Browswer differences

[Webskater]

After a couple of years developing for an Intranet (IE), I now need to develop a couple of public facing pages so have to take into account different browsers. My application makes extensive use of dhtml and javascript and we insist on IE5.5 or greater to use it internally.
Can anyone tell me what the comparable version of Netscape is that I need to insist on as a minimum to be vaguely comparable with the capabilities of IE5.5.
I need people to be using a browser which exposes the DOM. Also, any opinions on the best and simplest method of browser detection would be welcomed.
Thanks for any help.
P.S. I saw a page displaying statistics on someones site the other day - only 4% of visitors were using Netscape - is this other peoples experience now? If it really is that low I am almost inclined to ignore Netscape users.

[Charles]

Four percent is about right for Netscape users (http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2003/May/browser.php) but 13% of users do not use JavaScript at all (http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2003/May/javas.php). And because some of that 13% are people with disabilities who cannot use JavaScript you need to make sure that your pages work as well with as without JavaScript.From Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0;
6.3 Ensure that pages are usable when scripts, applets, or other programmatic objects are turned off or not supported.
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/wai-pageauth.html#tech-scripts

[Khalid Ali]

Netscape users may not be too many,but writing for netscape means you will write more standard compliant code as compare to you would do for writing code for IE
You can recomend NS7+ browsers for minimum standard.It will give you immense control over DOM as well as more CSS compliance...