I'm crazy about Andy and Dave's Pragmatic Programmer and Programming Ruby books, so naturally I had this book as well as Pragmatic Unit Testing on my Christmas list.
As someone whose been desparately trying to get a grasp on some advanced CVS concepts lately, especially vendor tags and tracking of third party sources, I'm a little disappointed at the slow start the book gets off to; it feels just a bit belabored reading another introdution to the basics, but I'm glad to hear there's good stuff further on. Guess I'll get back to it.
I have a Wells Fargo account, and while I quite like their online banking site, I have them squarely in the "Sinners" column when it comes to browser support. The problem is that their site accepts and rejects browsers based purely on browser strings, without regard to the brower's actual capabilities.
Since my favorite browser, iCab for Mac OS X, is neither Netscape nor Internet Explorer, I have to tweak it's browser string. When I do it connects with only a few glitches. Their denied browser page and browser test page essentailly claim that nothing except Internet Explorer and Netscape meet their "strict security standards." But what they actually enforce is a policy that only allows browsers that claim to be Netscape or Internet Explorer.
I have called the number they provide to point out this problem, but the person on the other end of the call clearly didn't think there was anything that she could do about the problem and told me that I'd be better of expressing my opinion on their Contact Us page.
Lastly, not having lots of web-authoring savvy, I found the following two pages extremely informative on the subjects of browser and object detection:
I think this guy's main point is that browser detection should be used to make your page more compatible by altering subtle aspects of a page to cater to certain browsers' eccentricities (read "bugs") but it is often used (abused) to make pages less compatible by turning away the browsers the author thinks won't work. To actually detect a browsers capabilities, object detection should be used.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone whose been desparately trying to get a grasp on some advanced CVS concepts lately, especially vendor tags and tracking of third party sources, I'm a little disappointed at the slow start the book gets off to; it feels just a bit belabored reading another introdution to the basics, but I'm glad to hear there's good stuff further on. Guess I'll get back to it.
I have a Wells Fargo account, and while I quite like their online banking site, I have them squarely in the "Sinners" column when it comes to browser support. The problem is that their site accepts and rejects browsers based purely on browser strings, without regard to the brower's actual capabilities.
Since my favorite browser, iCab for Mac OS X, is neither Netscape nor Internet Explorer, I have to tweak it's browser string. When I do it connects with only a few glitches. Their denied browser page and browser test page essentailly claim that nothing except Internet Explorer and Netscape meet their "strict security standards." But what they actually enforce is a policy that only allows browsers that claim to be Netscape or Internet Explorer.
I have called the number they provide to point out this problem, but the person on the other end of the call clearly didn't think there was anything that she could do about the problem and told me that I'd be better of expressing my opinion on their Contact Us page.
Lastly, not having lots of web-authoring savvy, I found the following two pages extremely informative on the subjects of browser and object detection:
Browser Detection
Object Detection
I think this guy's main point is that browser detection should be used to make your page more compatible by altering subtle aspects of a page to cater to certain browsers' eccentricities (read "bugs") but it is often used (abused) to make pages less compatible by turning away the browsers the author thinks won't work. To actually detect a browsers capabilities, object detection should be used.