Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Frank Shute
> Sent: Friday, May 30, 2008 5:51 PM
> To: Ted Mittelstaedt
> Cc: Gary Kline; FreeBSD Mailing List
> Subject: Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.
> 
> 
> On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 10:07:56PM -0700, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> >
> > 
> > 
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: Gary Kline [mailto:kline at thought.org]
> > > Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2008 3:14 PM
> > > To: Ted Mittelstaedt
> > > Cc: Kevin Downey; FreeBSD Mailing List
> > > Subject: Re: Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.
> > > 
> > > 
> > > 
> > > 	Chill down a bit, okay?  first, (as the OP), i did not know
> > > 	thaat there was *this** great a disparity in thee rendering
> > > 	between classes of browsers.  i used to stick pretty close 
> > > 	to the w3.org (or whatever it was).   i didn't think the
> > > 	difference extended to how the <TABLE> stuff was parsed.
> > > 
> > 
> > Gary, the problem is that the majority of people out there use
> > IE, most IE7, but still a lot of IE6, and a few deihards IE5.
> > 
> > Then there are the older versions of Safari on the Mac - there's
> > still a lot of Mac's around that are running 10.2 believe it or
> > not, and those came with MS IE for the Mac which -really- munges
> > some pages.  And Safari for Windows - which is a bit different than
> > Safari on the Mac.
> > 
> > And then there are all the Unix browsers.
> > 
> > There are some test programs that can help.  But the validators
> > can tell you your code is right and it still will display differently
> > in some of the browsers.  The only way to do it is to do what
> > the pros do - which is have all the different systems available
> > and load their pages in those browsers.
> 
> I test my pages with IE7, Safari on XP and Firefox on FreeBSD. Fixing
> problems with IE6 or anything else is too much to expect from amateur
> pages (which mine are).
> 

IE6 is the last MS browser available for W2K and even though W2K
was out for only a short time, (compared to XP) unlike Win98, it is
a real 32 bit version of Windows, and there's still a lot of it
out there.

Although, after the US economic stimulus checks are received by
the general populace, I'm sure that will change somewhat.

(I was very tempted when I opened the Fry's Electronics advert
today and saw the Toshiba laptop, dual-core CPU, 1GB ram, 160GB disk with
a DVD burner, going for $449.99)

> > 
> > Telling people "my site is fine your browser is fucked, get a
> > better one" is the mark of an amateur who is also being extremely
> > presumptive.  It's the old "do it my way or fuck off"
> 
> You forget that Gary is an amateur. Hence, any complaints can be dealt
> with "they validate, F off and get a better browser". (When he gets
> round to making them validate :)
> 

:-)  He is an amateur - but his content isn't the sort of content
that is a "must have" to where people will actually go to the
trouble of loading a different browser to view it.

(Hint: this is why virtually all church services are free to attend)

> > 
> > This is what Microsoft tells people - and most FreeBSDers and
> > Linux people claim they are on the moral high ground because they
> > aren't forcing their stuff down people's throats - that is, 
> > until they create a webpage and then they have no problem forcing
> > software down people's throats to see it, I guess....
> 
> I can't see anything wrong with telling people to use better software,
> you're doing them a favour! It's obviously different if you're writing
> pages for a commercial site.

I'm not sure I follow that...

> You should still write pages that
> validate and there are various hacks you can use with CSS, the DOM and
> Javscript to make your pages appear OK in older broken browsers...and
> newer ones with bugs.
> 

But why do you need to do those if your telling people to get a
better browser... ;-)

Ted