Just for Firefox?

[SpaceGirl]

SpaceGirl wrote:




Doesn't mean you can ignore the others.

Of course not. So you just send them default html/css. We dont bar ANY
browser from our sites. All of the HTML and CSS is 100% valid, and the
sites work fine without Flash and JS.

Can't imagine ever wanting to do something that silly.

A comment like that just displays how ignorant you are. Remeber the word
"design" in Web Design? Dont let yourself be limited by some frankly
dumb "Holy Than Thou" must not use Flash blah blah attidude. It's NOT
about the technology. It's about what you DO with it.

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[SpaceGirl]

SpaceGirl wrote:




Done this before. It's a recipe for disaster IMHO. Some proxies seem to
cache CSS pages blindy ignoring caching headers.

Which is why 'in in doubt' just send a default VALID css doc. Doesn't
MATTER about the cache anyway. The CSS filenames are DIFFERENT for each
browser - they are generated by the server to avoid just this sort of
complication.


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[Dylan Parry]

A comment like that just displays how ignorant you are. Remeber the word
"design" in Web Design? Dont let yourself be limited by some frankly
dumb "Holy Than Thou" must not use Flash blah blah attidude. It's NOT
about the technology. It's about what you DO with it.

You're right of course. Flash is okay, as is any other proprietary
technology, but only when the site's function does not rely upon it
working! I'm all for "bells and whistles", but as long as the site works
without them then all is good

It's fine for a site to have games or animations in Flash, or a
client-server application in a Java Applet, but when you start creating
navigation that *requires* Flash or such then it starts to become a
poorly thought out site. Nothing annoys me more than when I visit a site
and think "where the hell is the menu?" only to realise that the little
/f/ in a circle is where it should be, whereas I thought it was a Flash
advertisment

There are of course exceptions. Some sites, such an entertainment sites
like "Joe Cartoon" (is that still around?) can do what they like as
their content _is_ Flash animations, so if you can't view Flash then
there is no point visiting!

It's horses for courses, as usual

 

[Kris]

Is that worth the effort for the percentage of visitors MacIE represents
in your logs?

Yes - because they represent a chunk of our core market.[/QUOTE]

You understand of course that this chunk will only decrease over time.
It is a dead browser, built for a dead operating system.

Plus we dont IGNORE other users - we just present them with generic 100%
xhtml & css (with IE fixes) if we cant work out what they are. For
example, we use a lot of PNGs. These aren't supported by IE (properly)

PNG with alpha layers in CSS backgrounds, no. But IE/Win has trouble
with those as well. PNG-8 should present not much of a problem though
they are not the same.

without using IE specific (and totally invalid) CSS.

Which will not work in IE/Mac.

I want to AVOID
sending deliberately broken code to browsers like FireFox just to keep
IE happy.

Use conditional comments, an IE thing. Other browsers will ignore them.

 

[SpaceGirl]

You're right of course. Flash is okay, as is any other proprietary
technology, but only when the site's function does not rely upon it
working! I'm all for "bells and whistles", but as long as the site works
without them then all is good

Hmm yes and no, I think. Sometimes 100% flash sites can be pretty
interesting. Here are two I'm currently obsessed with;

www.tokidoki.it
www.vianet.it

It's fine for a site to have games or animations in Flash, or a
client-server application in a Java Applet, but when you start creating
navigation that *requires* Flash or such then it starts to become a
poorly thought out site. Nothing annoys me more than when I visit a site
and think "where the hell is the menu?" only to realise that the little
/f/ in a circle is where it should be, whereas I thought it was a Flash
advertisment

Oh I agree... the balance between each medium is all part OF the design.
If the user has to hunt for how to navigate, then your design is
probably not much good.

There are of course exceptions. Some sites, such an entertainment sites
like "Joe Cartoon" (is that still around?) can do what they like as
their content _is_ Flash animations, so if you can't view Flash then
there is no point visiting!
Yep!


It's horses for courses, as usual

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[SpaceGirl]

You understand of course that this chunk will only decrease over time.
It is a dead browser, built for a dead operating system.

IEMac is very dead, but OSX is FAR from dead.

PNG with alpha layers in CSS backgrounds, no. But IE/Win has trouble
with those as well. PNG-8 should present not much of a problem though
they are not the same.

Yeah I know, you have to hack IE to use proper alpha.

Which will not work in IE/Mac.

Depends.




Use conditional comments, an IE thing. Other browsers will ignore them.

That still means you have to server possibly broken CSS to browsers that
quite happily process perfectly valid code. What's the point? Serve the
correct CSS to the correct browsers. It seems daft risking future
compatiblity just to please IE right now. BEar in mind if you're doing
your CSS right anyway you're likely to have more than one CSS document
attached to your site anyway (one for print, one for screen).

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[Beauregard T. Shagnasty]

Anyway, if you THINK about it the answer is pretty simple; so long
as your script 'fails safe' then it's cool. If our script cant work
out what the browser visiting is, it just assumes IE (which is most
likely). And I would suspect that the target audience for the sort
of sites we do are NOT that likely to be using proxies anyway.
Again, that is the realm of techies - or corporate browsers.

What about dialup web accelerators?

As I understand how they work (I'm on broadband), the first of their
subscribers to visit a URL causes the page - and attendant CSS and
images - to be cached at the accelerator's proxy server. Subsequent
subscribers calling the same URL will view the page from this proxy.

If the first subscriber was using Mac/IE5, that is what the next NN
subscribers will see as well.

The accelerator probably won't dump it's cache until it either sees a
newer Last-Modified date, hasn't been viewed for quite some time, or
the cache got full and your page was dumped.

Browser sniffing is never a good idea.

 

[SpaceGirl]

What about dialup web accelerators?

Makes no difference.

As I understand how they work (I'm on broadband), the first of their
subscribers to visit a URL causes the page - and attendant CSS and
images - to be cached at the accelerator's proxy server. Subsequent
subscribers calling the same URL will view the page from this proxy.

If the first subscriber was using Mac/IE5, that is what the next NN
subscribers will see as well.

Only if the proxy ignores the last modified date. In which case, it's
just too bad. It's not possible to cator for ALL circumstances until ALL
browser render the same.

The accelerator probably won't dump it's cache until it either sees a
newer Last-Modified date, hasn't been viewed for quite some time, or the
cache got full and your page was dumped.

Once again, how many people really use these in the first place?

If user is using a proxy || accelerator & users proxy ignores "last
modified"... blah. Come on be realistic. If this were really a problem
NO generated sites would work, period.

Browser sniffing is never a good idea.

Only if you use it for the wrong thing, or dont know how to do it.



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[Beauregard T. Shagnasty]

Makes no difference.

That's a sweeping statement...

Only if the proxy ignores the last modified date. In which case,
it's just too bad. It's not possible to cator for ALL circumstances
until ALL browser render the same.

As I said, the accelerator service *does* observe the Last-Modified
date, but will *not* refresh its cache until your page changes. You
upload a new page, and the proxy will get a new copy (based on
whatever browser came next).

Once again, how many people really use these in the first place?

Millions. All the major ISPs here in the US offer an accelerator. The
technology has become quite popular (if somewhat of a myth).

http://www.propel.com/ (I'd copy the text but it's an image)
"Propel Accelerator makes dial-up web browsing up to *5 times faster!*"

http://www.getnetscape.com/
http://localnet.com/express/ (*6* times faster!!!)
http://www.netzero.net/compare/
http://www.earthlink.net/home/dial/
http://www.att.net/features/accelerator/
aol.com (but I wouldn't give my enemy a clickable link)
and more. They're all doing it: marketing.

If user is using a proxy || accelerator & users proxy ignores "last
modified"... blah. Come on be realistic. If this were really a
problem NO generated sites would work, period.

<lol> Yes, I'm being realistic about your site sending specific
content based on the browser UA string. It will not work as you intend
it to work. My sites are "generated" too, but they serve the exact
same content (and style sheets) no matter what UA came to visit.

Only if you use it for the wrong thing, or dont know how to do it.

I'll agree with that, especially the wrong thing part.

 

[Andrew Donaldson]

Toby Inkster wrote:

FWIW, relating to an earlier discussion, we get ten times as many
hits from Solaris as we do from Risc OS.

Out of interest as a RISC OS user, can you post the hit count and
percentage for RISC OS browsers? I'm expecting the figures to be tiny,
but am curious about what they might be like for such a "real world" site.

Andrew

 

[C A Upsdell]

Yeah, OK...


Huh? You can do this in CSS without any hacks or browser sniffing at all.

No, you can't. The CSS 2 spec (sect. 12.6.2) leaves it up to the user agent
how LI indent and marker positioning are controlled, and real-world browsers
do in fact control them differently. Indeed, different versions of the same
browser can control them differently: for example, IE 4 is different from
IE5+, old versions of Opera are different from today's versions of Opera,
and NN4 is likely different from the Gecko browsers.

 

[kchayka]

No, you can't. The CSS 2 spec (sect. 12.6.2) leaves it up to the user
agent how LI indent and marker positioning are controlled, and
real-world browsers do in fact control them differently.

So what?
There are only 2 properties involved - margin-left and padding-left.
Set them both on both the ul and li elements and you get virtually the
same results in pretty much every browser.

different versions of the same browser can control them differently:

Gawd, why are you trying to get archaic versions of browsers to render the
same as new versions? That's an excercise in futility.

 

[Kris]

You understand of course that this chunk will only decrease over time.
It is a dead browser, built for a dead operating system.

IEMac is very dead, but OSX is FAR from dead.[/QUOTE]

I was referring to pre-OSX. IE/Mac is Carbon, only to last a bit longer
in OSX. Nevertheless it was built for OS9 and only under that OS is it
still the best browser.

That still means you have to server possibly broken CSS to browsers that
quite happily process perfectly valid code.

No. You pass the IE hacks (if necessary; experience gained will make the
necessity to use it less and less) in a separate stylesheet called upon
from within conditional comments. Only IE/Win will ask for that
stylesheet.

What's the point? Serve the
correct CSS to the correct browsers.

As others have already pointed out, you are only guessing. Don't take
the fact that nobody has yet complained as evidence of a succesful
practice. Most things that are wrong with a site, the author will never
know. It's the authors job to limit the chance to failure.

It seems daft risking future
compatiblity just to please IE right now. BEar in mind if you're doing
your CSS right anyway you're likely to have more than one CSS document
attached to your site anyway (one for print, one for screen).

Yes. But what that has to do with "authoring to browsers" escapes me.

 

[Toby Inkster]

There are only 2 properties involved - margin-left and padding-left.
Set them both on both the ul and li elements and you get virtually the
same results in pretty much every browser.

Most browsers also add some top or bottom margin to either/both of UL and
LI.

 

[Toby Inkster]

Out of interest as a RISC OS user, can you post the hit count and
percentage for RISC OS browsers? I'm expecting the figures to be tiny,
but am curious about what they might be like for such a "real world" site.

112 hits out of over 4 million. I'll let you calculate the percentage.

 

[SpaceGirl]

That's a sweeping statement...
Perhaps



As I said, the accelerator service *does* observe the Last-Modified
date, but will *not* refresh its cache until your page changes. You
upload a new page, and the proxy will get a new copy (based on whatever
browser came next).

Yes, but with generated pages the page changes EVERY SINGLE TIME YOU
LOAD IT. The "last modified" date is always the date/time that you load
the page, unless you specifically code around it (on IIS and Apache anyway).

Millions. All the major ISPs here in the US offer an accelerator. The
technology has become quite popular (if somewhat of a myth).

http://www.propel.com/ (I'd copy the text but it's an image)
"Propel Accelerator makes dial-up web browsing up to *5 times faster!*"

http://www.getnetscape.com/
http://localnet.com/express/ (*6* times faster!!!)
http://www.netzero.net/compare/
http://www.earthlink.net/home/dial/
http://www.att.net/features/accelerator/
aol.com (but I wouldn't give my enemy a clickable link)
and more. They're all doing it: marketing.

Must be an american thing... not something I've seen in Europe (or,
incidentally, most of my American friends).

<lol> Yes, I'm being realistic about your site sending specific content
based on the browser UA string. It will not work as you intend it to
work. My sites are "generated" too, but they serve the exact same
content (and style sheets) no matter what UA came to visit.

Hey look at it this way too - if you're a returning visitor, you get
different content. Depending what country you're in, you MAY get
different content.

I'll agree with that, especially the wrong thing part.

*shakes her head*

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[SpaceGirl]

So what?
There are only 2 properties involved - margin-left and padding-left.
Set them both on both the ul and li elements and you get virtually the
same results in pretty much every browser.




Gawd, why are you trying to get archaic versions of browsers to render the
same as new versions? That's an excercise in futility.

IE 5.5 and 6 do it differently. IE 6 and FireFox do it differently.

Hardly archaic...

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[C A Upsdell]

So what?
There are only 2 properties involved - margin-left and padding-left.
Set them both on both the ul and li elements and you get virtually the
same results in pretty much every browser.

That turns out not to be the case.

Gawd, why are you trying to get archaic versions of browsers to render the
same as new versions? That's an excercise in futility.

Unfortunately what provides good results in some browsers may produce very
bad results in other browsers, e.g. bullets that are missing, or bullets
that appear to the left of the left margin. And BTW, I don't try to get
pages render the same in all browsers: I do try to get pages to render
reasonably.

 

[kchayka]

Most browsers also add some top or bottom margin to either/both of UL and
LI.

I'll agree on UL/OL, but I don't think I've ever seen any extra top/bottom
default spacing on LI, like there is on <p>. I've always had to add my own
if I wanted it, and I often do.

BTW, extra top/bottom spacing on LI *is* something that can have rather
different results in different browsers. MacIE and NS4 can suck for sure,
but it's trivial to hide CSS from these browsers and let them just get
their default spacing if it becomes a problem. @media rules rock.

 

[kchayka]

IE 5.5 and 6 do it differently. IE 6 and FireFox do it differently.

I have *never* had a problem getting comparable indentation in IE5.x, IE6,
Opera, KHTML and mozilla browsers when setting both margin-left and
padding-left on both the UL and LI elements. I've done it many, many times.

But then, I never bother trying to get a pixel-perfect layout. Maybe
that's where you're going wrong?