Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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.

3 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Re:That's what standards are for! by babbage · · Score: 4, Interesting

    On the other hand, it's not always that simple. Take a look at David Hyatt's Surfin' Safari blog some time, where he writes about how he is trying to make Safari adhere to the W3 specs, while also getting the browser to emulate the quirks in IE or Mozilla.

    Some of the other browser's quirks are just bugs, but people have developed sites that depend on them -- if he went with the spec instead of the bug, people would assume that Safari was the broken browser, even though its behavior in such a situation would be technically correct.

    In other cases, the spec is ambiguous, and IE & Mozilla have come up with what seem to be equally valid interpretations in their implementation. What should Safari do then but choose one of those paths or come up with yet another interpretation to follow.

    Standards compliance is nice and all, but in practice a properly standards compliant page can still have quite a bit of variability in how it's rendered on different browsers.

    In the end, the only way to really know is to test, test, test. Just as, unfortunately, it has always been...

    --
    DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
  2. My advice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

  3. A couple of points by craigbeat · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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)