Another day, another Netscape incompatibility. The hoary old beast, which renders HTML about as well as a Sinclair ZX-80, chokes on literal HTML entities for quotation marks, namely “, ”, ‘, ’.
We were all proud of ourselves for improving Web typography in this tiny way, but the Juan Antonio Samaranch, the Jack Valenti of Web browsers kicked us in the teeth again.
We have found, however, that numerical HTML entities for quotation marks work fine, so that’s what we’re using now, except for the headline of this section, whereby we use the four possible encodings in turn, one of which is likely to break in every browser save for iCab and Lynx.
We may give up and revert to simply typing ” and ’. It (ag)grieves us to do so.
But, ever mindful of accessibility and universal compatibility, we are willing to sacrifice. Yet again. This is the third concession to Netscape we have made. Assuming we last till then, starting in 2001 we will ignore Netscape completely. Except for Linux, there now exist quite a range of standards-compliant browsers you could be using (Explorer, iCab, Opera). Why aren’t you?
Posted on 2000-10-03