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

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

> -----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.

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"

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....

Ted