Occasionally, you may visit a web page that works fine with one Web browser and has a problem with another. Unfortunately, the problematic web browser is typically Netscape 4.,x, which is still used by around 20 percent of the market, despite the fact that it does not support many of the features of Internet Explorer or, indeed, the HTML 4.0 standard on which Internet Explorer is loosely based.
If you do encounter such a problem, the issue may not be one you can fix at your end, other than not using Netscape to view that particular page. Most often, the problem occurs due to a server configuration error on the server side. For example, the directory in which "index.html" page resides on that server could refer to a missing CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) page. This file is called "Normal.css" and, if it is missing, Netscape 4.x will fail to load the page due to a programming error. IE ignores tags it does not understand, as web browsers are supposed to do.
To work around this problem, and other issues related to Netscape's faulty CSS implementation, some websites (PCBuyersGuide.com, for example) build the style sheet directly into the web page, as in the following code, which would typically be inserted in the <HEAD>area of a page:
<STYLE>
<!--
body{font: 10pt Helvetica, Arial; text-decoration: none; color:#000000; }
tr{font: 10pt Helvetica, Arial; text-decoration: none; color:#000000; }
a:link{color:#0000FF; text-decoration: none; cursor: auto;}
A:visited{color:#662299; text-decoration: none; cursor: auto;}
A:hover{color:#400080; text-decoration:underline; background-color:#6699FF;}
-->
</STYLE>
The <!-- ... --> tags allow a CSS-challenged browser to ignore the unknown tags, avoiding unwanted on-screen display of the style text itself. On a browser that correctly interprets the above code, the CSS style sheet allows links to light up with a light blue background color (#6699FF) when the mouse pointer hovers over them. Body text is displayed as 10pt Helvetica (or, if Helvetica is not found, Arial) instead of the usual serif font (typically Times New Roman).
Here's a link to a short Normal.css file for you to see what it looks like as an external file. The main reason people use externally loaded CSS files instead of style definitions right on the page itself is to facilitate site-wide style updates. As I'm sure you can imagine, if all pages referenced the same style sheet, and the style sheet were updated to display a different style, all pages would therefore immediately reflect the update!
The reason I know this is because I had the same problem on my server at one point last year. It is a great example of why Web page authors must always test their pages with different browsers!
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