KPMG Revisited
Published 22 years, 3 months pastA point of followup on the KPMG fix: It turns out that the fix works almost completely in Opera 6/Win, even when it identifies itself as Opera (as my copy does). The little yellow-box navbar thing zips along quite speedily, but the drop-downs for “Search,” “Contact Us,” and “Country Selector” can be really slow, while other times very zippy. Also, one of the “close dropdown” buttons doesn’t work. I don’t know why, but I suspect these are easy to fix.
Here’s the kicker: I didn’t do any Opera testing until this afternoon. As I carried out my fixes, I didn’t make one single coding change with Opera in mind, and yet the page is 95% fixed for that browser. That’s the whole point of using standards—you can be almost completely browser agnostic. The other 5% that doesn’t work in Opera is probably due to either a DOM bug in Opera—no browser is perfect—or (more likely) my fumbling attempts to get the code based on the W3C DOM wasn’t a complete job, and I left some non-standards stuff in there.
Will it work in Konqueror? In OmniWeb? I don’t know, but if they support the correct W3C standards, then the answer is “yes.” It’s the same answer for any browser that supports Web standards.
I’d also like to reiterate for those of you planning to dig into the source of the fix that it’s not an example of completely standards compliant design. It’s merely an example of how one person, with a modicum of effort, was able to take an outdated design method and hack in some semblance of standards support in order to take a broken site and make it work in multiple browsers. It isn’t perfect, but maybe it’s a start. Share and enjoy.