Netscrape vs. Explorer---JUBBA!! Need ya in here

[Phil Jayhan]

Hey you guys-
I have set up my site and it didn't work in Netscrape. I was so upset about this fact that I did absolutely nothing about it and for the most part don't give a dman.
Am I wrong? I have had somehwere around 95 unique URLS come to my site and only one of them was a Netscraper. Sorry if it was YOU!

2 Q's-
Is it worth the werk to get it to werk in both?
And is there a simple way to get my site to werk inside of Netgrape? W/O much werk.

After spending hundreds and hundreds of hours making my site, am I to spend more time getting it to werk in a browser that God has obviously cursed? Netscrape sucks and I am going to ride hard for a separate forum here, temporary, that calls for all developers to ignore Netscrape altogether and purposely leave their sites not werking in it. Because they (Netgrape) cannot do the proper werk ahead of time, pre-release, developers have to spend ,millions of extra hours because of this? Pathetic. If we can get a Netscrape ban going here, maybe Flashkit and a few others would follow suit. If that happened Netscrape would hear about it and either go bankrupt (like their browser) or they would fix their lame, loser lousy browser.

Whaddya think?
pj
:p
Kirupa-
I'll try to track you down later on that issue, Thanks for your help in advance. Same with the Princess Bride, altough I did read in the forum rules that Owners are not allowed to bump sites to the top. I think Dave wrote that in... :lol:

[RenaissanceGirl]

It sounds like you hate Netscape and Netscape users enough to ignore the fact your site falls apart in it... regardless of what anyone else says. Yay or nay?

[ilyaslamasse]

Qorry to say so Phil but I'm on Netscrape and it works fine for me...

pom 0]

[Phil Jayhan]

Rennigirl-
Ya know I never said anything about hating Netscape users. Their browser sucks. I have hundreds of hours into this site and have no idea how long it will take to make Netscrape light up. Don't even know how, and don't have the time. I have so much to do, personally I think it is ridiculous. Maybe its a local thing and only my netscape doesn't work at my site (unlikely) but I stick to my words above, I think that this is their issue, not mine, at least as far as what the browser SHOULD be able to do. And the fact they they do not spend the time in development to make their borwser compatible. But now that I have answered your Q's Renn, how bout taking a crack at one or two of mine? ;) And to tell you the truth, I looked over your message real hard and couldn't find anything positive or helpful about it. As a matter of fact it has all appearances of being otherwise.

Pom,
Does your Netscrape browser work at Corpus T? More than the index level? Click into the page and see what happens, I mean internal links here. If your Netscrape werks, I need to know, as this presents a whole nother mystery. www.corpust.com (http://www.corpust.com) BTW, I am finally starting to get a foothold on how to werk the Forums which I think are pretty dandy.

pj
:p

[RenaissanceGirl]

Nope - it is not working on Netscape 4 for me. Pom might be using a newer version of Netscape. Most of basic HTML should work in Netscape and there doesn't appear to be anything (design-wise) about your site that can't be accomplished in Netscape. However, I'm not entirely sure how your site works (backend wise) so I'm not sure if I can really give you some pointers.

In my opinion - yes, you should make your site usable for Netscape and IE users alike. You have a wide variety of information and news that could cater to a bigger audience. It's a potential thing. Just my dos pesos.

[kirupa]

Hey Phil,
I felt your pain at one time, and I gave up supporting Netscape. If there is one thing that I've learned, Netscape users attack in packs (kinda like the mtv-species of the ring tailed lemur). The one Netscape user who visited your site will inform through various underground channels about your site, and they will flock, spam, and roll your house into the oddest hours of the day until the site works in Netscape. So for your own benefit, and because it is a nice thing to have an information site work in Netscape as well, I would consider making the site work for the newest version of Netscape.

My best advice is for you to ensure the site looks decent in Netscape 6. Ignore Netscape 4 users. It is bad enough they use Netscape. The least they can do is use the latest version of their browser, and Netscape 6 and Netscape 7 Preview are both excellent browsers btw. If Netscape 6 was released 2 years ago, there would be no Internet Explorer browser domination.

I hope that helped!

Cheers,
Kirupa

[ilyaslamasse]

OK, I see what you mean. It's a problem of MIME type, if you see what I mean, and I'm sure you don't since even I don't know what it means. But that's what it is.

pom 0]

[Phil Jayhan]

Thanks Renn, Kirupa and Pom-
Mimes hunh? Most of my files are .cfm's if that helps anyone decipher my back end. I really didn't know what I was doing when I started and still don't. My thoughts are this as a possibility; The index works in Netscape, cause of the index being an .HTML. When you flop from there you go to a .cfm that only comes up as code. There was a button in Dreamweaver about Netscape compatibility, but when I punched it, it caused my site to be totally ruined (2 months ago) and am quite concerned about pressing that button again. And it didn't work anyways. Maybe I will try with making the files .html one at a time and see if this makes the difference unless someone writes back and shouts DONT DO THAT!!! It will break the site. Or .htm.

I really don't even have a clue as to how to make this netscape compatible, or where to start. But I agree with you Kirupa that the info thing and both sets of users. However, I didn't know that they actually had a little click where they would all gang up on my site and start problems. But it makes sense living in this world. :(

And Renn, is that enough information to know what the backend is like? If memory serves me correctly, I set this up using a Cold Fuson template. Is that confirmed or denied by the .cfm file extensions? I cannot use .ASP as my server won't support that. Other than that I am not sure what other information you would need to know the backend setup as you said. But this is why I asked. I wanted to hear people that matter (you guys & gals) and see if it was something that I needn't worry about. But now I know, I will fix the problem somehow, somewhere, someway....Just don't know how cause it is like being in a dark room trying to make the darkness just go away. Never works. I don't know what .JSP is so I know I didn't use that.

Thanks for your Helps everyone!
Any more would be warmly appreciatted as I have no frelling idea what the problem is. And, I have to say it once more, I wish Netscape would get their act together. This truly is a problem of theirs, and they make their problems everyone elses by putting out these garbage browsers. But I will deal with it. Just needed to vent and blow off steam--cause this is a real pissoff.

pj
:D

[IAmMakaVeli]

hahaha, i like ur site...expose government corruption and all those horriBle AniMAl TesTiNG TheY Did ON Me...anyways, luv ur site :rollin:

as far as netscape is concerned, i would have said make it compatible in netscape so i can view in school...but we switched to IE(thank God) and now i could care less about netscape :evil:

:smokin: scott

[Phil Jayhan]

Makeveli-

Thanks! I hope you dont expect me to type your name the way you do, cause that would be wrong! :lol: And hard! Personally, those that did the animal testing on you are part of the American Saucer Brigade, (I put up the first forum on that last night) I will be doing a series on that in a few weeks, when time permits. Your speaking of the Men in Pink right? I would say men in black but they seem to have some sort of preoccupation with peoples butts. (anal probes galore) But if your interested I can tell you how to find one of the saucers and how to shoot it down, but you will need time, patience, a pound of C4 and one cow. When you get those things let me know if your interested and I will tell you where and how they can be found. Shooting the sucker down from that point will be the easy part.

pj
:p

[RenaissanceGirl]

All the sites we've produced at work are programmed under Cold Fusion. Usually we first design the site (no cfm implemented yet) test it under IE 4, Netscape 3,4,6, and Opera and under all resolutions (amen to Browser Resizer). If browser testing is done thoroughly, there isn't any problem in the future with cross browser compatibility. After I design and test, I hand it over to the programmers and that's it. However, sometimes we run into a couple cross browser issues when the programmers touch my designs. Usually it's something as small as a <td> tag improperly embedded. IE is good at catching these errors and properly displaying them. Netscape punishes you by displaying it all screwy. Check your cfm files to make sure closing tags are in place. It's possible that, for example, an if/else cfm tag is removing or placing a <td> tag when it shouldn't. If you are using a WYSIWYG editor such as Dreamweaver - improperly embedded tags are more likely to happen.

[Phil Jayhan]

thanks Renn! I now have something (knowledge) to help me study in the right direction, this is a good starting point. I really appreciatte it and would talk more but I haven't slept now in about 30 hours, and think I can finally fall asleep. Insomnia last night. thanks again!

pj
:p

Kirupa-
minyana please!? today didn't work out as you can see. |I
ps: for the love of god would you delete that dolphin post? I didn't mean to start that. And Time, its MY fault. Not yours. But Jubba was a lot right about that post.

[splinx]

Hey Phil,

This post a little off-topic for this thread, but I'm too lazy/busy to seek the correct one.

Your site loads a lot more smoothly and quickly, plus you've got that clock and other signs of life so that people don't think CT has hung. Good show. I'm also pleased to see you've retired those wavy flag GIFs. All in all, your site looks better, loads faster.

Still some lingering problems, however.

Check your spelling. In your Genoa article, for ex., you've got anit-air-craft (antiaircraft). Nothing, not even cheesy design, undermines the value of a site like spelling and grammatical errors.

Design is a matter of taste; spelling and grammar are not.

(some troublemakers - not specifically for you, Phil)

it's (it is)
its (belongs to it)
you're (you are)
your (belongs to you)
they're (they are)
their (belongs to them)
there (over yonder)

Also: check your colors; those three or four different blues you've got on there are not harmonious, at least to my eyes.

One final question/suggestion about your masthead. Using Flash there seems like a bit of overkill since, as far as I can tell, your masthead is static (not moving). I can't tell the size of the swf, but in many cases of static, headline text, GIFs are smaller and hence, faster. Also, why not use a bold font, like Impact, for your Corpus Tyrannicus Research Institute signature on the masthead? What you have now is, well, wimpy. A bold, aggressive name like Corpus Tyrranicus deserves, nay begs for, a bold, agressive font. Even if you keep your masthead in Flash format, I strongly suggest getting a bolder, more dynamic font for this usage.

I don't have Netscape on this laptop anymore, so I can't help there.

FWIW
:cool:
sp

[Phil Jayhan]

I can take all that! Excellent critique. Agreed with the colors. Did you like the brown background with the greenish menu better? Curuous. also, spelling. Right on. I noticed one last night. on the forums, conspracies. Your right again. Agreed with judgement on the buzzkill factor too. The masthead is only there to take up space. I will be making that my main menu. With as many pages as I was planning I saw that one ahead of time and figured this is a good way to change one single SWF and make a global change to every page. the drop down menus are going bye bye. Too hard to keep up with and update. nightmare actually. but i'll come back and read the grammar part later, I am way overdue for sleep. Splinx-good to see ya and thanks for your critique.

pj
:p
feel free to keep going. didn't hurt my feelings. this is the kind of stuff I wanna hear. I heard from another trusted person that the format/colors are a tad weak, needing help. And I agree. Too much blue is hard on your eyes.

[IAmMakaVeli]

i'm not a very good critiquer...but u should have a preloader on main pg. first time i came to the page i thought the only thign there was those links at the side...so maybe you could add a simple preloader to let ppl know something is loading..cuz usually status bar is not up...for me at least. whatever happened to that email u sent me..must have been intercepted by Echelon and destroyed....encrypt it this time!!

:smokin: scott

[Phil Jayhan]

Mak-
Thats a good idea. Can I do a flash preloader for a dreamweaver HTML formatted page? If so, how. I am ignorant on this; Lemme know if you know-Thats also why I put the JS clock there, first, it shows up right away, second, it shows a clock which they can watch and time. It is 96k right now, too big, but your right, I would like to do what you described.

Thanks fer the input--
pj
:p

[RenaissanceGirl]

You don't need a preloader. It's possible to accomplish a non-flash javascript preloader, but that stuff is for sites with tons of graphics IMO. Your site is mostly text and as far as I can see, the only pertinent graphic is the little T-rex up top.

Question: are the ads placed automatically by your server or did you place them there yourself? There's way too many ads and if you could control it, I recommend removing some of them. At the very least, you should consider their placement. There are some ads that are placed between content. This could be confusing to the reader since ads are frequently place before or after the content. The ads are comparable to commercials. Isn't it better to watch a movie all the way through without the interruptions of garish commercials?

Some small things (this is just my opinion). This is where things get ugly and Rengirl utilizes all the things she has learned about design. Please keep an open mind - I don't think your site sucks at all. I think it's a great site with great content but some improvement can be made in the way this content is packaged:

The Yahoo mail icon: this gif was created with the intention of being posted on a white or light colored page. Posting it on your dark/black page creates a halo effect. Clean it up or place it on a light colored background. I know this isn't a design site and is probably not meant to be artsy but little things like this can make a big impression.

Table borders: be consistent with your table border style. Right now I'm seeing three or four different styles. This makes the layout unclean.

The menu: buried between the content. That's a usability issue. Put it somewhere more prominent because a) the user can find it immediately before anything else and b) the user gets an idea of what can be found on the site.

Content layout: right now the alignment, font size and color is a bit jumbled. It's really hard to explain this one. There's too many tables and none of them line up. Here, I'll try to compare it to another news (although parody) site: www.theonion.com. (http://www.theonion.com.) The layout of The Onion is clean and crisp. They, too, have a lot of ads but they keep them at the top and on the right. The content layout is divided into four columns that line up from top to bottom. Table borders, color and headlines are consistent throughout maintaining a perfect balance. Sorry for being vague on this one.

It's pretty clear for a while, but after the "Page 2" links everything kind of goes downhill. The poll and the estimated attack thing - does it really need to take that much space? It conflics with the breaking news which, I assume, is the meat and potatoes of the site. After that, there's another table that doesn't look like the previous two tables and doesn't line up. What is this and what is it doing here? Is this meat and potatoes or more of a side salad? After that, yet another table. Here some content gets confusing. There's a text ad for Salon.com bundled with Corpus T articles? After that, more text ads. Now text ads are ok, but when you've got ads and content all jumbled together without specific locations asigned, it gets confusing to decipher one from the other. Last but not least, two columns, more different tables and styles and... Flash stuff? Kind of deviating from the news stuff. Then an ad for allergy sufferers (I know it's a pollen count thing, but really this is an ad for Allegra. And then Corpus T site of the week - an ill placed section of Corpus T buried in ads. Now on the right column, another table - what is this exactly? Is this more content for the site or links to other articles on other sites. I noticed that some of these links are other Corpus T pages and some are not. Is this an archive? If so, what is it doing on the main page?

There you go, my honest to God two cents. Please don't kill me. I'll give you a hand if need be. I'll even re-design it for you for the humble cost of a small link to my site at the bottom.

[sodium15]

you guys type alot!

[Phil Jayhan]

Renni-
Actually with all that you said it gives me the impetus to change what I knew were all problem areas. I hope I don't owe you any money for this critique as it is excellent. Kill you? Not. Been there, done that, wish I had a time machine to undo it, cause I would. :rollin:

You know, I have been at a standstill over the base issues your critique outlined. Since I am not a designer or at least a good one, I rely on my ad-hoc kind of pragmatism. But I want consistency. I want pro design. I want it to stand out as an example to all the internet green on black background site builders that will undoubtedly be a good portion of the audience. I want it all. (Sung in the base tone, just like the song) I want it to be better than Rense and Onion, if so be possible. And I want those green and black bilders (many of which have great content) to see this site and know what they need to do to reach the mainstream. Thats Trout talk! :lol:

My design theme (goal) is basic and simple with one basic goal; To provide what we will call conspiracy news, right along side with the 'real' news. This in my opinion is the greatest long term strength of Rense.com as I personally see the two as one, and shouldn't be separated. And the major downfall of Network news, they forget the role of the press is to ferret out dirt and force change through advertising it. It is only soundbytes and newsblurbs that do not contain anything contraversial or any depth. They stopped reporting in essense.

Ads; They are Javascript calls-I have no ads stored on my server. They are all smartzones. I can change them from cj.com. Exception: the text ads, which I agree also with you on.

Menu; Right now, I have decided to place the chain index menus inside the title bar, which sucks. The drop downs are bad, and they are impossible to update globally. And by years end this site will likely have 2000 or more pages, so it is a deep consideration, who wants to change 2000 pages with an updated drop down menu? (swearwords of choice goes here) But I do always want the full menu on every page. Many of these back pages will be the starting point of someone at my site. They will look up Bush idiocies and click on my link inside google and go directly to Bush Gaffes. Of course, then I want them to find the main page after that and stick around. Jubba has said he would like to help/do the design of that, as I suck at flash too. (I am humble enough to say I suck at all of this but will probably not always suck) <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/intl/aenglish/images/emoticons/ohwell.gif ALT=":\"> And I have painted myself into many corners with my approach, thus the standstill.

I am also humble enough to hear an absolutely great offer of help and not pass it by. So, if your serious about your offer Renn, I will gladly accept your terms. And I will also find some way in which to increase your return. I have several ideas about how I could do that and am mulling them about in my darkened mind right now.

A few notes, guidelines to help you understand what I want. Page 2 sucks. Your right. And I still haven't figured out what the dang slowdown on that page is. But your right. What I do want is for the Java newsfeeds to be on page 2, as breaking news will be broken by me from trolling for stories, like Rense. Thats all part of the Ipowerweb package and will be useful if put on a page that doesn't suck! :lol:

The background of the java newsfeeds is frustrating; I had to force that background color to match my greylink/white link page properties. Fitting a circle into a square. The java newsfeeds are not editable as far as color, they follow the page properties, period. :x

The only reason believe it or not that I had the allergy thing there was they pay decent money for clicks, but I couldn't find their affiliate program anywhere. I might have gone there while they were changing formats and pages. I can ax it as I am not going to waste my time with it. And your right about Onion.com. While it doesn't impress me as an excellent site that screams out 'I am so cool' (like mine does, right?) it is clean, crisp, easy to follow and navigate. A bit bright. IMO.

So, enough of babbling--if you were serious about your offer I will pay the bounty you asked and find ways to give you more than you requested, as it was a small thing to ask in comparison to what was offered. IMO. ;) Probably everyone elses too! Doh! And I will assit you in anyway I can, just let me know what I have to do to give this ball a push. Nuff said; I will await in my chambers for your reponse.

thanks-
Phil
:p

[lobstars]

Sorry for butting in!!
I just wanted to confirm that when you ask Renn for help and advice she gives it 100% I don't think I've ever seen advice like that before, and then the offer to help re design it aswell :)

AWSOME springs to mind

[Phil Jayhan]

Sodium-
You type very little. Doh! :lol:

Renni-
Your right! Yahoo looks much better on white! See how good I am? <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/intl/aenglish/images/emoticons/ohwell.gif ALT=":\">

Lob-
Awesome? You can throw in gracious and generous too.

pj
:p

[RenaissanceGirl]

*whew* What a relief! I was definitely expecting rocks to be slung at me since that has been the result of my critiques in the past. I would definitely love to give you a helping hand. I don't think it would be very hard - right now I'm imagining a main template for the index page, an articles template and maybe a special template for other pages. It doesn't seem that bad/difficult, especially since it's a news site. Since your site is mostly text, I think a full HTML site rather than a Flash one would serve you best, but maybe a small Flash animation would work out.

At work we use custom tags to make editing and updating layouts much easier. Are you familiar with this? I've gotten to know how it works a bit - if I help you out I definitely recommend using custom tags for the articles.

Woohoo, I'm excited now!

[Phil Jayhan]

Renni-

That all sounds great to me. the only thing I would like to keep is that flash space taker upper on the top, as that is the only way I will be able to keep up with the menu on thousands of pages, one change and all the pages change. And the menu will be updated infrequently to frequently so, thats about the only thing Im married to inside the site, And Jubba offered and I accepted his offer to make that portion. And of course the news and content links, search bar for news, along with a site search (not there yet but needs space consideration).

Just promise me this, that when I send you the dreamweaver formatted stuff so you can use all the stuff w/o re-creation, that you don't advertise how terrible the HTML coding is, let me do that here! :lol: IM SURE IT SUCKS! YEP, SURE IT DOES. COULD HAVE BEEN DONE BETTER, YEP SURE IT SUCKS. Now that I got that out of the way...HTML--It is terrible, full of horrible errors I am sure. All generated through dreamweaver and the javas are all cut and pasted and Im not even sure I did that correctly. I was just happy the ads and javas showed up. My method was to make a table, highlight the table, go to the HTML side, and place all the javas inside the table after the &nsbp or something like that. But it worked. Let me know what I need to send to you and anything else I can do to make this as easy as possible so you spend as little time as possible.

Thanks Renn-
pj
http://www.kirupa.com/temp/apple.gif
my rock bag is empty! Doh! Not looking to rephil it either-too heavy to carry around! Doh!

[RenaissanceGirl]

Question: Is this site database driven? If so then you should only have about 5 cfm files: one for the main page, an article template page, and maybe the other static parts of the site.

[Phil Jayhan]

Renn-
No its not database driven, and to be honest, although that sounds neat, I do not even know the meaning. From what I can tell everything but the index are .cfm extensions. Does that answer your Q?

pj
http://www.corpust.com/fairy.gif

[RenaissanceGirl]

I see - so with each new article, you create an entirely different file from scratch?

That's cool - I'll have to wait until Jubba's flash file is complete so I can design around it though. Question number two: what is your reason(s) for programming the site in Cold Fusion?

[Phil Jayhan]

Renn-
The title bar will be just a little bigger than it is now, but with a menu atteched inside. Might be like 33% bigger as far as length. The width is/will be 1000 pixels or the full legnth of the top, and as far as when I add a new article, I have a template I use, throw it into there and then publish. As far as Cold Fusion I only used that because I knew it would werk and wasnt sure about asp, jsp choices. Whatever you think though, you are the one who does this for a living--You can go ahead an design around the title/menu though as it will be the same as it is now only about 33% more length---space for the menu.

Maybe, since I dont have any idea of your schemes though, Jubba and you can speak out and find the coordination of colors, etc...Anything but dark, and preferably not too light/bright. I'll try to phlag Jubba down to help hammer out schemes between you two--he should show up here soon, watch fer him, thanks again Renn!

pj
http://www.corpust.com/fairy.gif
nar nar

[I am not Jubba]

uhmmmm yeah...

Renn: give me a color scheme to work with.

Phil: Tell me what you want on all the buttons. You said 10-12 buttons, but I am not sure what you want them to say, or where you want them to go...

[Rigel Dominar XVI]

Jubba,
I'll have em to ya by days end. I'll make a little thing in flash to give you an idea. Something simple. Color scheme, this is what I would really like, if possible; For whatever color scheme is chosen, not too dark, not too bright and hopefully something that will make the back 280 pages blend in as though they are part of the motiff, as thats a lot of pages to change and I would rather start adding more content as soon as possible. I'll start working on it now.

Thanks-
Rigel Dominar XVI
Rigel opened up a giant can of whoopass and got, well, quite vitriolic on the IRS. I think its a good opener. http://www.corpust.com/joker.gif

[RenaissanceGirl]

Phil - how many aliases do you have?