menu control browser compatiblity

[Chuck P]

We average 4% Safari intranet and 24% internet (student related site).

The ASP.NET 2.0 Menu Control is not working properly under Mac OS on Safari
2.0.2 browsers. Did some searching and didn't come up with anything easy to
fix it. Tried messing with the browser caps and browser definition files.

Little worried about messing with those file because it could adversely
affect Ajax or other controls.

Does the CSS Friendly ASP.NET 2.0 Control Adapter kit work/ been tested with
Safari or is it just another half baked idea?

Any ideas on the menu control? Should I scrap it?

 

[Steven Cheng[MSFT]]

Hello Chuck,

As for the menu control, the original problem of it is due to the default
control adapter render those menu items through html <table> elements.
However, html table element usually has different behaviors in different
client browsers, and some webbrowser may not display it well. So the CSS
Friend control adapter use html <div> layer to replace <table> based menu
item which is more browser friendly. However, I'm not sure whether that has
been fully tested through all kinds of browsers in addition to those main
stream ones(such as IE, FF, NS...). Anyway, you can try testing some html
<div> based html content through Safari or any other browser to see whether
<div> can be rendered identical to those in IE or FF.

Sincerely,

Steven Cheng

Microsoft MSDN Online Support Lead


This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

 

[Chuck P]

Thanks,
I was hoping to know if it would work ahead of time.
It's a lot of work to put the control adapters into production and keep the
control adapters versions up to date.

 

[Steven Cheng[MSFT]]

Thanks for your reply Chuck,

Yes, replace all those controls to use control adapters in production
environmente is quite expensive. Therefore, it is recommended that you
choose some typical control(mostly used in your application that you want
to adopt the css adapter) and test them in a development machine (test web
application). Here are some blog article which introducing some info and
tips on using css control adapter.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/05/02/CSS-Control-Adapter-Toolki
t-for-ASP.NET-2.0-.aspx

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/11/29/tip-trick-use-the-asp-net-
2-0-css-control-adapters-for-css-friendly-html-output.aspx

and the white paper has detailed view of each adapter's customizable
options:

http://www.asp.net/CSSAdapters/WhitePaper.aspx

Also, as mentioned in the first article, you can add ".browser" file in web
application to indicate whether to use or not use the certain control
adapter according to the client browser setting.

Sincerely,

Steven Cheng

Microsoft MSDN Online Support Lead


This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

 

[Chuck P]

Thanks,
It's shameful the original controls and the control adapters aren't tested
and documented to be compatible with Safari and other browsers. I hate
buying a control package from one of the vendors (Infragistics etc) because
of the cost and maintenance. However, they do state the controls work with
common browsers and they do patch them when new browser versions come out.

We ended up putting ClientTarget="UpLevel" in the pages. This seems to work
with the latest release of Safari.

 

[Steven Cheng[MSFT]]

Thanks for your reply Chuck,

Yes, some 3rd party vendor provided such kind of control package and even
dedicated on this. Usually, the Visual Studio UIFX dev team will produce
some flexible or extensible framework package so that end users and other
ISVs and do further development based on them. I also think that the
control adapter should have been tested against those popular browsers, but
seems there hasn't provded a complete documentation on this. I think it
would be good to include such information in the future. You're welcome to
submit this request to our feedback center:

http://connect.microsoft.com/feedback/default.aspx?SiteID=210

Sincerely,

Steven Cheng

Microsoft MSDN Online Support Lead


This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.