Let's start with a round of applause for Netscape. Back in June I reviewed
the first beta release of the new browser and gave it a resounding thumbs-down.
Chances were, it seemed, the final release would suck louder than an aircraft
toilet. But it doesn't. I eat my proverbial words. This is a decent browser and
well worth a try, especially if you're currently using an old Netscape 4+ model.
It's not as fast as IE 5.5 and it's not going to topple the king from its throne,
but it's good enough to secure a worthwhile slice of the market for Netscape.
When combined with the Mozilla/Gecko final release, which should be out in a few
months, that market share will be too large for any serious developer to ignore.
Most simple JavaScript works fine in N6. If, for example, you have links created
in JavaScript or new windows that open and close, you should be OK. The main problem
is if you get into the DOM (Document Object Model). The DOM for N6 isn't the same
as for IE4+ or NN4. It's much closer to the W3C recommended DOM1 than either of
these, but unfortunately that means the new browser won't accept a lot of DOM-related
code already on the Net.
As a general rule, you're entering the realm of the DOM if you mess about with
the properties of the Web page or the elements within it. If you don't change
a property, you're probably not getting involved with the DOM.
Since the DOMs for IE and N4 were different even before N6 came along, most
DOM-related code already recognises the browser (or, as some people say, parses
the browser) and supplies separate lines of code for the main types.
If you're not very familiar with JavaScript, this is probably the easiest way
to tell if your code will work in N6 unchanged or if it needs updating. Any scripts
that devote their first few lines to recognising the browser will almost certainly
need to be updated. In most cases they'll need a new section of code added that
conforms with DOM1.
Changing the browser recognition element is relatively simple. Here's a detailed
guide from WebReference.com and an alternative
from Netscape.
The only problem is that after making these simple changes you will need to
know what you're doing to rewrite code for DOM1. Note also that most DHTML code
written by Dreamweaver and other DHTML authoring applications will need to be
adjusted to work in N6.
Other Code
If you're using other proprietary code, this too will fail in N6, including NN4 proprietary code, most notably the use of Layers.
Here is a list of unsupported features:
Proprietary NN4 Features
document.layers[], document.elementName, and other NN4 Layer DOM features
document.tags, document.ids, document.classes, or document.contextual() for setting
CSS properties from NN4 JavaScript.
LAYER, ILAYER, and MULTICOL elements
DIV SRC= transclusions (external content imported into an HTML page using <DIV
SRC=...)
use of .jar files for SmartUpdate
Proprietary IE4/5 Features
document.all and other IE4/5 DOM features
document.styleSheets[] for setting CSS properties from Internet Explorer JScript
MARQUEE and BGSOUND elements
.cab files
For more details and workarounds see http://sites.netscape.net/ekrockhome/standards.html
Do bear in mind that you will probably need to adjust your DOM-related JavaScript
yet again when the final version of Mozilla comes on the market in the first half
of next year, at least to make sure the browser gets directed to the same set
of code as N6.
One final note, and something that you may wish to point out to colleagues
working in pure HTML, is that N6 is not very forgiving of any table with a fixed
width that's insufficient to contain its content. Previous browsers forgave this
kind of coding error and simply stretched the table to fit, but N6 doesn't like
it at all.
Comments and observations on JavaScript coding for N6 are very welcome.
