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Helping the Apple Web Community w/o an Apple Computer?
ptaff asks: "Web developing can burn some braincells when trying to get a page to render fine in all browsers. Using XHTML/CSS on Win/Linux, thou can get a 'satisfying' result among PC browsers (MSIE, Mozilla-and-derivatives, Konqueror, Opera) - but when it comes to Apple browsers (Mac-MSIE, Safari, Omniweb, iCab, and others), and there's no Mac around to test, how can you tell if things will work out fine? I personally experienced a CSS border directive on an input tag that completely messed up a simple document. There are some CSS compatablity sheets (this
comes to mind), but can you test further than that? is there any way a web developer can check for Apple-browser-compliance without a Mac?" If only HTML validation were as simple as submitting pages to the proper emulator, and viewing the results.
We have language standards to make cross-platforming easier. If you'd like to check to see if your page is w3c complaint, go here.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
If only HTML validation were as simple as submitting pages to the proper emulator, and viewing the results.
<rant>
Should be even simpler than this
-- if you code XHTML, then all XHTML compliant browsers should render the same.
-- if you code CSS, then all CSS compliant browsers should render the same.
-- if you code XYZ, then all XYZ compliant apps should do the same thing.
Isn't this what standards are all about?
Imagine if different electric companies supplied different types of power, while all "be standards compliant"
Image if different car companies produced cars that did not comply to "the standard road" or "the standard gas pump"
Do I have to test my public-access TV show on multiple channels, on multiple different TVs, just to make sure it works on all of them?
It's NUTZ! </rant>
10b||~10b -- aah, what a question!
Remind me again why I gave them money?
Funny, your name doesn't have a star next to it.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Dude. How do you include html-like tags in your text while also using html-like tags in your text?
/.
I've never figured that out on
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
If only HTML validation were as simple as submitting pages to the proper emulator, and viewing the results.
. org
If only Slashdot HTML validation were as simple as submitting pages to the W3C Validator, and viewing the results.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://slashdot
Yeah, if only... oh, wait, it is.
Of course, testing for validation and compliance to standards is not quite the same thing as "does my web page look okay in Arbitrary Browser Foo," which is what the submitter was asking about. At some point you simply have to say, "any browser will work as long as it doesn't suck with regards to published open standards."
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
no offense but if you are doing any kind of web development you better have all the major platforms on your desk:
A Mac with old Mac IE and new Safari (Mozilla/Netscape and Camino optional)
A PC with various flavors of IE and Mozilla/Netscape.
A Linux machine with the current Red Hat, with Mozilla and Konqueror.
Personally I have a Mac and Linux machine with VMWare running multiple OSes.
Sure you can dig into iCab and Opera and fringe browsers but the above list is good enough (I can just hear the Opera user(s) priming their flamethrowers, sorry guys).
Also keep this in Mind: the Mac folks are really trying hard for a standards-compliant browser that ALSO renders all the quirks of IE and other browsers. So if your code doesn't work right on the Mac there's a button right there on Safari that let's you submit the page to Apple as a bug. Maybe it's your bug or misunderstanding but if not you can be sure the Mac folks will fix it.
Check out David Hyatt's blog.
This story's at three comments, and already I'm hearing that "if you just use standards, it'll be OK." That's a load of bull, actually. Standards make the cross-platform problem easier to solve, but there are always differences in interpretation of a spec. Safari has CSS bugs that Mozilla doesn't, and IE's Javascript parser does things differently than Opera's. Standards support helps this situation immensely, but by no means is it a panacea. I'm a big fan of designing sites that validate to XHTML 1.1 and CSS2 (and indeed, all of mine do), but it's still a lot of effort to come up with something that both looks good and works similarly and accessibly across five major browsers and three platforms.
My advice to the poster is to do one of three things:
got standards? --- http://www.w3.org/
...don't ask Apple Computer.
;)
Look how this page renders on Windows (IE and Mozilla), the developers they're targetting to switch:
http://developer.apple.com/ue/switch/windows.html
Then change your client ID to an Apple, and watch it render correctly.
For iCab, you can use the 68k version under an emulator like Basilisk II.
Quality or Quantity, don't tell me they're the same.
Just take a screenshot of how it looks in a good browser, then change the site over to an all imagemap site. // just kidding!
:)
I'm not evil - I'm just compiled that way.
The thing I think is pretty great about Mac browsers (at least Safari on OS X) is that they do a pretty darn good job with the kind of crap they are thrown.
I use Safari almost exclusively and I browse all sorts of sites that I know were only previewed in winIE or were designed specifically for it and very very rarely have any sort of major rendering problems.
In fact, most sites look better in Safari because the text anti-aliasing looks so much nicer. Like, even Slashdot looks all right! Who would of thunk?
sig
Go kiss-ass to the graphic artist, who, if is respectable at all, will at least have a PowerMac or three in his/her office.
:-p
If not, quit your job, and find a job at a respectable place of business
Error 407 - No creative sig found
I happen to own a powerbook 12", and my experience is that everything that runs fine on mozilla / conqueror will work in mozilla/safari/MSIE on the mac.
In fact, the only time I use MSIE at all, is when some webpage puts in some wierd mandatory IE only B$. (although I am seing less of this, maybe im just staying away from those sites now)
But in all reality, Safari uses konqerors khtml engine, and mozilla is mozilla, and mac users are moving from IE to Safari.
This
As I work in webshop (yes, we're still around after the dot bomb), we regularly have clients that don't give a crap about browser compatibility or standards. However, our development team (myself included) do care.
We code and validate our sites to HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0. But we still test our sites on IE (for both Mac and Windows), Mozilla-based browsers, and Safari. Why? Because while coding to standards works great for us developers, these browsers still have bugs (especially CSS bugs). We routinely find CSS bugs in IE 5.5 for Windows, a few here and there in Safari, and (ironically enough) the current worst of the lot: IE 5 for Macintosh (ironic because, as some of you know, this browser used to be considered the most CSS-compliant). We don't sniff for browsers - we just try to avoid markup and style definitions that don't consistently work across the board.
Yes, it takes more work than just validating code. However, it still 10x less work than doing hacks and tricks to make stuff work in that piece-of-crap Netscape 4.
The Gecko based browsers are on the Mac, and Safari is based on KHTML (Konqueror). They seem to perform nearly identically to their Linux counterparts. As for IE, it was spawned off the early 5 series on the PC so it has it's own quirks, but since Microsoft has said they aren't releasing any new versions everyone is switching to Safari. I would think your safest bet is to test on the most recent releases of Konqueror. I can't really address OS 8 and 9 users, but I think many of them run Netscape 4.75.
Safari uses the KHTML renderer from the KDE project. The same renderer is used by KDE for the Konqueror browser.
Apple's Safari team has already submitted patches to the KHTML code base. Over time Konqueror, and Safari will be the same. The one caveat is that Safari will have fixes, often before Konqueror due to a lag incorporating the Safari team's patches.
"how can you tell if things will work out fine?"
Put the site up. Mac users aren't exactly a quiet bunch when something doesn't work quite right on their machines. Believe me, you'll know rather quickly if something doesn't work.
You could test everything you needed!
Virtual PC to test all Windoze browsers and OS X's BSD environment to run Unix Browsers!
Who "woulda thunk" that there are still web developers out there who haven't figured this little ditty out?
When making sites for a line office at NOAA (US gov't office), I always wrote for two browsers. You have to write for Internet Explorer because it'd bring, even in NOAA where NS 4.7 was pretty much forced on you, 90% of your hits, and Mozilla/Netscape 6+ "for everyone else".
The most important thing about Mozilla, and what impressed me most with the excellent browser, is that Mozilla's behavor was the same across platforms when it came to Javascript, CSS, and other rendering. More importantly, rendering errors showed the same behavior in the same version of Mozilla, regardless of platform! That's impressive.
Sure, fonts, icons, etc are *slightly* different, but I made some pretty dhtml intensive stuff (click "Query Storms") that behaved exactly the same on Linux on Windows, Linux, and both Mac OS 8-9 & OS X.
You basically have two choices. Make a Google-like site with such simple html that it'll render correctly everywhere, even in Lynx, or program higher-end, thicker client, dhtml jive for IE and Moz. That covers the vast majority of your hits (IE) and will give the option to most anyone on an alternative OS to, at worst, download a free browser that'll behave exactly as you'd expect (Moz). (Okay, three choices -- make two sites. One's dumbed down for lynx, the other for IE/Moz.) Now you've covered Mac, Linux, and heavens knows what else just by testing, give or take, on Windows. Mozilla's good enough that it is a platform.
Check for DOM (document.all and document.layers), give a warning to anyone who doesn't conform, and feel good that you've give people who *need* to see your pages an option without wasting hours and hours testing and writing for browsers that will make up a very low volume of your visits. Yes, you potentially exclude Granny Smith on dial-up with Mac OS 8.1 or Joe Apple Diehard who only uses Safari and won't even touch Camino, but let's face it, you're better off spending that time writing a new site and reaching 99% of a new audience anyhow.
Good luck!
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
try the browser cam. CSS-D inhabitants swear by it.
--jdp Maintainer of VisEmacs
for the Department of Energy... our team tested on IE 6.0, IE 5.0 (IE 5.x is still pretty widely used), NS 4.7 (the hardest to support), and Safari 1.0.
:)
We didn't really test for Mozilla/gecko based browsers since in usage, it was statistically insignificant. We probably wouldn't have tested on Safari either, but it's all four of our's favorite browser.
The world pretty much still revolves around two browsers: IE 6.x/5.x and NS 4.7. The latter is deployed everywhere still, and is in fact, the default browser for the DOE. I really hate that, because i'd really rather support the standards compliant NS 7.0 rather than 4.7, but we don't have the resources/time/energy to do that.
I believe in keep it simpel stupid. ANy web page I put up is very basic and works in all browsers very basic html can be much more effective then fancy cutting edge shit .
OK flaim the hell out of me but I still believe in what I just said.
http://Lenny.com
Personally, if a site works well without change in IE, Mozilla, and Konqueror, then I'd take that as pretty good evidence that it's using standards and should work anywhere. But then I'm not a web designer by trade...
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
WOW! So sorry anybody had to go through that crap.
I have had Wang, IBM, Amiga, 6 generic PCs, finally a couple of Apple machines, a G4 laptop, a G3 laptop, finally 25 DV iMacs last year and now 8 G4 duals and 17 iMacs (classroom.) The odd bad motherboard or bad stick of ram from time to time.
It's so cool to yell at the kids,"Don't you EVER reboot without asking first!"
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (Wilde)
iCab may not be upto snuff yet (CSS is still not complete - vers 3.0 is suppose to get this fixed)... but it has a error reporting function for HTML ... user setable from HTML 2.0 to HTML 4.0 Strict.
Theres a little smiley/frowny face right next the URL/location bar, if its smiley then the site is compliant - frowny, not. Click on frowny to get an error report. You can change it thru prefs.
MrMac
*** I Know Everything, But Can't Remember It All At Once ***
Really. They have them in shops. You go to the boss and you say, 'Some trifling small but well heeled cashed up segment of the market uses these damn fancy computers and I don't see how I can do my job effectively if I don't have one. I'd like a G4 Powerbookintosh with 64 Farnarkles of electric eels and 256 MongoBlobs of front side antipasto with the little keyboard light thing and stuff.'. Yeah. That's what you do.
And what is that frickin' dot. I can see it you know. I can see the little dot up there all white and dotty under the green laser pointers all green and pointy.
Now wash your hands.
This problem is really simple to solve.
Most Mac users, and some Mac browsers (like Omniweb) are switching over to Safari, and Safari uses the renderer from KDE's Konqueror!
So here's your solution: test your web pages in Konqueror on Linux.
Subscribers can choose whether or not to have the star displayed next to their user name.
CSS advocates claim that it can help with cross-browser problems, by eliminating the complicated HTML that includes tables, frames, and "spacer" images. If you try to browse Slashdot in Netscape 7.1, you're inclined to think that they have a point. But there's no real way to test this until more browsers implement more of CSS2 -- and implement it correctly.
Meanwhile, the W3C people continue to invent new CSS stuff faster than the browsers add support for it. Oh well!
I personally use a PowerBook and VirtualPC. The combo of OS X, VirtualPC (everything x86) and Classic (OS 9 browsers) life couldn't be better. I can work anywhere, anytime and do my testing.
OK, so life could be better, I could be independently wealthy.
Maybe someone can supply the service --
Accept an HTML page via email, or a URL to such a page, render it with a specific browser/machine combination (say, specified in the command line), and email back the redered page as a PNG or GIF.
Send an email indicating how far back in the queue the request is, with an option of canceling jobs that haven't been run yet.
That way, I could use "render-by-email" to simulate the joy of Windws IE.
Ratboy.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
I've been reading Zeldman's book Designing for Web Standards at safari.oreilly.com and it addresses this quite well. Safari and Mac IE 5.2 are very compliant to standards moreso than any version of IE on Windows, so it's not as big a deal now as it once was during the browser war era. Yeesh what a mess that was.
You can rest assured that as long as you don't code with a certain browser in mind your site(s) will look pretty close across platforms, IF you design with standards in mind. Losing table based layouts or at least minimizing their usage is one of the best things you can do to increase consistency across browser version/platform. Try not to use deprecated code either, like the venerable <br> or bgcolor = * and <P align="right"> etc. Always specify a DOCTYPE.If you can move away from using old pre-war coding practices you'll be a step ahead in the fight. Check out these sites for more info on coding pages that look good in any browser on any platform:
Designing with XHTML and CSS means not leaving anybody out. From Web-enabled phones to IE 6 to text only browsers like lynx or links you'll only need to write your code once. I say do away with javascript browser detection scripts and write once, run (almost) anywhere!
There is a last resort you can go to if you must. Macromedia Flash looks the same in any browser provided you have the proper plugin. :) Although that is not my recommended solution.
You've got an easy breezy wind at your back...most of the time.
With this in mind, it's likely the discrepancies in the two browsers will remain minimal.
It's called Browsercam and here's an example set of screen shots of an old version of Jeffery Zeldman's site. It's not email based but the gist of the service is as you described.
It sounds like an ideal way of testing a site without having every popular platform / browser combination available.
...so I used it as an excuse to buy a mac. Of course, everyone in the whole world wants a mac, but most people can't justify it. If web design is your business, you now have a legitimate excuse! You no longer have to steal quick glances at the beautiful gleaming machines in a shop window, afraid that one of your linux friends might see you. And if they start giving you a hard time about it just say that you need that "piece of junk" for work.
But two months down the road, when the seductive glow of the pulsing sleep indicator makes you use your new Mac as your primary machine, you'd better have an excuse when your linux buddies spot this among the headers in your emails:My name is Orestes, and I'm a mac user.
The specifications leave certain decisions up to the browser (and the user), so it's never going to be pixel-for-pixel identical. However:
If you test in Konqueror, it should do fine in Safari as well. If
you test in Mozilla (either Navigator or Firebird), you've got Camino
covered also. Didn't OmniWeb recently switch to one of those two
rendering engines also? That of course leaves out MSIE, the mac
version of which has very different rendering quirks from the Windows
version, but Safari will hopefully phase out the Mac version of MSIE
within a couple of years.
My problem is MSIE for Windows. Even assuming I'm willing to boot
into Windows for testing, how can I test in both IE5 and IE6? I
am *not* going through the uninstall/reinstall process every time
I want to test a web page. Currently I'm just writing to specs and
*hoping* it will do mostly okay in MSIE, but in practice I know that
there will be times when it doesn't. I recently discovered, for
example, that MSIE5.5 does not support applying CSS attributes to
child elements (e.g., ".sidebar > div { padding: 0.5em; }"). I
haven't tested that in IE6... do I really have to get VMWare just
to test my web pages?
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Does the verison of IE for the mac render pages the same as on a pc. If so then wouldn't a web developer want to develop everying on a Mac? I mean you can run IE, Safari, Mozilla, Opera. With a little work you could run Konqurer, Galeon, older version of Netscape. Guess it depends if all of these broswers render the same despite the OS they are running on.
Use Camino.
Now if only they would actually update the thing.
While you guys r at it, how does a Maccer or Linux user checks it if there is no Windows PC available?
--------
* Sigh *
That is what I found the best way to do that. If you are going to need to test for browser compatibility you will need something that will run at least the Major OSs out there. Windows 95-XP, OS 9-X.2, Linux. And I normally check with the Major browsers. IE, Netscape, Mozilla, Safari, Opera, and Lynx (Yes Lynx). I found that IE and Opera is different from different versions and different platforms so you have to check with each platform. Netscape and Mozilla render about the same so I usually just use one or the other. Safari is only on the Mac. And Lynx looks the same on almost any platform. I find I do most of my development in Mozilla (Mostly because it has the best Java Script debugger) then I check it out in IE then in Safari, when I am done then I give Opera a try. They all usually do a pretty good job at staying standard except when they interpret css, Mozilla and Netscape does the best job at that, IE and Safari tie in different way. Opera just kinda stinks all around. But IE biggest anoyance is using tables it behaves differently all the time and you need to be very strict to get the page look just right.
But to answer your question if you dont have a Mac. I would at least test it with IE, Netscape/Mozilla and Opera. If they all look the same there then the others should do it to. If not then it is probably a bug on their end.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
That's what I use which makes it all the more disturbing that VPC doesn't work on a G5. I'll be upgrading all of our G4's to G5's soon. Right now the Mac BU at MS has probably been told to keep working on upgrades for MSN and that a VPC upgrade is not even close to a priority. Hey, if I were a convicted, abusive, predatory monopolist bent on world domination, I would do the same thing.
Looking over these comments, it seems the solutions available, from best to worst, are :
1) You're worried about how it looks on OS X? Get a machine which runs OS X ! You'll be glad you did.
2) Check your page on both Mozilla and something else which uses the KHTML open-source engine in Safari, as those are open-source cross-platform rendering engines.
3) use W3C validation engines and tell users any problem is with the browser.
Why the fuck would you want to waste your time writing code to make accomodations for such a tiny tiny minority of web users? Seems like a royal waste of time.
If they can't view standards compliant pages correctly...it's on Apple's shoulders to fix.
Does flash render the same on all browsers? If so this could be an option. I know a lot of people hate flash but it does have its good uses. Yeah it won't work on some browsers. But for a good majority of people I think it might be a viable option.
I'm a Mac user, and have used most of these, so here's my pointers.
IE: One would assume anything that looks OK on IE/Win would be OK, but I'm not sure...
Netscape/Mozilla: Same goes, recent versions of Netscape use Gecko anyway.
Safari: uses KHTML/KJS, so anything which looks reasonable in Konq ought to be fine for Safari.
Camino/Chimera: Uses Gecko. See Mozilla.
OmniWeb: v4.5+ use the same engine as Safari. Previous versions CSS/JavaScript support was a joke that made me switch to Camino. Don't even try to support early versions.
iCab: haven't tried this one personally, but I have heard it's CSS handling is as bad as old OmniWeb's.
Opera: cross-platform; supposedly standards-compliant.
Hope this helps a bit.
CSS could never recreate pixel-perfect renditions of pages on all machines. If a developer uses font-size:12pt rather than 12px, the page will always render differently on machines set with higher or lower dpi settings (I use a Dell 8500 laptop with the hi-res ultrasharp screen with a default dpi of 140 or something).
Any pages I make are XHTML compliant, but, as was stated earlier, this does not mean diddly as to how it will render. One thing I used to do (before actually getting a Mac) was test using Basillisk Emulator. This could only use OS 8.1 and IE 4, but it did give an indication as to how the page would look on the Mac. Nowadays, I could care less as to how things render on different browsers. If everyone made pages that only worked on IE, developers of other browsers would soon change them to suit!
(That last thing about not caring was a lie, but sometimes I do get annoyed)
but why not just buy a lower end Mac and install Virtual PC on it? I don't do much web design, but I usually design in OS X, then check the results in VPC with IE.
Mozilla seems to render pretty similarly across platforms, and with X11 you can just compile KDE/Konqueror in OS X. Seems like if one is in web design the best platform would be Mac -- you can test almost anything on one machine -- without rebooting. An iBook wouldn't set you back very much either.
I develop exclusively on my Mac. On OS X, I'm able to have PHP, MySQL and Apache running on my iBook, none of which run extremely well on a PC. I test my code and sites on a PC but I wouldn't develop on one. Windows has the worst text editors I've ever used. I've got BBedit and emacs on my machine.
I think you all have it backwards...
What? Are you too cheap to buy a Mac?
You're a Linux (l)user?
A tool for web developers to test their pages against all known Mac browsers would have to be expensive. Some developer would have to carefully work out, and emulate, each browser's bugs. And they'd have to keep a big database of these bugs, and update it as each new revision comes out. After all version 1.1 of a browser may render differently from version 1.2 or 2.0, etc.
This is going to be difficult program to develop, which will be sold only to a limited audience, and it will need constant updates. I can't see a program like this selling for less than several hundred dollars, plus ongoing maintenance contracts.
And this assumes the program will be perfect. If it doesn't emulate everything perfectly, you will still get support calls from users reporting problems that you can't reproduce.
Now compare this to the price of just buying a Mac. The base-mdel eMac has a starting price of $800. If you are willing to buy a discontinued model (new, used or refurbushed), you can get one for even less. And now you will be able to actually run all those browsers instead of relying on a third-party approximation of what he thinks those browsers do.
Netscape 4 on the other hand will render substantially different i'd imagine.
Here is a simple capture app I wrote. It accepts a URL and returns a PDF image of the requested URL in Safari.
. ac gi?url=http://www.slashdot.org
http://championthinker.com:8080/cgi-bin/capture
Given that I don't know anyone who ever actually bothers to look at the 'best when rendered with' lines... nor do I know many people who are willing to download a browser just so they can see one particular site...
:-)
He didn't ask 'should I support Mac users at all, or should I just say 'screw 'em'?' Telling them to download a new browser, set it up, and use it JUST FOR YOUR SITE is basically saying 'screw 'em'. You can get away with it if you don't care about the audience, or if you can enforce their browser choices. (As one can at a large company with rigid IT rules, for example.) But don't think that it's an acceptable solution for Mac users in any other situation.
We take our money, our interest, and our page counts elsewhere, and there's almost always someone who is willing and able to test (or develop) on a Mac.
Now, that said, I wish I had a solution to the problem. But the only thing I can think of is the fact that used iMacs are going for $300, and old beige G3s are going for sigificantly less. Add in a copy of MacOS X and some RAM, and, well, it's not free, and it's a mite cumbersome, but it's also a nice thing to have around. And hey -- iTunes Music Store.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
So that when they discontinue office, they can still sell an Office solution for the Mac: Run the Windows version under VPC.
It's cheaper for them, it makes them almost as much money, and it makes the Mac look really bad (awful, slow, and the same UI as the PC!) What more could you ask?
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
HOW TO view a web page in MacOSX without using a browser...
Open the application Terminal and type the following...
Have you ever seen those little old ladies giving out teeny slices of Polish sausage on toothpicks? I'm sure the store is overjoyed that someone comes into the store and eats some food without actually deciding it is important enough to actually buy some.
Some people will like it and buy it, and others might just recommend it to their friends.
This guy might try it long enough to like it and buy it, rather than blindly throwing out $900 to the wind. Come on, not everyone has $900 sitting around.