Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

Recently, I’ve been working on a redesign of my employer’s web site. It’s not going to be any kind of ground-breaking work of art or anything, but it will be a welcome change from the kludgey frames-based page we’ve been using since forever ago. I’ve been playing with the cool soopa-rollovers and ypSlideOutMenu widgets from youngpup.net, and they’re really nice and easy to use, and degrade reasonably well for Netscape 4. This is important, because our web stats indicate that we have a significant number of users who still use that old dog.

However, my nice, mostly CSS layout turns into sludge when I load my page in NS4. Every time I try to do some nice standards-based CSS, NS4 finds some new way to disembowel itself.

It’s not like I’m doing anything particularly fancy, either. It’s just a few absolutely positioned DIVs, a couple of small forms, and a table. Does anyone know what perverted rules NS4 follows that makes it decide to ignore positioning? I had a similar problem on another website a while back, and was able to fix it by simply rearranging the order of the DIVs on the page. But I haven’t been able to make it work in my current project. Yet.