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.

Comments

Re:That's what standards are for!

[babbage]

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...