[Doc-SIG] docutils HTML contents generation and Netscape

[Guido van Rossum]

> [David Goodger]
> >> I'm not going to commit to full Netscape 4 support (it's a
> >> bottomless pit),
> 
> [Guido van Rossum]
> > I resent this attitude.
> > 
> > According to recent statistics, NS4 is still more common than Mozilla,
> > NS6, and everything else together (though behind IE, all versions
> > together).
> > 
> > Generating HTML 4.0 that doesn't rely on style sheets for features
> > isn't hard at all.  Use CSS for pretty looks, but please stick to HTML
> > for functionality.
> 
> Didn't mean to offend.  What I meant was, NS4 doesn't have good support for
> CSS or even HTML 4 ("id" attributes are ignored, for example).
> Functionality that is broken in the HTML under NS4, like the links that
> didn't work that Pearu reported, will of course be fixed.  When I said "full
> Netscape 4 support", I meant the CSS-side, the pretty looks; trying to get
> NS4 rendering to look as good as NS6 or IE5/6 or Mozilla seems to be an
> exercise in futility, especially since I'm not an HTML expert.  Patches and
> advice are always welcome, of course.

OK, maybe I was overreacting.  We've gone through this a few times in
the Zope world, where a few young zealots wanted to do everything with
style sheets.  I agree that you don't have to get the CSS support for
NS4 right (as long as it isn't broken), as long as the functionality
is there.

> Out of curiosity, do you have a URL for those statistics?

Someone mailed them around, but I forgot to save them and can't easily
find them back.  Searching Google for "browser statistics" gave me a
few useful pages, e.g. this:

http://www.cen.uiuc.edu/bstats/latest-month.html

IE's clearly the winner, with NS a distant second.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)