I sent in a few bugs to Mozilla for Netscape 6 preview release 2. I found out a few things that aren't exactly great news but it's better than taking the new Netscape the way it was/is...

everyone knows Netscape has much more trouble rendering html tables than the new versions of Internet Explorer. I noticed a lot of the same bugs from Netscape 4.7 were still present in Netscape 6. For example a table bgcolor will not show up in the "cellspacing" part of a table. The table bgcolor only shows up as the default td bgcolor if one has not been defined. Example here.

They responded to my bug and gave me a temporary fix that works but seems weird to me. You must include the document type definition (DTD) that instructs Netscape to strictly follow the W3C standard for html. Technically it is good coding to have the DTD there, but I haven't heard of one requiring it and it doesn't explain why it works a different way when you don't include it.

Basically, the DTD tells Netscape "yes I know what I’m doing and I want you to render the page the correct way like your were supposed to do in the first place."

This should be all on one line of course:

<! HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/strict.dtd">

I know this fixes the above problems. I’m gonna try it out now with some other Netscape bugs. Ns 4 has problems with nested tables, specifically percentage widths in those nested tables. Also, it has problems with align tags on tables and images. I’ll let you know if I find out any more.

James Craig - designer dude