I've been working on the new version of Mortal Kombat Kourier again today.
The new site will launch on January 1st, 2004, and will be far more accessible and sematically correct than the current version.
One could wonder if this is really important for a site about a console game, but I don't really care.
I guess know I have a accessibility and webstandards fetish.
Anyway, as I was doing my regular round of testing the behaviour of the site in visual browsers, I realized I never tested the new design of my weblog and the rest of this site in Netscape 4.79.
I had tested it in Windows, Linux and Mac OS X enviroments...
I tested it with Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Safari, Opera, and Amaya...
Hell, I tested the site in Netscape 2 at a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels in 256 colors... yet somehow, I managed to not test it in the biggest bottleneck of them all, being the Netscape 4.7x series.
I hesitated for a minute, but decided to go and see just how bad it was.
I copied the URL of my weblog, and pasted it in the address bar of Netscape 4.79, and hit Enter...
Dear God, save the women and children.
Yes, that bad.
Luckaly, I'm aware of various methods that can hide an entire stylesheet from Netscape 4.7x without harming newer/better browsers.
The method I used is probably the easiest for this case, and that was to add @media all { at the start of the external stylesheet, and add } to the bottom.
I refreshed, and Ah!
, fully expected, but still a relieve, it looks practically the same as in Netscape 2 and 3 now, which isn't too bad... for now.
The first stap of my plan had succeeded, the site was now accessible for Netscape 4.7x.
It was, however, not very recognizable as it looked like any other website that is properly marked up and hides its style sheets from Netscape 4.7x (or like any website from when the internet just began).
I decided to place some parts from which I knew they'd work fine with Netscape4.7x outside the media rule.
The results are not stunning, but they are something I can live with... again, for now.