Re: Non-Browser Compliance (RE: Why does Mozilla modify /etc/alternatives/netscape?)
First of all, thanks for the various hints as to what was actually happening
on my system; that makes more sense, so my assumptions about Mozilla stomping
out Netscape 4.77 were wrong. My apologies to the maintainer at assuming you
had done something wrong. And, a general thanks to all Debian maintainers.
As for the problems with the sites in question; when I say "don't work",
these are sites with browser checks that refuse access to Netscape 6/Mozilla.
Though changing the user agent settings will "let me in", the site managers
are not kidding, because many things, such as navigational tools, will not
work. Netscape 4.77 is the only (Linux) browser I have tried that will work
properly on these sites. Opera might, but I have not tried.
The two sites in particular are my credit union (www.metrocu.com) and
QuickLaw, a subscription-based comprehensive database of Canadian legal
decisions.
Last I checked, the credit union was "working on it".
As a lawyer, I use QuickLaw extensively. Quicklaw has been around for a long
while, starting out long before anyone I know had ever hear the name "world
wide web". It implemented web-based access in the past couple of years, prior
to which it used a proprietary Windows/Mac based access program.
I contacted QuickLaw about the non-support for Netscape 6/Mozilla. Here is
the response:
"Browsers implement, and expose to JavaScript routines, something call the
Document Object Model (DOM). The features of the DOM along with the ability
to manipulate it via JavaScript are collectively referred to as Dynamic HTML
(DHTML). The vast majority of websites employ some amount of DHTML. We
make fairly heavy use of DOM in our search templates, and as well as to do
things like the "locate next" and "locate previous" functionality.
Netscape Navigator/Communicator 4.x supports a very primitive version of the
DOM while MSIE 4.0 (and higher versions) support a more advanced (but still
not standard-compliant) version of the DOM..
In order to make the WBI work with both MSIE and Netscape 4.7 (on both PCs
and Macs) we had to do quite a bit of work to tailor HTML for the different
browsers and execute different JavaScript streams that account for the DOM
differences.
Then along came Netscape 6.x. This browser is built on a completely
different code base than Netscape 4.x. Furthermore, Netscape decided to
drop all of the proprietary and non-standard features. Pages using DHTML
features that work in Netscape 4.7 do not work in Netscape 6.x.
The good news is that Netscape 6.x now implements a version of DOM that is
similar to the version of DOM that MSIE implements. The bad news is that
the versions are not exactly the same and some things that work in MSIE
don't necessarily work in Netscape 6.x (or don't necessarily work the same
way)."
I understand this to really mean: "We designed our site to work with Internet
Explorer's non-standard handling of DOM/dhtml, because most of our customers
use IE. Now Netscape/Mozilla comes along and adheres to W3C standards, and
our site is designed to work with IE's non-standard implementation." They
also indicated to me that they are working on fixing their site to be
standards compliant, so should work with Mozilla in the not-too-distant
future.
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