ASP.NET and non-IE browsers

William LaMartin · Dec 13, 2003

I have a couple of web sites that need to be developed in the coming months,
and I am in a quandary as to whether to use ASP.Net or fall back on the
standard HTML editor (FrontPage) along with ASP. I hesitate to use ASP.Net
because in my tests, people using Netscape and some "fringe" browsers
received a jumbled rendition of the certain ASP.Net pages. But I love the
power of ASP.Net

My most recent test was to create an abbreviated version of a computer
club's site in ASP.Net. The test is at http://www.tpcug.org/main.aspx.
Everyone using Internet Explorer reported everything fine, The Avant browser
was fine, and one fellow using some version of the Netscape browser called
KONQUEROR in Linux reported everything fine. Everyone using Netscape
Navigator versions 4.? - 7 reported the buttons all in the wrong place on
the page and as having no color. The same for Mozilla Firebird.

People report similar problems at another test site I have at
http://www.lamartin.com/dotnet/Main.aspx, where I tested a number of ASP.Net
features, mainly consuming different web services.

So, is there a way to put buttons on a page, say, in a vertical column on
the left side with a panel to their right and have the buttons stay there
when the aspx page is viewed in Netscape?

Craig Deelsnyder · Dec 13, 2003

William said:
I have a couple of web sites that need to be developed in the coming months,
and I am in a quandary as to whether to use ASP.Net or fall back on the
standard HTML editor (FrontPage) along with ASP. I hesitate to use ASP.Net
because in my tests, people using Netscape and some "fringe" browsers
received a jumbled rendition of the certain ASP.Net pages. But I love the
power of ASP.Net

My most recent test was to create an abbreviated version of a computer
club's site in ASP.Net. The test is at http://www.tpcug.org/main.aspx.
Everyone using Internet Explorer reported everything fine, The Avant browser
was fine, and one fellow using some version of the Netscape browser called
KONQUEROR in Linux reported everything fine. Everyone using Netscape
Navigator versions 4.? - 7 reported the buttons all in the wrong place on
the page and as having no color. The same for Mozilla Firebird.

People report similar problems at another test site I have at
http://www.lamartin.com/dotnet/Main.aspx, where I tested a number of ASP.Net
features, mainly consuming different web services.

So, is there a way to put buttons on a page, say, in a vertical column on
the left side with a panel to their right and have the buttons stay there
when the aspx page is viewed in Netscape?

The thing to remember is yes, there will be some incompatabilities.
Some of it MS decided not to support, some of it was they didn't have
time to figure out every browser known to mankind like we used to have
to do as developers.

So I don't think abandoning .NET is the answer. You know its
power...and part of that power is either to set your target of your page
to down-level browsers, or override any controls giving you pain and
tweak the rendering yourself. Plus it could also be things you could do
by adding addl attributes to the controls that help it render better in
Netscape, etc. Check the HTML and see how 'off' it is, that'll help you
decide which of these to do.

Martin Honnen · Dec 13, 2003

William said:
My most recent test was to create an abbreviated version of a computer
club's site in ASP.Net. The test is at http://www.tpcug.org/main.aspx.
Everyone using Internet Explorer reported everything fine, The Avant browser
was fine, and one fellow using some version of the Netscape browser called
KONQUEROR in Linux reported everything fine. Everyone using Netscape
Navigator versions 4.? - 7 reported the buttons all in the wrong place on
the page and as having no color. The same for Mozilla Firebird.

Well, looking at the HTML sent to the browser from
http://www.tpcug.org/main.aspx I find some real mess, a HTML document is
supposed to contain a single <html> root element but that output seems
to contain a second HTML document nested in the <body> of the outer
document.
I don't know how your ASP page looks that produces that output but you
can't blame any browser if the rendering doesn't look like you would
like it.
By the way, Konqueror is not a Netscape product at all. It is a Linux
browser that is part of the KDE desktop.

William LaMartin · Dec 13, 2003

I tried it with the schema set to Netscape Navigator 4.0 in the project's
properties, but that didn't help

A bit of research has turned up using a <browserCaps> section in the
web.congif file. I will look into that.

William LaMartin · Dec 13, 2003

Well, I agree the HTML produced for the page is very odd. But it is what is
produced by the server based on the aspx page that Visual Studio.Net
created. Internet Explorer seems to like it. My question is how can I make
Visual Studio.Net produce aspx pages that will render properly in browsers
other than IE. Setting the project's target schema to Netscape Navigator
does not seem to have any effect.

William LaMartin · Dec 14, 2003

After a night's sleep, I again looked at the HTML that was being generated
with the glaring two <html> tags. Indeed that was what visual studio was
producing--but it was producing it because of my error. I have a panel on
the right side of the page that I populate with different items depending on
what button on the left is pressed. When the page loads for the first time,
the sub below is run. The page used in the subroutine was originally a
complete html page. What I needed to do was extract out all of the html
text between the <body> and </body> tags of that page and put that in a text
file and use that as the page. That got rid of the extra html and body tags
in the source code for the page.

Now to get someone with Netscape to check the page again. It is at
http://www.tpcug.org/Main.aspx

Private Sub New_page2(ByVal page As String)
Literal1 = New Literal
Me.Panel1.Controls.Add(Literal1)
Dim TR As System.IO.TextReader
TR = System.IO.File.OpenText(Server.MapPath(".") & "\" & page)
Me.Literal1.Text = TR.ReadToEnd
End Sub

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ASP.NET and non-IE browsers

William LaMartin

Craig Deelsnyder

Martin Honnen

William LaMartin

William LaMartin

William LaMartin

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