Update 03.20.02:
I have finally figured out how to fix the Netscape 4.7 problem. It was really quite a simple actually. Netscape has problems with gifs as backgrounds. All I had to do was change the background from a gif to a jpeg and Netscape was happy. Stupid browser.

As you can see from the image below, Netscape 4.7 for Windows has problems rendering the top navigation bar. Basically, the top nav bar is a table with an image of the white and gray horizontal stripes as the background. The horizontal blue bar is also a background image. For some reason, Netscape just doesn’t want to render these background images.

I’m not doing anything particularly tricky here. In addition, I’ve inspected the HTML code and it looks clean. I’ve tried numerous things to fix this, but all to no avail. Every other browser seems to be able to render it properly including Mozilla 0.9.8, Netscape 6.2, and Explorer so I think the problem is with Netscape 4.7. Although I have not been able to find anything on the web directly pertaining to this issue, I have read in several places that Netscape 4.7 is lacking in standards compliance in a number of areas, tables being one of them.

If you’re a web design guru and can figure out what the problem is, please let me know!

Posted by Roger at 7:02 am.