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I'm using netscape 4.7 to browse the site, and white the opening page shows up fine, clicking on any of the essays nets me a blank page. The "show surce" option displays a bunch of reasonable-looking html code, so it's not like there's nothing there.
Microsoft's internet explorer 5 works just fine, though.. Is there some feature here that microsoft exploits that breaks netscape?
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Yes, Explorer can render 'bad' HTML. The fact is, I made a bit of a mistake writing the HTML for the main New Mars website, forgetting to close some table tags. Explorer can work around that fine, but Netscape cannot.
I will eventually repair the bad HTML, but it's not high on my list of priorities. Why? Less than 5% of people use Netscape 4, and that's not surprising considering that it's now over five years old and is in my opinion, a heap of junk, compared to Mozilla 1.0 and IE5/6.
Editor of [url=http://www.newmars.com]New Mars[/url]
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Less than 5% of people use Netscape 4, and that's not surprising considering that it's now over five years old and is in my opinion, a heap of junk, compared to Mozilla 1.0 and IE5/6.
I suppose it's idealistic to presume that mars will escape the kind of computer bigotry we're stuck with on earth... I guess it would only be a problem if more than one software maker is involved in the effort, or more than one language is spoken...
Will mac users and PC users and Unix users still debate the merits of their operating systems while on the red planet? I suppose something like that is inevitable, since the alternative would be (shudder) an industry standard.
Sorry for the sarcasm, but I have as much interest in browser wars as I have with cola wars. I'd rather just get to mars.
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I don't agree that what I said is some kind of computer bigotry. Netscape 4 is an obsolete browser - it doesn't come installed on any computer, and hasn't for the last two or three years. If it did, I'd support it. This has nothing to do with choice of OS - in fact, your choice of browser is OS independent and it costs nothing to change.
As for industry standards, Netscape 4 doesn't support them. The current standard is to use XHTML and CSS, neither of which it can handle, and New Mars uses a lot of CSS. The fact is, a large and increasing number of sites do not support Netscape 4 any more, just as they don't support Netscape 3, or Mosiac.
Editor of [url=http://www.newmars.com]New Mars[/url]
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As for industry standards, Netscape 4 doesn't support them. The current standard is to use XHTML
and CSS, neither of which it can handle, and New Mars uses a lot of CSS.
If I had complained about cascading style sheets, you'd have a valid point. But as far as I know, the HTML standard still requires authors to close table tags.
The fact is, I made a bit of a mistake writing the HTML for
the main New Mars website, forgetting to close some table tags.
By way of analogy, the mars climate orbiter was lost because mission planners forgot that they were dealing with two different standards, metric and english. Was it 'measurement bigotry' that crashed a $125 million dollar space probe, setting back our collective dream by at least 2 years? Hardly. But if the mission planners had tried to pin the blame on their subcontractor who had used a nonstandard measurement system, instead of admitting that they had sent the wrong command to the spacecraft, that would have been a serious human error.
Netscape 4 is an obsolete browser
- it doesn't come installed on any computer, and hasn't for the last two or three years. If it did, I'd
support it. This has nothing to do with choice of OS - in fact, your choice of browser is OS
independent and it costs nothing to change.
In fact, the computer I'm using is more than 3 years old. When I tried to upgrade to netscape 6, it was hardly free: it took abiout an hour for the download, and when installed it ran so slowly that I went back to 4.7.
By way of analogy, the space shuttle still uses magnetic cores for its computer memory. Programmers have to wade back much farther than 3 years to make their software work. It's not difficult to look ahead towards earth programmers sending software to mars that needs more hardware than the martians currently have. But then mars is just a computer backwater, they can't compete because their equipment is by necessity 2 years old or more.
The question of whether or not I can read some essays with my prefered browser is really pretty trivial, and that's not what bothers me. As ranking officer here, you get to set the priority status of any system bugs in this analog of a mars colony, and that's hardly a life support failure. I'm trying to point to a larger issue, one that's not going to get fixed by repairing the table tags.
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I don't agree with your analogy. The New Mars website is in no way supposed to mimic a Mars base even in the slightest sense, and I have no interest in making it do so. This is how it stands - there are really two separate issues.
1) I made a mistake in writing the HTML for the website. Correcting that mistake would take a fair amount of time, which I do not have at the moment.
2) The mistake is only apparent to users of Netscape 4 and older browsers. These people comprise less than 5% of the web population. Netscape 4 is an obsolete browser, and I and many other web developers do not have any interest in ensuring that it can display websites correctly.
If the mistake affected a lot more people who weren't likely to upgrade, then it'd be high on my list of priorities. It isn't. If you'd like to make a statement about mixups of standards in Mars matters, post it to another forum. As far as I'm concerned, the Netscape matter is closed - I will fix it when I have time.
Editor of [url=http://www.newmars.com]New Mars[/url]
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Sheesh, I had no idea people could get so freaking emotional over a stupid browser. Just calm down Dingus! It'll be ok! Perhaps Adrian actually has a life and doesn't want to spend his time 24/7 servicing people who can't upgrade to modern and sometimes free browsers! Personally, I think Adrian has a good site here regardless of what you over-emotional people who seem over-zealous about the origin of a stupid computer program think. If you don't like it here go somewhere else!
To achieve the impossible you must attempt the absurd
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I finally got around to tidying up the html for the New Mars main website, so it should render properly in pretty much everything now.
Editor of [url=http://www.newmars.com]New Mars[/url]
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