Question:
I have a layer and I want to make the text inside scrollable. I use SPAN (or DIV also works okay) and it looks fine in Internet Explorer. But there is no scrollbar in Netscape; rather the text is cut off. How can I make it so that the scrollbar appears in Netscape?

Answer:
This is one of those situations where the browser wars get really frustrating for any user. DIV and SPAN, being HTML 3.2 compliant, are supported by both browsers. However, DIV is not fully supported by Netscape 4x to the level it is in Internet Explorer, and you can’t even set an attribute on it to enable or disable scrolling. You can achieve a semblance of your requested behavior with a LAYER tag.

The way that the page is rendered is the primary reason for this problem. If you start out with a LAYER that has a specific clip region (a rectangular block on the screen in which the LAYER is contained), then in order to force a scroll bar, you have to insure that the contents of that block exceed the region (perhaps with a bunch of
statements). Then use document.mylayer.document.write “This is the new text” to replace the text into the document region. By the way, to set a clipping region, use the CLIP attribute for the DIV. This code will create a clip region where left=0, top=50, right=100, and bottom=200:

Gecko (Netscape 5.0) seems to include considerably better support for this feature.