Re: wine and IE
-- Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> wrote
(on Friday, 21 February 2003, 01:06 PM +0000):
> On Fri, Feb 21, 2003 at 06:34:35AM -0600, Gary Turner wrote:
> > Paul Johnson wrote:
> > >On Thu, Feb 20, 2003 at 09:27:22PM -0600, Gary Turner wrote:
> > >> Telling your (potential) customers they're not welcome on your site is
> > >> not an option.
> > >
> > >I never suggested it was. What I did state, though, is that folks run
> > >a reasonably recent version of whatever browser they prefer and file
> > >bug reports against non-compliant rendering. IMO, this is the Right
> > >Way to handle the problem.
> >
> > By suggesting that the customer is at fault because he can't see your
> > site the way you intended it be seen, is to suggest they are not
> > welcome. Remember, the average visitor to a web site has no idea what a
> > bug report is.
> >
> > What is more reasonable, the shopkeeper cater to the customer --- or
> > vice versa?
>
> Not everybody developing for the web is a shopkeeper (thank God). If I'm
> not trying to sell something and therefore achieve Perfect Marketing Zen
> in the quest to do so, I honestly don't care if their rendering is a bit
> off due to them using a five-year-old browser; I'll write
> standards-compliant content - which means that browsers should be able
> to extract the information even if not all the formatting - and if the
> rendering doesn't look right then that's their problem.
>
> In general, people who think of the way pages are "intended to be seen"
> are missing the point of the web. Will your pixel-perfect design look
> the way you intended it to look on my PDA? The standards emphasize
> semantic markup, not physical markup, and leave the details of rendering
> up to the browser where they belong. CSS merely provides hints.
I completely agree. But that's not the issue.
There's good, standards-compliant content that can still trigger
rendering bugs in older browsers that makes the content unreadable. An
instance I found this week was with setting margins on a <ul> item -- in
IE 5, it caused all <ul> items styled in this fashion to float top-left
in the window overlapping the content (and if there were multiple <ul>
items, then they overlapped each other, as well). I didn't care so much
that the rendering wasn't how I'd designed it and how it looked in
Mozilla -- I cared that anybody viewing it in IE 5 wouldn't be able to
read it.
So I still need to test the site in older browsers and on other
platforms -- until I can catalog *all* the possible rendering bugs on
*all* the browsers... ;-)
--
Matthew Weier O'Phinney
matthew@weierophinney.net
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