XHTML is a stricter specification of HTML; it is the blending of XML and HTML.Originally posted by: Deslocke
Well, I'm not a web design pro either. I'm only 16 and I don't even know what XHTML is (besides what I just looked up on webopedia). But anyway, what do you mean by "mangle.". I only used CSS on the scroll bar. Older browsers will just show the traditional scroll bar, correct?Originally posted by: jliechty
If you're going to use the widely-used traditional table "hack" for your layout, you can easily manage with supporting the 4.x browsers, but don't worry about anything before that, because people using those browsers deserve rude awakenings in the form of extremely ugly pages to indicate that they need to upgrade.
OTOH, if you're developing with XHTML and CSS (which I do, since I'm not a web design pro, and I can take my time with my personal sites), you shouldn't start out trying to support anything before the 5.x browsers; the older ones mangle CSS so much that it's not even funny, and they are a major PITA to get to display CSS-formatted pages properly.
Netscape 4 will just not display some CSS (as with your scroll bar), but it will attempt to display other CSS in ways that are not stated in the CSS specifications. Thus, your page ends up looking like crap some items will not be showing, other items will be totally out of place, etc), and you usually need to use the import trick to hide your stylesheet from NS4. In that case, your page appears to NS4 browsers as plain text, unformatted. To see an example of this, check out one of my pages here at http://www.joink.com/homes/users/jliechty/fah/. First load it in IE6 or Moz1.2, then load it in NS4.x; you should be able to see the difference.