No load, under OS9 ?

[lonb]

Friendly neighborhood Mac familiars,

Recently my company launched the website, www.SnapFood.com. Our primary market includes a substantial number of multimedia development companies, a subset of which use OS9. Some of our field people have witnessed firsthand that our "website doesn't load at all" on some of these machines.

I don't know anyone with OS9 so I can't test this. If anyone can check this out, and possibly suggest why the problem is occuring, it would be incredibly appreciated.

In fact, if you work in Manhattan, we would be happy to offer you a discount on ordering through the web site (sorry the service is only available right now in NYC).

Thanks in advance!

- Lon

 

[Makosuke]

Don't forget that if you've got an OSX box handy, you can always install old Classic versions of Netscape and IE to run in Classic for testing--I do that all the time.

Well, this is only a guess, but I'd bet money the people having the problems are using Netscape 4; since newer versions of Netscape won't run in Classic (the best you can do is Mozilla 1.2, I think), and a lot of people never started using IE 5 (which is at least better than NS4), it's a surprisingly common browser among Classic holdouts.

And as you probably already know, NS4 is a disaster of a web browser. I don't know for sure but would guess that, some of the time (or depending on the plug-in version), it decides to choke on the flash bits embedded in your page. Either that, or it's not happy with the div-in-a-table on the opening page, and some versions decide not to draw anything.

If that market matters to you, your best option is probably to browser snif and create a specific version for NS4 without the Flash and whistles; if it's Flash that's causing the issue, since it's integral to your design, it's not easy to work around.

Personally, I prefer to use external stylesheets for everything, and then put all but a small set of the most basic styles in a seperate .css file and give it a media type, causing NS4 to ignore it completely and not break things trying to draw stuff it can't draw properly. But, that doesn't seem to be an option with the way your pages are designed.

(Speaking of which, although your site is very nice looking, you might spend a little bit of time with The Validator; looks like outside the javascript, which confuses it, and a few missing alt tags, the only big problem with your pages is a lack of a doctype declaration, but it never hurts to at least take a shot at being standards compliant. I'm also a bit surprised to see a site design still using font tags, but I suppose if it works for you and displays correctly, there's nothing to complain about.)

 

[Nermal]

I'm no expert, but what's wrong with font tags?

 

[Makosuke]

I'm no expert, but what's wrong with font tags?

Nothing is inherently wrong with them, but they do have something of a "90s" image; I thought that most people these days were using CSS for styling (and the site in question here does use embedded CSS for a lot of the styling).

Personally, I'd feel the world was somehow a better place if every site was built in valid strict HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0/1.1 with a minimum of inline styling, but that's just me. If it's valid markup and it looks good, it doesn't really matter.