Comments on: Scorning Standards

By: The Clue Stick - The Web Standards Project

The Clue Stick - The Web Standards Project — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 11:37:45 +0000

[...] nt form

After viewing their browser-restricted redesigns, Eric Meyer swings the clue stick at [...]

By: talk talk

talk talk — Thu, 22 Jul 2004 02:59:00 +0000

It Must LOOK the Same!
Some thoughts on a post by Eric Meyer, and the state of web designers.

By: Gabe

Gabe — Wed, 21 Jul 2004 17:09:38 +0000

Personally I have to disagree that filters are better than server side detection for serving up custom CSS. I even add extra divs in my HTML to avoid IE box-model issues, because I think it’s important that CSS be concise and straightforward. All these CSS hacks make assumptions about combinations of bugs/features that strike me as pretty fragile when looking into the long term future (who knows what bugs could inadvertently show up in future highly standards-compliant browsers?). The only thing I do is to use @import to avoid NS4 problems by default.

Usually everything is functional across browsers (if not always pretty), but if something is broken horribly I think it is much better practice to write a server-side filter to strip the stylesheet for that browser. I know it’s a hassle if you aren’t a server-side programmer, but if you are in an environment where all pages are parsed by a preprocessor anyway, then it is much more elegant.

By: Mike Pick

Mike Pick — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 16:39:05 +0000

Actually Micahel, there is a pretty decent version of Mozilla (1.2.1) available for OS 9.

Scroll down this page to Mozilla 1.2.1 – Released December 2, 2002.

Seems to work well in my limited testing, and is much less buggy from a display perspective than IE 5.1.

By: Michael Guitton

Michael Guitton — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 14:14:01 +0000

How much does it cost to pinpoint the rendering inconsistencies in IE5/Mac? If you’re not a CSS veteran, it can take a day or two but once you have a good grasp of the technology involved, you can overcome the differences in a couple of hours and use new Tantek’s IE5/Mac band pass filter to author a well-organized style sheet. As a Web developer, I met fewer problems with CSS compliance in IE5/Mac than with IE5 or IE6 for Windows. It all depends on the kind of styling you try to apply and the structure of your document.

IMHO, writing:

/*\*/
@import “not4ie5mac.css”;
/*/
@import “ie5mac.css”;
/**/

… is a far better practice and cost fewer bucks than writing a script that screens out browsers (and user agents can be spoofed). I’m still using OS 9 at work (even though I’m proficient with Mac OS X underlying operating system) and I have no choice but using IE5/Mac. If a site denies me the access, I won’t come back using another platform and/or browser unless I have a very good reason to do it…

By: Milan Negovan

Milan Negovan — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 14:01:53 +0000

Look-The-Same Obsession
Eric Meyer shared some very interesting thoughts in his recent post, Scorning Standards. With so many versions of different user agents (browsers) out there it’s not necessary to obsess over getting your design to look the same in all of them. You nee…

By: Martin Alderson

Martin Alderson — Sun, 18 Jul 2004 14:39:39 +0000

While I agree that it would be great to have 100% browser support, it is exceedingly hard. IE/Mac is really pretty bad in the way it screws things up — I see more hacks for mac IE than any other browser.

But, I do agree that it’s a bit silly to use detector pages, but then again, a) it’s telling people to upgrade to better browsers and b) it means that Joe isn’t going to have a hate for the site because it totally screws up.

To fix the screwups is a horrible challenger, either doing what Steven says and have a slash filled mess or having mutliple stylesheets which are a total pain to manage.

I have a real problem with people not supporting FireFox and Safari, but I think we should drop Netscape 4, IE4 and IE for Mac support. They make up less than 1-2% of the total and to be honest I’d rather have any efforts supporting those going into supporting standards compliant browsers

By: Steven Wittens

Steven Wittens — Sun, 18 Jul 2004 13:33:08 +0000

I’d like to point that it’s often not about making the site ‘look identical across browsers’. Yes, most of the CSS bugs only cause a couple of misalignments or couple-pixel shifts. However, many can render your site unusable by not displaying certain elements or by displaying things on top of eachother.

In that case, you’re forced to litter your CSS code with a forest of slashes, asterisks and quotes which confuse the parsers and make sure that rule #4 is not parsed by Mac/IE, that rule #7 is not parsed by Konqueror, rule #8 is only for Netscape 4, etc.

We had a problem in Drupal with Mac/IE where fieldsets with a certain positional style would not be displayed at all, which meant that administrators could not edit certain properties. Removing the styles made the form in question a lot less usable (basically it had to do with inline/floated fieldsets which were positioned next to eachother). We do not wish to litter our CSS so now, Mac/IE is still broken.

Besides, even if you properly structure your content and you’re lucky enough to get all browsers to display everything in a visible position, the end result will probably be unusable (from a usability point of view) on at least one or two browser flavors. If you’re lucky, they’ll be minor and/or outdated browsers. If it’s IE, you’re pretty much forced to go through the extra trouble, but for other browser it’s often not worth it.

By: Richard Soderberg

Richard Soderberg — Sun, 18 Jul 2004 08:37:45 +0000

If I were to assist Feedster somehow by modifying their public pages to be more standards-compliant, what would be the major target? Ideally full XHTML compliance is wonderful, but are there any gapingly obvious, necessary fixes that must go in immediately?

(cc: by email requested)

By: gregorybowers.com: talk talk » Now taking freelance work

gregorybowers.com: talk talk » Now taking freelance work — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

[...] ased site for your business or group: A Web Design Horror Story, from Blake Scarbrough Eric Meyer on why a standards-based [...]