Local News: Fonts and the MacFixIt redesign: a follow-up

First, thanks to all of you who wrote with suggestions for dealing with CSS/browser incompatibilities (as described yesterday). We continue to work on this matter and are determined to find an optimal solution.

However, we now have more information on one particular symptom: we had reports that some users were not seeing any CSS-based fonts at all (e.g., headline and body text would be identical). We could not duplicate this - until now. A reader discovered that if you use Netscape 4.7 on a Mac and turn JavaScript off (even though stylesheets remain enabled), all stylesheet instructions are ignored. We tested this out and confirmed it. While we could (and should) partially work-around this by having alternate font selections to use if stylesheets are off, this still does not explain why the browser incorrectly acts as if stylesheets had been disabled. Turning JavaScript off does not produce this problem in Explorer. So it appears to be yet another bug in Netscape.

According to Wayne Parker, it is indeed a Netscape bug. He writes: Netscape originally implemented stylesheets at JavaScript. They even support an alternate stylesheet syntax, called JSS (JavaScript Style Sheets). Apparently, JSS is the 'native' format, and Netscape translates CSS into JSS behind the scenes. If JavaScript is off, so are styles." So it looks like Netscape users will need to keep JavaScript on to see MacFixIt correctly.