DOM-only CSS
More or less for kicks, I’ve added a bit of code here to raise the browser bar a little. The link to the style sheet is added using DOM methods as the page loads, so unless the browser supports the DOM methods in question, the page code defines no styles. So far as I know, this means Mozilla/Netscape 6. It may be that it works on IE5.5+ on Windows; I won’t know until I make it into work on Monday.
No, there’s no compelling reason to do this. My first thought was that it’d be a handy way to weed out browsers that can’t handle CSS layouts, reasoning that any browser that can handle the DOM will have at least reasonable support for CSS positioning. This would leave me free to ignore older and annoying browsers like Netscape 4, whose fledgling CSS support might render the page illegible. But then it just became something that I thought would be fun to play with.
I spent several hours trying to make this work in IE5 Mac, but couldn’t figure it out. Either I’m missing something entirely, or it can’t be done. IE adds the style sheets to the collection of LINKs but doesn’t display them. Frustrating. Then again, as long as I’m doing something as arbitrary as this, why should I care? If the DOM support isn’t there, it isn’t there.
Still. Grrr…
23 Nov 2001 Sam