Slashdot Mirror

I haven't touched CSS much at all, I like what it does, so i'll probably have to sit down and learn it one day... It it something that can be coded by hand usually, or is there alot involved with CSS that you really need to have a program generate the code?

This site is an example of CSS done by hand (HTML too, while we're at it). I also did the redesign of this site in a similar manner (actually, I took the work I did on that site and reworked my personal site into a similar framework).

His site is unreadable to visitors using NS 4.0x...

Dan, please make your website complaint [enough] with standards so that all browsers can at least see the basic text.

Seeing as how Nutscrape has a problem implementing standards properly (its CSS implementation blows goats), I don't see how you could do more than a basic design without either (1) breaking all the rules to make a site that renders properly in Nutscrape or (2) make a site that follows established standards, and screw the people (both of them) who are still using Nutscrape 4.x.

A third way would be to detect the browser and send either a standards-compliant page or a "lobotomized-for-Nutscrape" page. I did this in the redesign of this commercial site and refined it a bit further when I redid my personal site. It's not that I personally care if people who continue using outdated, buggy software can access my site...for the dot-com site, accessibility was considered important enough to figure out a work-around.

Here's a test for you: pull up my site in Nutscrape 4.x and in another browser (Mozilla, IE, Lynx, Opera...it doesn't matter). Save the returned HTML (grab the stylesheet, too) to a file somewhere on your webserver and have W3C's validator check both. You'll see that one validates as HTML 4.01 Strict, while the other doesn't validate as anything. Now load the page that validated properly into Nutscrape and tell me what you get. It's a mess, isn't it? It displayed just fine in your other browser, though (unless your other browser was IE 2 or something similarly ancient).

I will give you that IE doesn't crash much, but I won't give you that it's stable-- since I cannot count the times that 5 or 5.5 have completely misdrawn pages. I think my favorite is when I've gotten moderator points on Slashdot and I go to scroll down, instead of the form elements moving with the text the text scrolls and the form elements are sticky.

FWIW, getting mod points on /. is the only time IE has spazzed out on me...and that seems to only happen under Win98. I've gotten mod points a couple of times since switching to Win2K, and the problem you describe has never happened.

The only current-version browser I've run across that consistently has rendering problems is Nutscrape 4.x. Its CSS implementation is effed up pretty badly; sites that render just fine in IE, Opera, Mozilla, Konqueror, etc. sometimes come up as a total jumble in Nutscrape. Even Lynx does a better job with some of these sites. (Want an example? Try http://www.thejewelers.com/store01.html, a page on a site I redesigned a while back. It validates properly for HTML 4.01 Strict and CSS 2. It renders fine in every browser I've thrown at it...except Nutscrape. For their broke-ass browser, there's http://www.thejewelers.com/nsstore01.html. It renders OK on Nutscrape and other graphical browsers (looks nasty under Lynx), but pays no heed to standards or principles of good design.)

I will give you that IE doesn't crash much, but I won't give you that it's stable-- since I cannot count the times that 5 or 5.5 have completely misdrawn pages. I think my favorite is when I've gotten moderator points on Slashdot and I go to scroll down, instead of the form elements moving with the text the text scrolls and the form elements are sticky.

FWIW, getting mod points on /. is the only time IE has spazzed out on me...and that seems to only happen under Win98. I've gotten mod points a couple of times since switching to Win2K, and the problem you describe has never happened.

The only current-version browser I've run across that consistently has rendering problems is Nutscrape 4.x. Its CSS implementation is effed up pretty badly; sites that render just fine in IE, Opera, Mozilla, Konqueror, etc. sometimes come up as a total jumble in Nutscrape. Even Lynx does a better job with some of these sites. (Want an example? Try http://www.thejewelers.com/store01.html, a page on a site I redesigned a while back. It validates properly for HTML 4.01 Strict and CSS 2. It renders fine in every browser I've thrown at it...except Nutscrape. For their broke-ass browser, there's http://www.thejewelers.com/nsstore01.html. It renders OK on Nutscrape and other graphical browsers (looks nasty under Lynx), but pays no heed to standards or principles of good design.)

Now, if we could just convince them to implement the W3C HTML Standard or the W3C CSS Standard.

Hmm...what part of the standard does IE not implement? I printed out the HTML 4.01 and CSS 2 specs and kept them next to me as I redid this site. IE (back to at least 4.01) renders it properly, as do Mozilla (last I checked was M16), Opera, and Lynx. The browser that choked was Nutscrape 4, so if you want to complain about a browser not meeting standards, I'd suggest that you go after AOHell and not Microsoft. I checked the site with W3C's validators, and everything came up OK.

But I don't see what the problem here really is at the top end: just generate your pages from a database and stick the content into a template for the browser/platform in question. What's the big deal?

I know of a good system to do this: the Everything engine (which powers the world's largest online encyclopedia). But what about people whose content is hosted on Freeservers, GeoCities, and XOOM, hosts whose security policies do not permit server-side dynamic page generation?

If your site has only static content, you can generate the pages in advance and use client-side browser detection to direct people to the appropriate set of pages. It's somewhat wasteful of space, but it gets the job done if you don't have the necessary control over your hosting service to do things on-the-fly on the server.

As an example, this site is one that I've set up this way. It has two sets of pages--one for IE, Mozilla, Lynx, and other standards-compliant browsers, and one that's "lobotomized for Netscrape." Both are put together from some templates that are mashed together with make, sed, awk, and some other stuff I don't recall off the top of my head. It works well enough for hosting it on a third party's IIS box. If we operated our own webserver, though, it'd run Apache and I would more than likely use server-side includes to generate pages on-the-fly. (It'd mean I could get rid of the only bit of JavaScript the site uses--the client-side browser detector. JavaScript is evil, but with Netscrape not playing nicely with HTML and CSS, it's a necessary evil.)

Also, what is the most unreliable component in your system? The hard drive... The monitor... The processor or memory... No. The numerous fans throughout your system.

Indeed. I maintain about three or four dozen machines at this company, and the most frequent problem we have is with processor and power-supply fans crapping out. A fair number of our machines are PII-350s or thereabouts, and you can't even get replacement heatsink/fan combos for those anymore. (I usually get some other type of heatsink/fan, throw out the heatsink, and attach the new fan to the old heatsink...a few minutes' work which will be good for another year or two, at which time the fan will probably need to be replaced again.) Power supplies are cheap enough that it's usually cheaper (parts cost vs. downtime) to replace the whole thing than to replace just the fan within, though I've done that with some of my home systems. A few hard drives and a motherboard or two have gone bad over the past couple of years, but it's rare that a month goes by without a fan conking out.

I'm not a pro, but I have become more and more inclined to write pages that actually conforms with the standards, most notably HTML 4.01 Strict and CSS1, and go on to validate the stuff. If the browsers can't handle that, *$%^#* them. And, browsers can't handle that...

For my personal site, this is the approach I took. I tried doing this with a company site, but Netscrape's f*cked-up handling of CSS (even in v4.x, which is inexcusable) necessitated the creation of a second, parallel site that would display acceptably in Netscrape. (How many sites do you know that are perfectly viewable in Lynx, but give Netscrape fits? To see how an HTML 4.01- and CSS1-compliant site looks in Netscrape, try this link.)

Fortunately, a makefile and some sed and awk scripts do the conversion automatically...I still have only one source tree to maintain for the site.

_/_
/ v \
(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
\_^_/

I'm not a pro, but I have become more and more inclined to write pages that actually conforms with the standards, most notably HTML 4.01 Strict and CSS1, and go on to validate the stuff. If the browsers can't handle that, *$%^#* them. And, browsers can't handle that...

For my personal site, this is the approach I took. I tried doing this with a company site, but Netscrape's f*cked-up handling of CSS (even in v4.x, which is inexcusable) necessitated the creation of a second, parallel site that would display acceptably in Netscrape. (How many sites do you know that are perfectly viewable in Lynx, but give Netscrape fits? To see how an HTML 4.01- and CSS1-compliant site looks in Netscrape, try this link.)

Fortunately, a makefile and some sed and awk scripts do the conversion automatically...I still have only one source tree to maintain for the site.

_/_
/ v \
(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
\_^_/

And as a designer, getting pages to look right in both IE and NS while trying to remain W3C 100% valid is a nightmare.

I just went through this with the conversion of a customer's website. Whoever had done the site before designed it with frames, lots of text images, and not an ALT tag in sight. It was pretty scary, especially if you tried browsing it with Lynx.

I downloaded and printed out the HTML 4.01 and CSS 2 specs and went to town over the weekend, redesigning the site with standards compliance in mind. It looked pretty good in IE 4, IE 5, Mozilla M16, and even Lynx...but Netscrape 4.x completely botched the interpretation of the style information. I ended up rejiggering the makefile for the site and cobbling together some awk and sed scripts to convert the entire site from a style-sheet-based, standards-compliant design to a table-based design that Netscrape would display acceptably. Some browser-detection JavaScript redirects people to either the standards-compliant tree or the lobotomized-for-Netscrape tree.

(If you want to check out my handiwork, it's at http://www.thejewelers.com. You can also use this link to go straight to the standards-compliant site or this link to go to the lobotomized site. It's not 100% where I want it (no robot food, for instance), but it duplicates the original site's look and feel in a more standards-compliant (and faster-loading, too) way.) All this is just one more reason why I use Internet Explorer, even under Linux (thank $DEITY for VMware...). Say what you want about Microsoft, but they did a much better job of sticking to standards than Netscape.

_/_
/ v \
(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
\_^_/

And as a designer, getting pages to look right in both IE and NS while trying to remain W3C 100% valid is a nightmare.

I just went through this with the conversion of a customer's website. Whoever had done the site before designed it with frames, lots of text images, and not an ALT tag in sight. It was pretty scary, especially if you tried browsing it with Lynx.

I downloaded and printed out the HTML 4.01 and CSS 2 specs and went to town over the weekend, redesigning the site with standards compliance in mind. It looked pretty good in IE 4, IE 5, Mozilla M16, and even Lynx...but Netscrape 4.x completely botched the interpretation of the style information. I ended up rejiggering the makefile for the site and cobbling together some awk and sed scripts to convert the entire site from a style-sheet-based, standards-compliant design to a table-based design that Netscrape would display acceptably. Some browser-detection JavaScript redirects people to either the standards-compliant tree or the lobotomized-for-Netscrape tree.

(If you want to check out my handiwork, it's at http://www.thejewelers.com. You can also use this link to go straight to the standards-compliant site or this link to go to the lobotomized site. It's not 100% where I want it (no robot food, for instance), but it duplicates the original site's look and feel in a more standards-compliant (and faster-loading, too) way.) All this is just one more reason why I use Internet Explorer, even under Linux (thank $DEITY for VMware...). Say what you want about Microsoft, but they did a much better job of sticking to standards than Netscape.

_/_
/ v \
(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
\_^_/

And as a designer, getting pages to look right in both IE and NS while trying to remain W3C 100% valid is a nightmare.

I just went through this with the conversion of a customer's website. Whoever had done the site before designed it with frames, lots of text images, and not an ALT tag in sight. It was pretty scary, especially if you tried browsing it with Lynx.

I downloaded and printed out the HTML 4.01 and CSS 2 specs and went to town over the weekend, redesigning the site with standards compliance in mind. It looked pretty good in IE 4, IE 5, Mozilla M16, and even Lynx...but Netscrape 4.x completely botched the interpretation of the style information. I ended up rejiggering the makefile for the site and cobbling together some awk and sed scripts to convert the entire site from a style-sheet-based, standards-compliant design to a table-based design that Netscrape would display acceptably. Some browser-detection JavaScript redirects people to either the standards-compliant tree or the lobotomized-for-Netscrape tree.

(If you want to check out my handiwork, it's at http://www.thejewelers.com. You can also use this link to go straight to the standards-compliant site or this link to go to the lobotomized site. It's not 100% where I want it (no robot food, for instance), but it duplicates the original site's look and feel in a more standards-compliant (and faster-loading, too) way.) All this is just one more reason why I use Internet Explorer, even under Linux (thank $DEITY for VMware...). Say what you want about Microsoft, but they did a much better job of sticking to standards than Netscape.

_/_
/ v \
(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
\_^_/