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Helping the Apple Web Community w/o an Apple Computer?

Posted by Cliff on from the readable-webpages++ dept.

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.

2 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. It's not the standards, people by medeii · · Score: 5, Informative

    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:

    1. Buy an iBook or Powerbook. They're pretty cheap, lovely to use, and you've got a good excuse for needing one. If your budget doesn't allow, check on eBay for a used G4 system (an eMac, for instance) and grab it instead.
    2. Grab the only decent emulator I know of, Basilisk, and try to find someone with an Apple BIOS ROM and some System 7 CDs. That's as close as you'll get to emulating one, and no, it won't run OS X.
    3. Use BrowserCam, a service that lets you (for a fee) see the results of your labor in a variety of browsers. It seems pretty cool, if you don't have any other option, but over time just buying a mac will pay for itself anyway.
    --
    got standards? --- http://www.w3.org/
  2. Use Konqueror by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.