller, serif (Times New Roman?) that I see with NS 6 than the larger sans-serif font IE5.5 used.

   As well, using the closing paragraph </p> is good practice - XML will eventually force such things.

2. Cookies - give a reason why not, people. If you don't like them, turn them off. You then lose the ability to have your preferances saved. Tough.

My only other comment on the pages is could you give a thought on the news page to having dates in the format "27 Jan 2001" rather than "01/27/2001"? I know it is only us non-americans that are radical and prefer to see the day before the month, but spelling out the month name means it is obvious. Then you will just have the non-english speakers complaining about the use of the english abbreviations. Sigh. Maybe use the same date format as the date / time stamps on the main page ("2001-01-29")