November 22, 2000

• The disdain over Netscape 6 continues to pour in, and I have hundreds more to add to the list. But instead I’d like to draw your attention to a smaller, almost insignificant bug, if only because it flys smack in the face of any common sense.

  
  

  Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a standard (remember that word, its important) created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to help control consistant formatting of a webpage across multiple browsers and platforms. Using CSS, you can control pretty much any aspect of a page’s layout, including font size.

  
  

  Easy enough so far. Before I rant, here’s a quick HTML lesson. Font sizes in HTML are dictated by a number 1 through 7; 1 being the smallest font, 7 being the largest. In CSS, these seven values map to these seven categories (I can only wonder why they just didn’t use the same numbers instead of categories…): xx-small (1), x-small (2), small (3), medium (4), large (5), x-large (6), xx-large (7). Easy enough so far, right?

  
  

  To illustrate my frustration, look at this sample file on three different browsers: Internet Explorer 5, Netscape 4.x and Netscape 6. The file has 3 columns, the first telling you which font is displayed, the second displaying CSS fonts of different sizes, and the third displaying standard fonts of different sizes. On IE5, you will notice that both the CSS fonts and the standard HTML fonts render at the exact same size, as it should be. No problems here.

  
  

  Now look at the file on Netscape 4.x. Notice how there is a slight difference between the CSS fonts and the standard font. This is a small oversight on Netscape’s part, but something worthy of addressing. But practically it isn’t terrible, because the difference is only noticable at small fonts. Shame on you, Netscape.

  
  

  Now look at the file in Netscape 6. In 6, Netscape fixed the consistency problem between the CSS and standard fonts, but haphazardly introduced a new bug. Notice how the xx-small and x-small fonts are exactly the same! The small font then maps to size 2 instead of size 3, and so on and so forth, until the xx-large font maps to size 6 instead of size 7. Big oversight. Under this scheme, not only will pages combining xx-small and x-small show no difference in font size, but webpages on IE5 and Netscape 6 will render very differently.

  
  

  So what is a point of having a standard if it doesn’t standardize anything? We are faced with 3 of the newest and most popular browsers, and none are consistent with each other. Netscape 6 is a browser with flashy looks, but it seems that in that flash the notion of consistency was lost. If I may fall back on the popular architecture metaphors, its like decorating the exterior of a building without first properly laying down the foundation. The W3C creates standards, not surprisingly, to keep things standard across dissimliar platforms. Netscape needs to take that lesson to heart. For as the browser wars continue, it is only the developer who suffers.

  
  

  Consult this site for a list of more CSS bugs across different browsers.

  • 4:28 am
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