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

That's what standards are for!

[Prien715]

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.

Re:That's what standards are for!

[KingAdrock]

Where as I agree that standards are great and should always be used, just becaues you page is standard compliant doesn't mean it will render correctly.

Before you go and tell me that it is the browsers fault, will you go try to explain that to every browser user on the planet so they don't bitch at me?

get a mac

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

It's not the standards, people

[medeii]

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.

Use Konqueror

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Should be simpler

[jcbphi]

- 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.

This assumes that there is no ambiguity in the standards. In the case of XHTML+CSS, there are plenty of vague/conflicting descriptions in the standard as to how something should render. Of the top of my head, here is a recent (and thorough) description of such a problem, from Dave Hyatt's Safari blog

Re:Should be simpler

[harves]

I see a lot of comments saying that the standard is vague and ambiguous. That might be true, but that isn't why your documents don't render correctly.

Ever tried to write an HTML document which "renders" correctly for a blind person?

Ever consider that HTML is meant to instruct the browser on what is intended and not on how to render it? The idea of these markup languages is that you "mark" text as the heading, or as a paragraph, and let the user agent (normally a web browser) sort it out.

You can demand that CSS code always renders the same, except that the user may choose to override your settings. If you depend on using your CSS-based layout to be able to navigate your website, then you wrote your webpage incorrectly. I see the ambiguity in the standards as saying "don't rely on me!", and you simply shouldn't rely on them.