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W3C On How To Fix Browsers
kellan1 writes: "The W3C has published a note Common User Agent Problems, aka why do web browsers suck, and what can you do about it?"
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BrowseX might be what you are looking for. While does have slightly expanded abilities than just a html parser, it is really quite small at about 2mb for a complete download. When they seperated the TCL libraries from the binary, it could fit on a floppy.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
i don't know about you, but I get bit by web pages that have incomplete tags all the time. That, in the context of this recommendation:
1.7 Warn users about incomplete documents and transfers.
Please read what you quote, and have a look at your browser next time. Elsewhere in the article, it's insinuated that displaying a warning on the status bar is "good enough". And you know what? IE does that. Look at the status bar next you load a partial page. You should get a little icon with a yield-like symbol and an exclamation point, saving something to the effect of "Page loaded, but with errors". How is that not warning the users? It's not IE's fault you didn't look at the warning.
Streamripper
this is my sig.
You know, you're right. When I got to a website where they've made a mistake, I want an error message. There's just no way I'd want to view the information I went there to read.
Everyone knows that the majority of slashdot users use freaking Internet Explorer, so most of you should just shut the hell up.
Yeah this sucks. Most people (including me ;-) no longer use HTTP authentication for security critical applications for this (and a other) reason -- much better to write your own auth (or use a library) as part of your session management. That way you can simulate a stateful connection reasonably well.
Oh, another thing that pisses me off about IE on the Mac (probably most other browsers as well, but I'm running into this now on Mac IE5.0) -- why the hell can't I use the standard editing conventions for my platform in a TEXTAREA? There's no way to move a word or paragraph at a time (like option or command arrow...)
Oh well....
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
What do you think point 3.2 is referring to? As far as I know, IE is the only browser that departs from the HTTP standard by ignoring text/plain as a content type. I don't consider a browser that thinks "Sure, the server says it's text/plain, but I know better" to have "comprehensive support for W3C standards".
remember jwz??
``Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.''
ound the message used repetitively over and over still nothing grows silen
Keep the TEXTAREA, add a new one <FORMATTEXT> , or something similar.
Just a quick correction: Use TEXTAREA, but add an option to it, eg. <TEXTAREA FORMAT=HTML>. That way old browsers still support it, only the formatting is missing. Also the format would be extensible.
I doubt, therefore I may be.
$ finger #timmy
$ finger #timmy
invalid use of finger
Haven't you ever watched the movie 'Sneakers'? The thing the blind guy had...
The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.
> I don't think I'm the only one that finds it quite annoying to have to exit and restart my browser in order to make it forget my HTTP authemtication information. I believe Netscape and IE both have this problem.
... and the hours of wasted programming time having to implement cookie-based (or alternative) authentication for web-based applications.
I want to train staff to click the log off button, not shut the browser down.
Si
One thing that I really like about Konqueror is that you can set the browser ID tags. Most of the time I leave them set to "None of your fucking business (Mozilla 5.0 compatable)" but if a site that I actually want to see gives me trouble I can switch over to being IE 5.5 pretty easily.
_____________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
OmniWeb for MacOS X has this functionality as well, plus the added bonus of not needing to be run on an Amiga!
--- "We also were guided by the unlikelihood that anyone would face supernatural evil armed only with technology."
How about if there's a middle ground? Netscape is uptight about everything. Missing the closing TABLE tag means you get no table at all.
MSIE makes many assumptions, and draws the table based on a best guess. It also shows some errors if there are problems in the Javascript.
How about a middle ground, where the browser does make a best guess, yet will provide an error to the designer that wants it?
--
Those are indeed useful things to know.
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults or /etc/X11/app-defaults
.Xdefaults(/.Xresources?) files. Needless to say,
I've been working on a kiosk for one of the departments at my school.
As such, I've been using Redhat/Netscape/Afterstep. I too found the
pages on x.themes.org useful.
Then I found a program called 'editres' with several siblings.
'editres' is a standard part of X. By using it and clicking on a
running X program, you can edit all those goofy settings with can be
set in the
directories and the
I went to town crippling Netscape. No more menu bar for you...
Inaddition to the X settings, there is a page on the Netscape homepage,
barried several layers deep and almost unfindable, that details
settings for Communicator which can be set through the
~/.netscape/preferences file and a netscape.cfg file, which I never got
working.
Take care
--johnny
Actually, XEmacs has an API by which X apps can embed XEmacs as a text editor. That would be fine with me, I'm a Emacs whore...
However, I do NOT want to run an Emacs key-binding tutorial with each client of mine. "No, see, to make the text bold, you have to have the hm--html elisp package, load it in your .emacs file, and the key binding is [ctrl-x, ctrl-w, b]" I don't have that kind of patience...
I'm talking simple, simple stuff. Bold, italic, headlines. Keep the TEXTAREA, add a new one <FORMATTEXT> , or something similar. You get a textarea-like window, but when you type it shows the text in the font that the stylesheet gives it, you can bold or italicize text, etc.
Actually, something a lot like AOLpress would be nice...
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
So how much did that cost you on eBay?
You forgot the step where the clueful (at least those on Win32 systems) download Opera.
What...a slashdot user who hasn't watched sneakers, I'm calling in the death squad, they'll tape your eyes open and make you watch every film in river phoenix's library, the end result will be
1 tie) Explorers and Sneakers
2 tie) Everything else You'll thank me later
Read my plan to save the Bengals
I need the <TEXTAREA> for many things, such as posting application forms, stuff that sends e-mails---most of the stuff is not in HTML. If you restricted it to HTML rendering then you've removed the flexibility of the widget.
when there is a web browser that is isn't brainsick...
It's not the fault of the browsers that they were implemented to specification. If they did in fact implement HTML rendering in the TEXTAREA widget or even if they added a HTMLAREA widget in a certain brwoser it would only cause webmasters more grief since it would be another thing which "Works in IE, doesn't in Netscape" or vice versa. If anything, blame the W3C for not coming up something that people need.
"This user violated our Acceptable Use Policy and has had their account terminated. The page you are looking for is gone for good."
In that case, the proper status code would probably be 410 Gone
No cookies to be sent to resources from third-party domains. What I mean is, if I download a web page from x.com, then my browser should not send ANY cookies to images on that page if they came from y.com. I can't think of ANY reason why this is a legitimate need.
While I agree with no cookies from outside domains, Having no images pointing to outisde domains is a bit more problematic:
Read again. He didn't say to disallow the loading of images from other sites. He said just that cookies shouldn't be sent in the HTTP request that retrieve those images. It wouldn't KILL banner ads, but it would prevent the ad companies from tracking you as you move from site to site.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Okay, say someone is nice enough to write extra code for the <TEXTAREA> so you can highlight & hit bold... The most it can do, is put the <B> tags around it, and let the browser display it back bolded. Now, just say that it does put those tags in... how usefull was that for a site that strips the html tags from the input??
Okay, lets go even further... say that the place you're posting to allows HTML tags (which is a rather large security risk) or even just some HTML tags... what good is it going to do you if it isn't displayed properly? Just because you can now highlight and press Ctrl+B or Ctrl+I or something, doesn't mean that when you see it, it'll be seen how it is supposed to.
The problems that the document is dealing with are very basic behavioral concepts that, apparently, all the browsers don't seem to agree on (when they should).
im a web designer currently living up in san jose. on my way to work at our clients site, i pass netscape's headquearters every day.
we take great joy in yelling a different fix for their broswer every day out our window;
"how about rendering tables correctly?!"
"how about filed widths being consistent?!"
id be happy to yell any fixes anyone would like to see implemented.
oh the headaches of netscape. keeps me with a job though.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
But now I'm confused. IE is better than most browsers as displaying broken HTML -- why is he mad at MS?
I love comments like these:
"Browsers started going to hell in a handbasket when they forgot why HTML was around in the first place - to make a platform-independent system for sharing information. Thus, a web page in Netscape *should* look different than a web page in IE, *however* the content should be the same. "
Coming from somebody who's complaining about the fact that webpages don't look the same on all browsers, because they don't adhere to the standards.
News flash. Content is not the most important part of a website. There goes the karma. But hear me out. Content is one of two things that are equally important, and if either are lax your website is useless. The other is user experience. You may have the most content-rich site in the world, but it doesn't matter if it looks like shit. And you can have the nicest looking site in the world, and it won't matter if it's got a fucked up interface or you have no content. Just look at some of the more abstract graphic artists' homepages out there.... They look great, but when you can't tell where to click or what clicking there's gonna do, you head straight for that little x in the corner.
When will you people learn, that the look and feel of a site Is just as important as it's content?
Frankly, I love explorer, and they do a lot more complying (is that a word?) to standards than netscape, and a whole truckload more than they have to.... W3C can jump up and down, but as it stands, IE is the standard, and it ain't gonna change for a while, because users are happy and that's what counts the most.
</rant>
--Gfunk
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
.. is the fucking advertising shit they put on them like the "Shopping bar" and all that 'I'm an AOL user-I don't know how to go to ebay myself' crap. If all the browser makers would just strip down the interface to the essential stuff for going to web pages, they could focus more on fixing the damn inconsistencies with the spec's.
The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.
Just tell them to make it not crash as damn much...
thanks, I owe ya one, anything you need me to yell at uhh, the headquarters of mellon bank?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
This already exists as an ActiveX component that comes with IE.
:-)
No one uses it on the Internet, though.. because it is ActiveX.
-- Thrakkerzog
I just started getting important e-mails that cannot be read by Liunx Netscape Mail client. Just look at the text/html attachment.
D =0 0 =00H=00T=00M=00L=00 =
Who knows what's going on here?
Another Netscape/Sucks bug?
??? (these are 3 apostrophs by the new ASCII ver 5.0;-)
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2615.200
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2615.200
------=_NextPart_000_0137_01C08D04.B3C6A6E0
Content-Type: text/html;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
=FF=FE=00!=00D=00O=00C=00T=00Y=00P=00E=00 =00H=00T=00M=00L=00 =
=00P=00U=00B=00L=00I=00C=00 =
=00"=00-=00/=00/=00W=003=00C=00/=00/=00D=00T=00
=004=00.=000=00 =
.
.
.
.
Etc....
Well, you must have been asleep when this was covered in class, as you appear to be confused about what a 404 page is. Browsers are perfectly capable of differentiating between a 'page' (ie, a 200 or 304 code) and an 'error' (a 404, 403, 500 or any other error). A 404 is not a web page, it's an error with a (hopefully) descriptive message which is usually displayed as a web page. The browser sees that it's a 404 way before it gets the rest of the page (byte-wise speaking) as that information is the first thing the web server transmits.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
Thanks for the tip, though.
All your dangifiknow are belong to us.
Ideally of course, everyone would pay professional web designers to do it (more money for me) but this is a non ideal world and there are a lot of people who would like to contribute something but don't have the means. I help them where I can, but the tools that are available are all old, use deprecated tags, use tags incorrectly or simply write tags the wrong way.
One day I hope I can produce software that would let the code-knowledge-challenged produce good code, but right now everything that comes out of all of the software I've used is totally wrong. Until then, there will still be hundreds of people writing poor code because they don't know what they are doing or they are using a program that is buggy. Then the browsers try to compensate and that's why they are messed up.
This is SO educational! -- Kintaro Oe
Er, I don't think Netscape 1.0 supported bgcolor (and I'm fuzzy on tables, but I don't remember it supporting tables). I remember for a while NCSA Mosaic was actually marginally better than Netscape 1.0 because it supported background colors (wooo!). Then Netscape 1.1 came around and blew it away. I can still remember the days when people tried to avoid using the table tag because of all of the problems it caused (not working in many browsers, slow to render on Netscape, forcing Netscape to load the entire table before it even tried to render, etc...)
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
rodent...
rodent...
Tactical nuclear weapons are a viable alternative!
What list of W3 standards were you consulting that did not include any XML? It's the biggie for me. XML DOM, XSLT, XPath, XML Schema, XML Namespaces. It's all there, and it's fast.
True, it's not a packaged part of the browser yet, but it's a fully supported release.
Netscape 1.2 was the 'breakthrough' version. It supported bgcolor, align, and (I believe) tables as well. Hmm, did it also do frames?
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
I find issue 3.1 - "Save resources retrieved from the Web on the local system using the appropriate system naming conventions." - plain silly and the proposed 'fix' would be annoying.
.txt to everything you save.
For anyone familiar with windows, the 'fix' would be like the annoying Notepad behavior of appending
Their solution implies that the browser knows best which is rarely the case.
Instead of fixing a browser that isn't broken, people should suffix their files properly.
I'm running KDE 2.1b2 and it will resume, though I haven't tried it.
.part extension) and resume it. I have to go to the site again and click on the link. I also can't give it a bunch of mirrors and have it calculate which is the fastest one whilst downloading. That was my favourite GetRight feature.
I highly recommend turning on the option for having one file operation window. It will even tell you your total download rate if you're downloading multiple files.
Another neat GetRight-ish feature (but better) is the little menu that comes up when you select a URL that isn't a link. Klipper, the ultra-neat clipboard tool asks if you want to open it in Konqueror, or (depending on availability) Nestcape or Mozilla, or it will let you pop up a window to edit your selection and then allow you to choose again. You can add more applications and regexes for processing. By default, mailto: links can be handled by kmail or mutt.
There are some features that are lacking, however. I can't click on a partial file (Konqueror adds a
konqueror does this now. (At least the browser crashing and the download progressing) The download window is handeled by a seperate process. I think kde CVS has support for file resuming, but I have not tested it yet.
-- Thrakkerzog
--Mike--
It's called amaya, and it can be downloaded from the w3c, she's slow, but faster than Mozillia M18 on win(NT4|9*|2K)tel machines, no *ix experiences with it though.
Read my plan to save the Bengals
I'm looking at /. for the first time using opera (boy, it's good and fast) I haven't tried my Internet banking yet, but this may be my browser. My company is MS only (god I miss GroupWise) now but I know now that there are options.
BWS
vs.
I'm impressed that Mozilla has come so far in it's ability to render HTML, but that's only a small subset of the W3C stuff.
--
You already did what you chided the parent for doing, with the exception of exaulting IE instead of Mozilla. Is it ok for an IE supporter to start the argument, but not ok for a Mozilla supporter to join in?
I'm confused here...
Frogs are primitive animals - so the occasional extra toe is not that unusual. But this is very unusual.
Amen
Also, Netscape tends to be a memory hog, sometimes usurping 32 megabytes all for itself (in contrast, I've never seen IE peak above 14MB). Furthermore, Netscape is so notorious for crashing (and causing lockups), that Microsoft has joked about it (type "about:mozilla" in the IE Address bar sometime). That means you won't want to browse to a Red Faction walkthrough on Netscapewhile actually playing the game; Netscape might take up too much memory and then crash, ruining both the walkthrough and the game!
IMHO, if Microsoft can keep things in IE simple and functional, they'll gain the acclaim of former Netscape 6 users. Until Netscape rewrites their entire codebase to clean up the mess they've made, they're doomed.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Shouldn't you instead:
1. Output previous poster's text to punched paper tape.
2. Enter new text, with paper tape punch turned on.
3. Get out scissors and glue, connect the two strips of paper tape.
4. Open New Comment dialogue in Lynx.
5. Turn on paper tape reader to read in combined strip of paper tape.
I'm afraid you're addicted to the new bells and whistles, dude. Next you'll be telling us you're not using a PDP-11 anymore....
... if web design could work both ways. If we could have control over design, to make stuff look good if we want to, but still have it viewable anywhere on any device, as fancy (or not) as the user wants.
Sometimes, flashy stuff is good. Some sites are downright beautiful, and it really helps to be able to make content that looks like that. But it'd be nice if that SAME content could render at least passably on Lynx and whatnot, in case you don't really care about the looks. Or better yet, so you could view web pages on your cell phone or Palm without having to rely on shaky translations of the pages.
The main problem with the internet today, and with web browsing specifically, is the mix of commercial attitudes and the "pure" internet attitude. Us netheads want things to be usable anywhere, anytime, on any device. Sure, it's ok if it looks good, but taking away from functionality for looks is nothing that I'm fond of, and I'm sure many people agree. But here come the suits, with their shareholders and boards of directors. They MUST turn a profit somehow, nevermind that it stifles creativity or usability. They make a buck, so it's all good.
That rant has no open tag.
;)
-_-
IE is the most standards compliant browser I know of. Have you developed strict HTML4/CSS1 webpages? Have you compared them between browsers?
----
"Oh, bother," said Pooh, as he hid Piglet's mangled corpse.
Bah, who cares about that?Not many.
I certainly don't.
Ironic that you use them as an example when their search tool you talk about isn't working. "We are unable to perform your search at the moment. Please try again later." Haha. =)
my bad... different poster. I thought I checked that...
Frogs are primitive animals - so the occasional extra toe is not that unusual. But this is very unusual.
As for nested tables, as long as you use the closing TABLE tag, it doesn't matter if you close TR and TD. The closing TABLE tag is required by the specs.
----
"Oh, bother," said Pooh, as he hid Piglet's mangled corpse.
If we're lucky, everyone reverts to tableless pages with grey backgrounds.
Completely unnecessary. My Site is fine with tables. It's not exactly beautiful, but that's mostly because I've kept the graphics down to a minimum(DSL connection == not exceptionally fast on upstream).
My site full HTML 4.01 compliant(almost XHTML 1.0), it renders perfectly in every browser I have available(including lynx!). I just haven't tried with it IE(no Windows installation), though I'm sure it renders fine too.
If any of you are using IE, check out the site and let me know if it's ok! I'll cower in fear now and hope this relatively obscure posting doesn't slashdot my site.
-----
"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Er, that was me, not Alan.
And I do regret it -- if I could edit the original, I'd change "most comprehensive of any browser" to "...very comprehensive support...".
There is a web browser that does what you want -- Internet Explorer 5.5.
Here is a link that explains how to create editable web pages for IE 5.5.
Basically, you are able to take an element, like a div tag, and set its "contentEditable" attribute to true. Then you add a few buttons that use IE's MSHTML editor to do things like make text bold, etc.
Since it requires IE 5.5, it won't help everyone, but it is an alternative that could be made available to IE 5.5 users.
And just so I can say it: fear my low slashdot uid!
Bah, who cares about that?
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
Since when is Canadian a language?
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
s/stagnated/suffocated/. The reason NS was stuck at version 4.x for so many years is because MS "cut off their air supply". They couldn't afford to develop a new version because there was no longer any way to recoup the development costs.
That is why we have the situation we have today. A lot of people liked (and still like) Netscape but were stuck with the 4.x browser because of MS's illegal business practices. So a lot of web developers had to develop for a bitrotten browser instead of making use of new standards like CSS (yes, NS4 had some sucky CSS support (so did IE 4)). Finally, everyone said "fuck it" and developed for IE 5.
If the browser war hadn't been "won", I'm sure we would have seen a lot more innovation from both NS and MS over the past few years. NS and MS would still be creating their cute little tags to one-up each other, and W3C, following their leads, would design an elegant solution to do the same things (and then some) The Right Way. I suspect we would've seen much more interesting developments from that competition than the relatively trivial things we have seen without it.
Since the end of the browser war, what sort of developments have we seen? IMHO, the most significant developments in the web browser have been: HTML (duh :), client-side scripting (Javascript), integrated VM (Java applets), and style sheets (W3C CSS). How many of those happened after the browser war ended? Have we seen anything of comparable signifigance since? I mean, "hover"? Give me a break! CSS came about just as the browser war was ending, and that is where the real innovation stopped. I don't think that is a coincidence.
When MS won the browser war, it wasn't just NS who lost. We all did.
Mozilla implemented then broke or removed
IE supports the hover: property for links. Mozilla is attempting to support it for everything. That's just a teensy weensy bit harder. We'll get there, though.
In addition, a Mozilla developer says "From reading the CSS WG mailing list, it looks like the exact definition of hierarchical hover is still being hammered out. I'm not sure we should put an implementation of it into our code until we are sure that we know how exactly this feature should work."
It's Bug 5693.
Gerv
Which specs are those? Can you point to an official reference?
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html32#table
Is that "official" enough, moron?
Michael
Do you have ESP?
If you use NN, you'll notice unclosed TABLEs on the Microsoft site and on pages produced with Microsoft tools all over the Web. I'm shocked, shocked that you suggest it was anything more than a simple coincidence that those pages contain an HTML error that make them unreadable for NN.
I'm suprised there isn't a recommendation that user agents should not have to reconnect to the server when te user resizes the window.
Would be immensely more useful, in spite of the abyssmal formatting, if it was larger than 50 characters by 10 lines. I don't know if this puny size is a conspiracy to keep comments short and pointless or some vague attempt to keep it "useful" for Lynx or 640x480 display resolutions. Either way, it just seems kind of ridiculous.
May I ask... :)
... Because, the majority of people in this world aren't as brilliant as you are.
... mostly cheezy thirdrate apps)
I've glanced over these recommendations, and think they can lead to a better user experience. Your users should be the ones that matter when writing software, not how you think it should be.
The better the user experience, the more accepted your software will be. The better accepted, the more acceptable. At the risk of being modded down for saying something pro-Microsoft. This is probably the reason MS Software is so successful, becuase most of their user interfaces are well thought out.
Personally, if a program has a good interface, I have a perception that it's a better quality product, simply because it has a cleaner, smoother "feel" to it, as opposed to an application that has an interface slapped on to it as an afterthought (several examples come to mind
This can also apply to a web page, or in this case, a user agent.
Nothing wrong with making things more convenient for your users.
---
The (Hopefully) Great Slashdot Blackout
My point is that a majority of NN failures come from one of the following:
there are 2 kinds of people. those who divide people into 2 kinds, and those who don't.
Some of the things it does (and still being small) includes:
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
I guess it's biting and insightful then, because Netscape6/Mozilla have better support for the basic W3C standards (HTML, CSS, DOM) than WinIE. Check out www.richinstyle.com or some other independent site if you don't believe it.
Meanwhile those of us who would like to exchange information are looked down upon and laughed at. The best web pages are `plain' and `boring' by the standards of Joe Sixpack. Joe Sixpack is a moron.
My biggest problem with TEXTAREA use is that it's prone to being lost. There are two different ways this can happen. One, you use IE and when you submit your form there's a problem. So you hit "back" to fix it and WHAT THE HELL?! You're looking at a blank form. (That's what mine does, anyway.) Or you can use Netscape, which keeps form data in place when you hit the Back button.... but it still crashes a hell of a lot. I've lost many a lengthy web-based email or online journal entry to Netscape crashes. Yeah, don't tell me I should just do my editing in notepad and paste it. That's like telling people to quit smoking - good advice but pointless to give out. :)
----
"Here to discuss how the AOL merger will affect consumers is the CEO of AOL."
grep -ri 'should work'
From the "Index Dot HTML" writeup on TEXTAREA..
I wonder why they got rid of it, although your idea seems to make better sense anyway.
... but I wish that the hideous creature which is Javascript had never, ever crawled blinking from the swamp.
Failing that I'd like a browser that had much more control over redirects and javascript. I'd like buttons on the toolbar for Javascript on/off, obey redirects on/off, and I'd also like rulesets to control them (javascript always/never for this site etc).
Why don't we be kind to people?
Because we can't be bothered for various reasons.
Do you really think that any of the big browser companies really give a shit about making a good product?
Do you really think that apple care about providing the best usibility for OS X?
Do you really think that Palm care if you are dissapointed becasue they provide you with a cheap, plastic spare stylus when you spend $400 on what they called a high quality product?
They are companies, here to make money. Thats what they do.
I'm asking seriously here. For all I know there is a very good reason for this.
with humpy love,
with humpy love,
humpmonkey
Some people write pages that stick to the HTML standards, though for the most part they are simpler in design because that's the easiest way to stick to the standard. But quite frankly, it's also usually (not always) less interesting.
The browsers will still render the same page differently because that's what the standard allowed them to do - it didn't dictate the exact appearance and left it to the browser implementors.
Besides, they create the Amaya browser, which is supposed to render correctly, and you will see it looks pretty different from everyone else's browser. Maybe we should all just use Amaya?
Well, I don't know if it actually works or not, since I'm not sure how to test it ... but Mozilla has a "Log Out" option, under "Tasks, Privacy and Security, Password Manager".
Gullibles Travels
wags
Speaking as a engineer working as a web developer (It pays alot more in Australia and I'm still working on my thesis) I always try to use tags which in my experience are common to both NS and IE and are standards compliant.
But the industry is such that we keep getting newby employees at this place to do al the web rendering of the front end to the complex back end systems. They don't really have experience in knowing which tags work in both and are standard and I don't have the time to tell them when flashy new web pages are using a browser tag.
My question is this
Does anyone know of a place (on the web etc) where you can get a compact list of most of the common core of tags support by both the HTML standard and most browsers (ie. both IE and NS)as well as a list of unsupported browser specific tags.
Isn't Arena a reference implementation?
I think there was another before it, too. (Amaya?)
Arena is part of the NetBSD packages collection, and should be buildable on any decent freenix.
Amaya is their reference html browser and html editor. Not to usable as a browser for day to day operation, but a fine editor.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
The reason why most of the content out there is shit. Is becasue web designers can't use half of the good damn tools they have!!!
I have plenty of really good, usefull ideas. But I can't use them 'casue they don't work in the browsers!!!!!
So instead of me making a really, fun/usefull/easy to use/whatever website. I have to go back and make a basic site, bacasue that they only thing I know will work.
While I agree with no cookies from outside domains, Having no images pointing to outisde domains is a bit more problematic:
Some people, my self included at one time, have web counter widgets on their page, which would be broken if out-of-domain images were allowed.
I do agree, however, this would kill banner ads.
Maybe it should be a security option?
---
The (Hopefully) Great Slashdot Blackout
You're wrong for a number of reasons.
There is no definition of how tags are supposed to be rendered. That is explicitly left open by the HTML standard, and for good reason. CSS specifies more of that, but it's still not complete, and again, there are good reasons not to fully specify the rendering.
It is simply not true that the rest of the work is "a piece of cake", not when you're dealing with something as complex as the W3C standard definitions and all their interactions. If you don't believe it, try writing a browser yourself.
But the biggest problem is that despite the fact that HTML 3.2 and 4.0 are specified, it doesn't matter because Web page authors DO NOT stick to the standards. They write buggy pages which more or less render OK in the browser they happen to be using, and then they're done. There are almost no pages which adhere strictly to the W3C definitions, and that's why results vary from one browser to the next.
The browser you want has been out since 1996. I am using it right now. There's just one little catch, though: you need an Amiga.
Whenever AWeb does a textarea widget, it has a little button in the lower right corner. If I click it, then the text is immediately loaded into the greatest and easiest-to-use text editor in the world. Whenever I tell the editor to write, the textarea gadget is immediately updated.
What is the greatest text editor in the world? It's whatever you want it to be, set in the browser's preferences.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
In this case, all browsers work according to the spec.
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
Try Opera.
:-)
Its small.
Its fast.
Its pretty close to rendering *correct* html, as well as doing a deacent job at rendering Microsofts and/or Netscapes lousy implemetations of HTML.
The downside is that they want money for their browser.
But IMHO its actually worth paying to get a good browser.
Expensive quality or free shit... Its your choice.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
When the user agent clicks on a broken link, return the user to their current page and inform them of the error. How many times have I clicked the BACK button because nobody has put this in? How hard can it be?
That's nice to hear! Too bad nobody cares enough too make web pages that supports it :(
By the way, how does access keys work in IE? Like, in what way is the key to press indicated (like, underlining wouldn't be likely...), and what key combination do you use to activate the link?
-- Cure for Cancer instead of SETI! (only w32 yet - mail and beg)
Well... If developers *coughMicrosoftcough* would make their deviations from the standards open, free, well documented and "backported" into the standard,
;-)
other browserdevelopers could implement the deviation in a manner that represented similar code the same way to the user.
As it stands now everyone has to "hack" support for MS and NS deviations.
And microsoft are known never to follow standards correctly, so why presume that they *ever* would implement support for a nonmicrosoft deviation from a standard?
Well... Im ranting...
Ill stop now.
But the idiocy of the people developing browsers at MS and NS is something that gets me a bit aggressive.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
However, this is not how web browsers interpret the data, this is how the W3C thinks web browsers _should_ interpret the data.
Engineering and the Ultimate
The W3C does have a tool you can use to see if web pages are compliant with their html specifications. Which, of course, almost no one's are.
As far as I am concerned, if this guy's web page is not html compliant, I am not going to worry if mine isn't.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Content-Type: application/postscript; qs=0.001
Content-Encoding: gzip
If saved locally, the filename on most computers should be html40.ps.gz for the applications to recognize the file type.
Wrong: Saving this compressed PostScript document as html40.ps is likely to confuse other applications.
Surely the correct thing to do is to save the _uncompressed_ file as html40.ps? Aren't most html files sent over the web sent with gzip content-encoding?
The shareholder is always right.
I love the slashdot community. _That's_ why I read slashdot. However, in general, there is a lack of editing on the part of the people posting articles. If I were here just for the articles, I would have left a long time ago. When misleading comments appear about the articles, it often makes the discussion meaningless, because there's a lot of people talking about stuff that isn't true. I love the people of slashdot, and I get upset when the editors take their responsibilities so lightly.
Engineering and the Ultimate
What about celphone browsers? PalmOS? WebTV? Crappy WindowsCE appliances in the airport business lounge?
Please! Like the servers aren't detecting the special-case client and sending them some specialized version of the site that is optimized for PalmOS or etc.
There is no way to refute that in this day an age a web site is about more than just content - it is also about presentation. Presentation means more than just formatting for more utilitarian digestion of content. Presentation gets into areas such as public image and public perception. Most everybody on the web is interested in being percieved by others to some degree of specificity. For those sites that wish to very specific in how they distinguish themselves, tight artistic control is neccesary. W3C be dammned, web designers will always turn to the technology with the features that best achieves their own artistic design goals.
Mr. G. Funk,
I really enjoyed your rant. I went to your home page to learn more about your personal philosophy since your are clearly a wise man. However, my browser was unable to render it properly. I use Mosaic v1.0. Do you know what is wrong?
Sincerely,
sv0f
Netscape*toolBar.numUserCommands: 1
Netscape*toolBar.userCommand1.commandName: findInObject
Netscape*toolBar.userCommand1.labelString: Find
Netscape*toolBar.userCommand1.commandIcon: Find
I find it useful, at least...
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
There are even bug lists with examples for each and every bug like this one. Other software developers can only dream of such detailed bug reports. The browser developers just don't regard them (or don't have time or have other priorities, whatever).
the behaviors described are not protocols officially accepted by MS. (just look at the behavior of the browsers)
Given the dominance of MS in the market, is this document even relevant? [even though it is brilliant, insightful, and written by people who care about what is going on]
I am just glad we haven't progressed to the point where Microsoft "red" is a shade between black and blue.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
HTTP/1.1 [RFC2616] allows transfer encoding. An example of encoding is data compression, which speeds up Web browsing over a slow connection.
The user agent should allow the user to set the transfer encoding in the HTTP requests sent out.
I don't understand why this pref is necessary. Browser makers generally have a much better idea of what the best transfer-encoding types are than users, and most users wouldn't have any reason to change this setting.
The shareholder is always right.
It really is Microsoft's fault.
Why? Because prior to the explosion of browsers and the web there was no good, ubiquitous technology that allowed platform independent distributed computing. There were plenty of technologies at the time, but you wouldn't find any of them on Windows machines. Rembember Bill's pre-Netscape attitude about the Internet? "Oh, it's just for hobbyists, the REAL *information superhighway* is going to be MSN!" Hence Windows had none of the built-in network-ready functionality that would help form a base for *real* distributed computing in a way that would actually work.
Once browsers became widely available for Windows (i.e. Netscape) the web began its explosion because it enabled what everyone really wanted in the first place, but Windows wouldn't give it to them, platform-independent networking. Unfortunately, since the browser represented the only real choice to accomplish this, it started being used for EVERYTHING. Not just hypertext document traversal and simple form submission for which the web was designed, but full-blown remote applications for everything you could imagine. Hence the browser wars reached a feaver pitch because now everything under the sun had to be supported, but it was on top of a model (batch-style client fetch) that just wouldn't support it.
And we're still paying the price today. My own job is in the development of a complicated user interface used to configure a complex system. Pretty much hell to do in a browser, but we break more than half of the W3C's rules because we need it to act like a real UI, and the decision to go browser-based stems ultimately from the fact that there really aren't many better alternatives (well, Java maybe, but it has it's own problems, --I won't get started on how Microsoft screwed that up, too). And now, God forbid, we're faced with more Microsoft "vision" in .NET.
If Microsoft had the slightest CLUE about networking, the world would be a different place today. Hell, we probably wouldn't even be facing a possible recession, and the dot-com implosion most likely would have been much less severe if everyone had real tools and applications that interacted on the Internet in a sensible way.
Sorry if this is just more /. sour-grape Microsoft bashing, but if anyone can't point out why I'm wrong, I'd love to hear it.
I know, I wish Slashdot had the same type of WYSIWYG editor that my weblog does. It uses Manila, from Userland, to allow WYSIWYG in IE 5+ for Windows, at least. I know that isn't the Slashdot audience, but I'm betting 30% of the hits here come on IE...
---
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
1. Have the web browser render correct pages correctly, as the #1 priority.
;) or at least know that the reason the page looks bad is because of the web page being poorly done, and not a browser issue.
2. Have the web browser try to compensate as well as possible for mistakes, as long as doing so doesn't interfere with #1, above.
I.e. follow the Internet maxim, "be conservative in what you do, and liberal in what you accept"
3. Issue a web page quality feedback to the user so if a site has bad HTML, the user knows, so she can fix the site if it is hers, let the web master know if someone else is responsible for the site, know that a company can't do web pages right (great if you are browsing a web page design company's site!
A good implementation would be, for example, an icon which shows quality, and when clicked shows any errors in the page. E.g. if the page is good there would be a smiley face and a tool tip would say "No errors - high quality page", and if the page was bad there would be a frown face and when you clicked it you'd get a window opening with a list of the errors in it. A really good implemenation would have a whole site of icons for perfect, good, ok, bad, and horrid HTML. Of course, the lower the quality, the more likely there are to be problems rendering the page...
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Browsers started going to hell in a handbasket when they forgot why HTML was around in the first place - to make a platform-independent system for sharing information. Thus, a web page in Netscape *should* look different than a web page in IE, *however* the content should be the same.
The DTD merely says that this text is in a paragraph. Unfortunately, most browsers have embraced and extended this to assume that all browsers have the exact same layout. Thus, changing font sizes or types in your browser makes the page look just plain wrong.
Back when the DTD was being followed, *everyone* built web browsers, and all was good with the world. The content was similar, and no matter what the platform, you could still browse. Then came . And . And and all hell broke loose.
Now we're in an IE world. One browser for everyone. Netscape is flailing, Mozilla is close, but MS has free run of the DTD.
If you really want browser wars to heat up, you have to make usre that the browser followed the DTD properly so the display is not driven by the content, but is driven by the end user, as it should be.
s/Flash/pdf/
The public transit website in my area is very basic (works in lynx, even), but flashy, printable pages are all done with pdf. I think this is in an example of good design.
[ot] I think a good measure for the cross-platform compatability of your pdf files is to run them through BePDF - it's fast, but drops detail on very complex documents.
Hands in my pocket
There are many reasons why two correctly-functioning browsers will display the same page differently. The <p> tag, for example, without style information, just means "paragraph" - there's no reason different browsers might not have (compiled-in or user configured) different default fonts, default spacing between paragraphs, default paragraph indentation, etcetera. Even with style information, the user can override the author's preferences.
Web pages are not Postscript or PDF documents. HTML authors who try to make pages that look exactly the same in all browsers Just Don't Get It.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Here I am, typing into a <TEXTAREA> , a widget so abhominably broken, it only understands the barest rudiments of text editing (hit key, print letter), and they're worried about broken or missing <A> tags.
Come on, people... one of the most common uses of the web these days is to post messages on a weblog-type site (like, oh, Slashdot) -- and there isn't a widget that we can use other than the <TEXTAREA> so normal people can type text in, highlight a few words, and hit a BOLD button? They have to learn to use <B> tags? What is this, 1983?
I'll tell you what -- when there is a web browser that is isn't brainsick, then I'll care about the UI implementation of broken <A> tags...
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Hello XHML (HTML described in XML)
As other posters have noted, a lot of problems have been caused by the so called "race to the bottom" where current browsers try to render the worst HTML code possible.
That is exactly why we need XHTML where the authors are forced to write DTD compliant documents to start off with or they simply will not be displayed.
This means that the people writing XML processors for a given browser don't have to worry about supporting anything outside the specification. (Although displaying useful error messages for incorrect documents may be a sticky point)
For a good description on why we need XHTML, see http://www.webreference.com/xml/column6/
Give Opera a try. It has the capability.
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Another example of this is displaying tables while loading. This is a really neat feature. It too has nothing to do with the spec.
Also, someone mentioned fixing <TEXTAREA> so that users could click a button for bold instead of having to type B tags. Interesting idea, except textarea is designed to do all kinds of things besides except html code. If you really want a bold button, write a little something up in java, I'm sure it's possible.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
it's convenient but that's not what browsers are for. those separate specialty programs should exist so you can have some easy choice over the matter, as you should with every part of your browser
I think you mean Netscape 6.01, not 6.1. I've downloaded it, and haven't found any real differences as of yet...
---
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
Yeah, but if I drive by with my windows open and my car stereo turned all the way up, and a recording of a 300 baud modem sending a patch in my cassette deck, that might work better. ;)
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
You forgot:
NS4 for linux.
NS6 for linux.
NS4 for win.
NS6 for win.
MSIE.
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
Over time, the W3 Consortium's mandate has expanded massively - but I think they've gone way overboard in terms of trying to define usability. IMHO, it's very much the browser designers' choice whether to highlight links, report errors in a certain way, etc. The whole of section 1.x is entirely beyond their "jurisdiction" (let's remember that they're self appointed here, folks).
Though I'm sure Jakob Nielson is delighted.
You still might want the user to see the message. For example to differentiate between the ISP terminating the page, and the following: "The user has died and as a result has had their account terminated. The page you are looking for is gone for good". Or, "This page was full of BS, and I decided to stop inflicting its ramblings upon the Internet." (Of course, pages full of BS comprise most of the web).
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
> Since when is Canadian a language?
A Canadian version, or more properly, an international verion of a document, would express measurements in the sensible metric system, rather than the antiquated, inconsisitent, absurd imperial measurements (so called becuase the British empire used to use them. Used to). Do you speak Canadian measurements?
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Hmmm... this quote was from a note attached to one of their recommendations. While I've been on a great number of sites that do frames very badly, frames done well can be a great benefit.
For instance, I've always been impressed with the way the Java API is layed out...
If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
I remember old browsers used to display information like:
The trend I've seen in modern browsers simply say "Loading" or "Opening" without telling me what's happening. Having the extra information would help when troubleshooting what section of the content isn't loading.
Bitch, bitch, bitch.
"Oh so and so browser doesn't render properly"
"Well, your browser introduced proprietary crap"
"At least my company isn't co-opting the world"
Blah, blah, blah. While I agree with many of the posts that lament about rendering and a lack of standards - I think we all need to get back to the basics: Useability. We've become so enamoured by our ability to 'do things', we've forgotten that the majority of people surfing beside us have little or no computer knowledge. They don't see the difference between a static HTML page and a page that was built on the fly using PHP and mySQL. What they do notice is incoherent navigation schemes and huge download times.
Having worked extensively training new computer users of all ages, I think I have more hands-on useability experience than your typical Slashdot reader. The following are some improvements that need to be made (by browser authors and web designers):
- 404 Errors, 500 Errors and so on. As one poster mentioned already: provide more information about these errors. A 404 File Not Found error means absolutely nothing to an 85 year old man. Make your own set of error pages that explain the error and how it could be fixed. Also provide a listing of other resources that are available on your site.
- Information Architecture: Make the information on your page easy to find. Don't bury your content underneath a pile of Flash animations. Sit down and plan a navigation scheme that will allow users to easily find information on your site. Any first time computer user should be able to find the most obscure piece of information on your site in under a minute.
- Another poster brought up another great point about . This is a terrible way for people to enter information. A first time comptuer user has no concept of HTML tags, as simple as they may be. We need to develop something that will allow them to highlight text and make formatting changes like they would in a word processor.
- Cluttered Browsers: Most of the browsers available today are cluttered with buttons and advertising. Keep It Simple Stupid. People become easily confused by a wide variety of buttons. ICQ is a decent example. You have Basic and Advanced Modes. Web broswers should be the same. A basic mode has your most rudimentary buttons (forward, back, stop, bookmarks) while your advanced mode allows access to the "Search" and "History" 'tools' ahem.
- Documentation: Provide some damn documentation with your browers. The current documentation is terrible. People can't find solutions to their problems... Mainly because the current documentation is poorly written and the information architecture of the documentation is terrible too. Make it simple. Have a list of "How-To" guides that explain basic concepts and provide screenshots.
They may sound like inane suggestions, but they're improvements that would go a long way in making the surfing experience of beginners a lot more enjoyable.
I don't think I'm the only one that finds it quite annoying to have to exit and restart my browser in order to make it forget my HTTP authemtication information. I believe Netscape and IE both have this problem.
All your dangifiknow are belong to us.
And there are a lot of these small things. An organisation that calls itself an official standardisation organisation should first think if they're capable of doing the job correctly before stepping forward with all kinds of 'do this and do that and everything will be allright'.
Until then, I don't see HTML as a 'standard' which is standarized by a standardisation organisation, but 'just a propriatry language'.
--
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Internet Explorer 5 is probably the most standards compliant browser ever made. Mozilla is doing a fine job, however it may still be debatable which one supports the standard more fully (after Moz is out of beta, of course).
Not all Microsoft products are susceptible to slight breakage in standards compliance. Their browser is exactly opposite of that.
Although target highlighting would be pretty cool, if more people used target anchors.
-Jason
what! You have not heard of OPERA !!!
This space intentionally blank
More flexibility in caching algorithms - for example, cache images but refresh content would speed many browsers. IE5 caches based on time periods, which are either too long or too short for many sites. Allow users to define behavior of typing in a name into the url text box. Some browsers assume that this means that you want to search, or go to a database such as realnames. Defaulting to www..com (or .org or whatever) would simplify and speed browsing.
Whilst creating my web page, I noticed that MSIE did not render the parameter "ALIGN='justify'" in a table cell.
:)
I'm stumped as to why, because it's difficult to derive a motive of world domination and global repression from this!?
Someone please help!!...
Does anyone read the articles they post? Anyone? This is not about what you can do about web browsers. This document is for web browser creators, not web page writers. It tells you what the UI of your browser _should_ act like. It offers no help to those using poorly designed browsers.
Engineering and the Ultimate
These days, your browser is a tool you use with your computer, in the same way a text editor or ftp client has been for a while. This is especially true for many users of free software, since the documentation is, by and large, on the web. Browsers, on the other hand, have grown much like a microsoft product -- more complex, more bloated, and with more features rather than simple and functional. I would love to see a browser with the html rendering abilities of mozilla or internet explorer, but without all the other functions. Such a browser might still need frames support, and possibly javascript, but it wouldn't need to be your chat program, your html editor, or your kitchen sink. It seems like most browsers fall on either end: lynx which is stable but which can't see many of the sites which are written these days, and mozilla which takes up a lot of RAM and does everything you'll ever need to do on your computer.
-thinmac
Narrative
Erhm, when I do that all I see is the default IIS 404 page, which is not useful in the least.
Agreed. The concept of user interface design did not begin at Xerox PARC in the 70s. It goes back to stuff like stone tools and papyrus manuscripts.
Ever wonder why magazines and newspapers break text up into columns rather than letting a paragraph run the entire width of the page? Hint: it's not because of adverts, or because their machines couldn't handle it. It's because they realized that eyes can't handle that much text all at once.
BTW, median screen resolution is 800x600, and it's likely to get smaller in the next few years. Think Palm.
This article would have been much more useful with a table (sorry, Netscape users) of common browsers and which ones support good features and which don't.
---- Just another spud server.
wrong, nobody wants to "experience" a web page. An in-your-face web page is a web page that puts people off. HTML isn't an entermainment medium (though some of the source is very funny) -- it's the content that's important.
No cookies to be sent to resources from third-party domains. What I mean is, if I download a web page from x.com, then my browser should not send ANY cookies to images on that page if they came from y.com. I can't think of ANY reason why this is a legitimate need.
Be a great way to eliminate web bugs and other such tracking methods. I wish my browser did this, or gave me the option to do this. If the web page came from y.com, maybe then they can have their cookies.
At least HTML 2.0 is a ISO standard...
some of these, especially the chunked encoding, transfer negotiation, and things like bookmarking negotiated URIs, isn't possible with IIS and other web servers.
so, what kind of world would that be when all of the UAs did the right thing and the servers fell over?
Leading the partnership for a Slashdot-Free Slashdot, Son of Dog
This feature worked in earlier milestones - I remember it specifically working on my own web site. When'd it break?
As much as I hate to use a management buzzword, it's good to see the W3C being proactive about this situation, and do something to remedy it. I have a feeling Mozilla will follow spec, and MS will not (as usual).
+-- (Score:-1, Moderator on Power Trip)
>> How about a middle ground, where the browser does make a best guess, yet will provide an error to the designer that wants it? <<
Amen!
(Or even a small message to the user, as long as we *still* see the content as best guessed.)
Table-ized A.I.
I'm just some putz, wanna be programmer but if I were to decide to create a web browser, I would want to follow the standards to the letter. I haven't seen anything to suggest that the standards are poorly chosen.
Anynone?
steve
Vote Quimby.
>> You know, it's hard to transmit patches by voice from a car window.<<
Perhaps not. The traffic is so slow there that you have enough time to speak every 1 and 0 until the car moves out of range.
Table-ized A.I.
A related problem is that the Sun+Netscape Java Browser Conspiracy threatened to create a Runs-Almost-Anywhere programming environment that would make the underlying operating system mostly irrelevant, so software buyers and software users wouldn't have to care if they were using MacOS, Linux, FooBSD, Solaris, or those products from Redmond, which forced Microsoft to invade the browser market to keep from getting killed.
Support The AnyBrowser Campaign at www.anybrowser.org
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
What makes browsers suck now? Everyone who makes a browser is very reluctant to follow the path of the ones who won the war. I can think of a few examples - specifically a few that IE introduced to CSS standards that Netscape rejected, Mozilla implimented then broke or removed, and no other browsers will do. I'm referring to the :hover property. Is this feature a bad thing? Absolutely not! Better than making a big hacky JavaScript solution to do the same thing. But will any other browsers support this? No. That's just stupid - and it's not the only example.
Well, this post may jump around a lot and lack consistency, but I'm rushing to the point and I think the point is clear. Browsers suck because web developers want to use new technologies being developed by companies who build web browsers that introduce them. Then the other browsers refuse to adopt the new technologies - in several cases simply because the authors hate the company *coughMicrosoftcough* that introduced them. That's just stupid.
I don't see any good reason why anyone should listen to them. A lot of the points in that document are a matter of prefference. Also, since they can't even make a working browser themselves (maya sux0rz) what can they have to teach people who have browsers several levels above their's in functionality.
Liberty.
A quick search turned up this:h p
http://www.php.net/manual/en/features.http-auth.p
Which shows how to get browsers to forget, by sending a 401 status at them...
Hopefully this helps someone...
Wrong! Think long-term: If a web designer knows that 50%+ of his audience is going to be annoyed by his site, he'll make a clean page.
/dev/null.
The e-mail thing is cool, but it would just result in every hostmaster redirecting all mail to webmaster to
--------
Genius dies of the same blow that destroys liberty.
No luck on Mozilla 0.7, but thank you for satisfying a long standing feature request of mine! I'll look for it in future releases.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Right on - The "recognized link types" have been in the HTML spec for a loooong time, and as far as I know they've never been implemented.
I've been known to suffer brain farts when reading structured sites like documentation or other chaptered text where I think "I want to go and look at the last chapter" and I go and click on the back button taking me somewhere else. This usually happens when there is no navigation links constantly displayed in the window. (For example, in the common HTML rendering of the Linux HowTo format.)
One implementation I could see is that the browser could display a special toolbar with Next Section, Prev Section, Contents, Index, etc when it encounters these link types on a page. I can't be too hard to do -- for example Windows Help has a similar implementation where pages know about the site structure. (And sure, this problem could be solved by Frames, but why not present this knowledge to the browser and let it deal with it.)
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
i think its just a bugfix, it's still nowhere close to mozilla's speed and memory footprint though.
*** For a better tommorow, change your life today ***
hahahahahahahahahahahahaha....
! !!!!!
slashdot
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
i remember reading up on these error messages a LONG time ago (at least six years) and thinking about how rarely i see 410 Gone. nowadays i sysadmin a couple of domains: do you know how to properly set this up in apache? i'd like to stick to the standard error codes as much as possible.
- j
(Netscape's version would just call vi!)
And just so I can say it: fear my low slashdot uid!
rodent...
rodent...
Tactical nuclear weapons are a viable alternative!
Yeah, I sure wish Quicktime wouldn't steal my PNG association from Netscape. It automatically scales the image to fit in your window. That sucks.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I'm surprised that they didn't say anything about Microsoft's Embrace and Extend program. I've seen Netscape get a bad rap ALOT because it poorly renders poorly written code.
I'd say it does the right thing alot and guesses a lot less at what the developer was trying to do. But the way it looks to the average user is "This site works in IE, but not in Netscape, Netscape must suck." Usually its the page that sucks in my experience.
Now I think that somethings could be done better, but we get these developers who write everything only looking at IE and then when their code doesn't work in Netscape, again Netscape gets a bad rap. But doesn't Netscape hold developers to a higher standard than IE?
there are 2 kinds of people. those who divide people into 2 kinds, and those who don't.
nc.
Netscape were doing well for a while - but they too had their dominance in the industry. They were so smug with what they ahd accomplished, they saw no need to improve. Communicator was an attempt to fight back at MS, who were building an impressive web browser. And, NS only went half-way with it. It was hardly anything new and impressive.
That is why we have the situation we have today. A lot of people liked (and still like) Netscape but were stuck with the 4.x browser because of MS's illegal business practices. So a lot of web developers had to develop for a bitrotten browser instead of making use of new standards like CSS (yes, NS4 had some sucky CSS support (so did IE 4)). Finally, everyone said "fuck it" and developed for IE 5.
Totally wrong. IE4 was probably the first browser to actually do CSS right. Now granted, IE2 and IE3 were worlds behind NS2 and 3 respectively, but IE4 is the one that sped away in the technology race. But you're only partially right on the issue of NS4 having some sucky CSS support... it had VERY sucky CSS support. Btw, you're comment about the hover function. Geez dude. Are you so myopic that you could only get that from the statement? The point was is there is a lot of very basic simple support that Netscape just neglected to product. Duh.
When MS won the browser war, it wasn't just NS who lost. We all did.
Pffft... You know, as a Linux user and open source advocate, the only things I find myself jealous of Windows users are their web browser and well design multimedia architecture. IE is so incredibly nice and it's such an excellent browser - faster, more stable, and cleaner overall. The only way we've lost is that we just don't get the source to IE and someday, that might even change. *shrug* Of course then again, I'm building my own technologies that are 100% browser independant (thankfully there's no conflicts over ECMA standards :-).
Saying things like "hey, implement this in 'useful' ways" may as well be the same as saying, "hey, we have this cool idea for defining web structure, so every browser should come up with some incompatible way to turn that into user interface." But the thing is, we don't want to have unpredictable UIs at the whim of the browser designer -- we want our web app to behave the same on every browser. In this one recommendation, they've just committed the same sin that they're complaining about in every other recommendation, which is the crazy proliferation of browser behaviors in the face of "standards."
Yeah, but some people just cut and paste from other people's web pages the DOCTYPE tags (with no understanding whatsoever of what it is all about) and then code to a different standard. Just heard about that this week. Sad but true.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Braille?
How's that supposed to work?
Little pimples raise up on the screen?
What am I missing?
t_t_b
--
I think not; therefore I ain't®
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
is that so many browsers don't render pages correctly.
- There is a clearly articulated definition of what tags are supported
- there is a clearly articulated definition of what the tags are supposed to do and how they are to be rendered
My question is why do so many browser not render correctly? What is so hard? One of the hardest parts of programming is requirements definition for the software being written, and getting the customer/boss to clearly articulate what they want the software to do and how it should perform. Once you have the iron-clad requirements written down, the rest of the work is a piece of cake - it is implimentation and testing against the requirements.
In the case of HTML, where there are clear definitions for 3.2 and 4.0, a list of what is deprecated and what is supported, if web page authors stuck to the STANDARD and not use browser specific tags, then there is no reason that the page should not display identically on each persons browser. I find it unfathomable that this is not the case.
"Microsoft has made computing accessible to a population who would otherwise not be able to use computers" - B. Kernigha
funny, the whole article can be summed up by saying sloppy html and other formats/languages cause crappy, slow loading, confusing webpages.
Not that the article isn't informative, but hardly anything that most experienced web designers don't already know. Problem is getting the inexperienced and novice designers to follow it, heh, or even understand it. I'd say that the majority of the web is made up of novices.
exactly why open source kicks so much ass.
Checking your work on three different browsers to see that they all look the same is silly. And this isn't even considering the remaining few people who use Macs.. :)
I hate web sites that give you a 20 characters wide textarea when most of us are using at least 1024x768 for browsers. I personally use 1600x1280.
You shouldn't.
I think that scientific design says that the ideal width of text lines is not as long as possible. The eyes have to scan too many times horizontally. It is better to keep the number of scans per line to 2 or 3 (from memory).
So even when I have a big monitor, I don't maximize my browser window.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
What version of Netscape were you using? Navigator 4.73 on Linux silently fails on startup if any one of those options is set.
Works fine here on Navigator 4.76, Linux / Intel / libc 2.1.3. There are probably enough bug fixes and small refinements in 4.76 to make it worth the upgrade.
Then I found a program called 'editres' with several siblings. 'editres' is a standard part of X. By using it and clicking on a running X program, you can edit all those goofy settings
I've played with editres a little, but found it fairly daunting when used with any really large apps. Most of the X resource hacking I've done has been done by hand -- most well-behaved X apps will document their resources in the man page. I learned a LOT reading the xterm and olwm/olvwm (my window manager of choice) man pages and looking at some sample code.
I've been working on a kiosk for one of the departments at my school. As such, I've been using Redhat/Netscape/Afterstep. I too found the pages on x.themes.org useful.
Hmm, for a dedicated Netscape kiosk, I wonder if you could run it entirely without a window manager...
yes, you can. but only a basic list. these are problems that would be rooted out by a QA cycle in the first place. the real test of a site designer or html coder is to know what works between the browsers. often redundant code is inserted to address both browsers.
what would be far far more helpful is to document how WC3 html "desires" match up to how browsers REALLY render the code.
that would not only allow a designer to check his good html vs. a list of the little bugs and nuances of the browsers, but also point out to the browser makers in a point by point list where exactly they are causing headaches.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Proprietery tags. DUH!
And netscape's horrible instability... But that's probably just because of it being programmed in visual c++...
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IE is not the most standards based browser. IE failed to complet its DOM (document object model).for example, I would like to see who has more trouble providing information on plugins? Netscape or IE? I am not a spokesman for netscape, I run Linux so we know that netscape is a volital whore especially the new 6... But either way it is more standards based than IE. I wonder if you feel stupid because you said something created by Microsoft was standards based. PLEASE!
"I am an enigma wrapped in a pork chop sandwich..." quoted from Lawrence Zoldowski II 1998
I've used it before and it makes a noticable difference when cookies don't have to be sent for a lousy menu jpg/gif.
rodent...
rodent...
Tactical nuclear weapons are a viable alternative!
This attitude about Web design is one of the reasons the Internet went broke. (another one is lame, hopelessly flawed business plans)
Web designers need to remember that Web design is not print. Documents will be changed by users and users should have that freedom. Worry more about information architecture, it's the content that ultimately matters. Design shouldn't just be decoration that viewers have to conform to, design should help viewers to better comprehend the information they're seeing.
What about handicapped users? Or those who need larger type to see? What about celphone browsers? PalmOS? WebTV? Crappy WindowsCE appliances in the airport business lounge?
Web design extends traditional design towards architecture and engineering. Good Web design is flexible. It doesn't matter what the building looks like if it falls on your head.
Strict adherence to standards is the best thing we've got. Letting go of the bells and whistles is better for your clients, your audience, your bottom line and your sanity.
try http://www.redcross-cmd.org/Chapter/cprfact.html.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
What I dont understand is why browsers don't have better support for downloading and resuming of files. Why do programs like GetRight and Gozilla have to exist, catching clicks in browsers and downloading for us? And it would be twice as good if the browser could crash, and your download window keep downloading. I personally run mozilla and I'll use wget for huge files and resuming. It would be nice if I could do it right in mozilla.
Note: this is certainly outside the scope of the linked WC3 article, but is entirely relevant to the headline of "How to Fix Browsers".
.Xdefaults and restart Netscape:
I came across some useful bits on x.themes.org a few weeks ago about how to modify your xdefaults file so that Netscape supresses all the useless toolbar buttons ("Shop", "Spend", "Buy Stuff From Netscape"). Just add the following (my trimmed-down version) to your
*toolBar*myshopping.isEnabled: False
*toolBar*destinations.isEnabled: False
*toolBar*print.isEnabled: False
*toolBar*search.isEnabled: False
*toolBar*viewSecurity.isEnabled: False
*toolBar*home.labelString: Google
*home.tipString: Search here
*urlLocationLabel.labelString:
*bookmarkQuickfile.labelString:
(unfortunately, the source file doesn't have the creator's name in it, so I don't know who to thank for whoever discovered/compiled this info... but it's nice indeed having a browser that just has buttons for Back, Forward, Reload, Google, and Stop)
Vendors can't claim to be compliant if they don't pass the test. And web developers would know exactly how to make their codes portable.
We all know how IE and Netscape each have their foibles with the standards, but what about Konqueror? I've been using it lately and I think it's really good (especially for a non-IE/non-Netscape browser).
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Personally, I think this is quite a well written article, contrary to what others may have to say. Who can say that they wouldn't mind to know if a link was broken? Or if the page hadn't loaded just yet, and the we browser made it a little more obvious? The protocols implimentation is also a verry well written part of the article - the W3C mentioned a lot of issues that would be helpfull to not only programs like IE, but also Netscape. I think that mozilla especially should take a look at this list, and be able to support most if not all of the specifications laid out by the W3C - although some of their suggestions are a bit... far fetched. Connection intensive actions, such as trying all the DNS entries *might* be a bad idea for someone who is on a modem.
--NovaScorpio
Matt
Or maybe that wouldn't be a good idea...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
ya know? the fuckin' things that plug in and raise little bumps so you can feel the text - ya know? motherfuckin' braille...
moron.
News for turds, shit that splatters
the problem with web pages out there are not the browsers but the web sites, the site design, lack of content, flash, and multimedia, etc...
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
You're thinking of the accesskey attribute of HTML 4. Very nice, if you have a browser that supports it, like iCab. There may be others I'm not aware of or have forgotten at the moment.
Also, Opera allows you to access nearly all the browser features with keyboard commands. I don't think it supports accesskey (yet), so you can't move around in the document itself.
-ChristTrekker (moderating today)
1. The "google" button assumes you have www.google.com set as your home page. You're smart; you get the idea.
2. The (expletive) lameness filter made me submit the above post three times because I tried to have a row of **** setting off the code fragment from the rest of the post. Lame.
I think we need two formats.
One that does the thing HTML was originally designed to do, but improves on it. Some combination of langauages such as TeX and HTML. Something that describes what the different parts in the page are, and lets the client decide where to place images, if a table of context is needed etc.
AND one that can be used by market-droids to make webpages that the server descides how they sould look.
Trying to combine these both two very different goals into one language is obviously not A Good Thing.
-- Cure for Cancer instead of SETI! (only w32 yet - mail and beg)
Note: The authors do not encourage Web content developers to use frames as they can cause many usability and accessibility problems.
Amen! Testify! Not that buzzword-spouting, frappuccino-swilling dot-com "web designers" will be reading the document, but this sentence, if nothing else, should be required reading for people producing web pages.
Sorry about the f---edcompany.com-style rant, frames aren't nearly as common as they were 2-3 years ago, but they still drive me bonkers.
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
its a very good browser :)
sheep for the sheep human for the human i just wonna keep my soul alive
may his writhing soul rot in pieces
News for turds, shit that splatters
THAT is something I really miss about web pages! I want to be able to use browse almost without using the mouse - like, (the most important) links should have keyboard shortcuts. For example, one letter of the link could have a different color - and then you just pressed like ctrl-a-[the link key} and you were en route. This comment field in slashdot should also have a keyboard interface - like 's' to make the 'subject' widget gain focus, 'c' to enter the comment field, and 'a' to check/uncheck the post anonymously checkbox.
And no, don't say 'do it the lynx way'. Tabbing between al links isn't a fast and smooth way. Intelligent keychoices would be.
I think this is supported in (some late) HTML-version - but I doubt there are browsers that support it.
-- Cure for Cancer instead of SETI! (only w32 yet - mail and beg)
It's dangerous to second guess the web designer. The 404 page may contain useful information for the user. Sure, most pages unhelpfully state "404 File Not Found" and little more, but it's possible for a page to be much more helpful. A site could have their 404 page automatically do a search to find the requested resource. Here is a good example at Wizards of the Coast. A site could present a list of resources the site does, since one of them is likely to be helpful. Perhaps the page is gone because the client's account was terminated. I'd like to receive a message like "This user violated our Acceptable Use Policy and has had their account terminated. The page you are looking for is gone for good."
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"...and what can you do about it?"- is saying if you are a developer make you own browser. Not if you are using a browser check out these options to make your day more sunny.
I found section 1.3 interesting (``Allow the user to retrieve Web resources even if the browser cannot render them''). In my experience, it's often not the fault of the browser maker, but the site designer. How many times have you tried to view a video or audio clip, only to be diverted away because the javascript on the web pages can't tell if your browser has a plugin for the media type (as if you really need a plugin in the first place...)
--
One of the many things that is better in the Mac version of IE (taking your word about the shortcoming in the PC version) is that you can indeed access the saved auth info for each authentication domain individually.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
I think we need two formats. One that does the thing HTML was originally designed to do, but improves on it. Some combination of langauages such as TeX and HTML. Something that describes what the different parts in the page are, and lets the client decide where to place images, if a table of context is needed etc. AND one that can be used by market-droids to make webpages that the server descides how they sould look. Trying to combine these both two very different goals into one language is obviously not A Good Thing. Some people would say that we already have two formats: HTML and Flash.
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where there's fish, there's cats