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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!
Simple -- use:
<rant> == <rant>
Escape characters
Now this post was tricky to do !
10b||~10b -- aah, what a question!
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/
&lt;rant&gt; == <rant>
right?
Yikes, we'd better stop this. At this rate, the reply to this will be eerily long....
120 character sigs suck. Make it 250.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
Apparently you didn't keep it simpel enough. YOur message has capatilization wierd. and other starnge shit. MY borswer must be messing your messge.
oh on its cathcing! Dman YOu! i use Gen2 and IT'll take me days 2 recompil everythang to fixc my mzolille!!!!1!
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.
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.
...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.
While you guys r at it, how does a Maccer or Linux user checks it if there is no Windows PC available?
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* Sigh *
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)