Tom & Mike,

The fundamental problem is Netscape Nagivator. I was pretty pleased to hear the news yesterday that Netscape is finally getting out of the browser business. In fact, there's dancing in the streets among people who build Web sites, because all of us have wasted hundreds of hours coming up with "workarounds" for all the bugs and design deficiencies in Nagivator; all told, over the years, Nagivator has probably resulted in several million hours of lost productivity. The brutal truth is that Microsoft didn't kill Netscape, Netscape killed Netscape.

I posted the technical explanation once for the particular problem you see. It has to do with Nagivator failing to properly ignore a new standard tag called "IFRAME", supported by MSIE, that's used in the fancier ads (almost none of them are simple graphics any more). It's Nagivator's fault, because the standards require a browser to ignore tags it doesn't recognize. That bug has been in Nagivator for years, from Nagivator 4.0 through 4.79 or whatever it is now, and they never fix it. It bears repeating: The brutal truth is that Microsoft didn't kill Netscape, Netscape killed Netscape.

Time to come in out of the cold and switch to a 21st century browser. MSIE 5.5 is superb--good product quality, fantastic feature set. There are things I can give you on a Web site with MSIE that are impossible with Nagivator.

--Robert