Ugh. Netscape. The site takes forever to download, doesn't display properly, fonts and text fields are different sizes than in IE, table border colors don't show up, and so on. Can't we just forget about designing for Netscape?

The short answer is no.

Netscape is still a major browser. Although 81.3% of web users prefer IE, 13.8% of web users are still using Netscape.*  That's potentially 13.8% of the seeUthere.com audience. You can't afford to ignore that many people.

Netscape is more sensitive than IE. It requires a more standardized HTML syntax and cannot tolerate as many errors. Tags must be closed and must nest properly. One missing closing table tag will make the entire table disappear. Netscape forces you to write good HTML.

This makes Netscape a useful development tool. A basic tip: when previewing a page that you are building, always use Netscape. You will catch all kinds of errors that will slip through undetected in IE. It's much easier to fix them as you go along rather than finish up, look at the page in Netscape and *then* see all the errors.

If the page works in Netscape, chances are excellent that it will work perfectly in IE. The reverse is definitely not true. So save time and frustration and build your pages in Netscape.

One scary example of why this is important:
Most seeUthere.com pages in V6 have form elements where the user is supposed to enter a piece of information, click a submit button etc. Many of these pages were missing the required <FORM> </FORM> tags around those elements, and so the form elements didn't display at all! Those pages would have been unusable for clients with Netscape. Beware. If the developer had been previewing all along with Netscape, this problem would have been discovered at the very beginning.

The other big problem with Netscape is nested tables. Basically Netscape chokes on any table that is nested more than five layers deep. In the Design Event WYSIWYG page there are tables nested seven layers deep, which is why this page takes forever to display in Netscape, and is still slow in IE too. We'll go into this in more detail later in the Coding section.