Meta: I thought this was interesting to look back on since one of its features (Layers / ILayers) came up today in the “Why can't HTML alone do includes?” thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43880608
NetCaster seems to be the cut down remnants of the full Constellation Network User Interface that never shipped, and which MSIE4's Active Desktop seems to be in response to instead of the other way around: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34279701
mattl•9mo ago
IIRC Layers (ie. the layer tag) became the div tag FWIW.
That was not my recollection. The <div> tag was introduced in HTML 3.2 in January 1997, and the <layer> tag came out in June 1997 with Netscape Navigator 4. So <div> predates <layer> by a good six months, and they co-existed until <layer> was deprecated.
mattl•9mo ago
Do you remember how different layer was from div? I’m struggling to remember now.
Lammy•9mo ago
Layers were unique to Netscape 4.x (a.k.a “Communicator” vs. the older “Navigator” branding), so the Netscape ONE docs would probably be the best place to start if you can tolerate the fact that it's their tech so they're patting themselves on the back for it the entire time: https://web.archive.org/web/19990219125559fw_/http://develop...
That chapter has a tantalizingly-broken link near the bottom: “For a comparison of CSS Positioning and positioning with the <LAYER> tag, see Danny Goodman's View Source article ‘CSS-Positioning — The Dynamic HTML Neutral Zone’”. I was able to fix the link (looks like it was MCom-intranet-formatted) and you can read it here: https://web.archive.org/web/19990129034353fw_/http://develop...
“Over and above this common [W3C CSS-Positioning (CSS-P)] standard, Netscape and Microsoft have applied these concepts to their own document object models and have developed different ways of conceptualizing these positionable entities. Netscape calls these items layers, and has even created a <LAYER> tag to facilitate adding such items into a document. Microsoft, on the other hand, refers to such items as styles. The challenge we scripters face is controlling Netscape's layers and Microsoft's styles to accomplish the same job.”
“Over and above this common standard” is particularly funny wording to me considering Microsoft are the ones with the reputation for embracing-and-extending but here Netscape are doing the same damn thing. It was already in their blood anyway considering we got the <IMG> tag from a similarly non-standard extension by Marc Andreessen when he was working on MCSA Mosaic, before MCom/Netscape: http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.ht...
=================
For many years it was customary to have separate NS4 vs IE4 code paths by detecting the top-level objects that were unique to each browser, something like:
if (document.layers) {
// Netscape Communicator code
} else if (document.all) {
// IE code
} else {
// All other browser code
}
Though my recollection is that `if NS4 else all-others-including-IE` was the most common pattern.
mattl•9mo ago
> `if NS4 else all-others-including-IE`
Yeah, certainly saw that. Plone which inspired Wikipedia's CSS has .netscape4 class used all over the place, which is probably still all over https://fsf.org despite the fact I stopped working there 13 years ago next month.
Lammy•9mo ago
Its JavaScript Style Sheets made me realize why the `<link rel="stylesheet"/>` tag tends to have `type="text/css"`, because in an alternate world it could be `type="text/javascript"` too: https://web.archive.org/web/19970630094623fw_/http://develop...
NetCaster seems to be the cut down remnants of the full Constellation Network User Interface that never shipped, and which MSIE4's Active Desktop seems to be in response to instead of the other way around: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34279701
mattl•9mo ago
Lammy•9mo ago
perilunar•9mo ago
mattl•9mo ago
Lammy•9mo ago
Check out Chapter 2 “Dividing Content into Sections” in particular for examples: https://web.archive.org/web/20001207134400fw_/http://develop...
That chapter has a tantalizingly-broken link near the bottom: “For a comparison of CSS Positioning and positioning with the <LAYER> tag, see Danny Goodman's View Source article ‘CSS-Positioning — The Dynamic HTML Neutral Zone’”. I was able to fix the link (looks like it was MCom-intranet-formatted) and you can read it here: https://web.archive.org/web/19990129034353fw_/http://develop...
“Over and above this common [W3C CSS-Positioning (CSS-P)] standard, Netscape and Microsoft have applied these concepts to their own document object models and have developed different ways of conceptualizing these positionable entities. Netscape calls these items layers, and has even created a <LAYER> tag to facilitate adding such items into a document. Microsoft, on the other hand, refers to such items as styles. The challenge we scripters face is controlling Netscape's layers and Microsoft's styles to accomplish the same job.”
“Over and above this common standard” is particularly funny wording to me considering Microsoft are the ones with the reputation for embracing-and-extending but here Netscape are doing the same damn thing. It was already in their blood anyway considering we got the <IMG> tag from a similarly non-standard extension by Marc Andreessen when he was working on MCSA Mosaic, before MCom/Netscape: http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.ht...
=================
For many years it was customary to have separate NS4 vs IE4 code paths by detecting the top-level objects that were unique to each browser, something like:
Though my recollection is that `if NS4 else all-others-including-IE` was the most common pattern.mattl•9mo ago
Yeah, certainly saw that. Plone which inspired Wikipedia's CSS has .netscape4 class used all over the place, which is probably still all over https://fsf.org despite the fact I stopped working there 13 years ago next month.