Posts in the Browsers Category

Fabian Valkenburg sent in e-mail letting me know that my comments on Opera 7’s CSS support got used in the talkback to an evolt.org article, and that I’m wrong about Opera 7’s display of the dates on this page being a bug.  As it turns out, the answer to that is “maybe.”

First, a word on how I set up the title and date styling in the basic site theme.  Both are contained in successive h5 elements, each with an appropriate class value (title and date, in fact).  I make the title inline so I can wrap a border around it that “shrink-wraps” the text.  Then, since I want to move it upward, I relatively position it upward two-third of an em.  Since it has been relatively positioned, for the purposes of laying out other elements, browsers should act as though the element wasn’t positioned at all.  (See CSS2:9.4.3 for details.)  So, in that sense, the relative positioning should have no impact on how the date is laid out, and in fact it doesn’t in the browsers I tested; I only brought it up to show that the title wasn’t floated.  On the other hand, I float the date to the right and right-align its text.  Since I’m floating the date to the right from below the place where the date’s h5 would have been (because the date comes after the title), I give it a negative top margin to pull it upward, so that it sits just below the top border on the entry.

Now here’s where things get fuzzy.  According to CSS2:9.5.1, the outer top edge of a float may not be any higher than the top of preceding float or block boxes.  It doesn’t say anything about inline boxes.  Remember that with CSS, it’s possible to have inline and block boxes for sibling elements.  So the effect of that portion of CSS2 is to allow floats to ignore preceding inline boxes when they float.  Or not ignore them, as the case may be.

Let me frame it another way: here’s a testcase that shows h3 and h4 elements in the normal flow, and then with the h4 elements floated.  To my way of thinking, both floats should sit below the h3 elements that precede them, regardless of the type of box those h3 elements generate.  This is because my conception of floats is that they start from their place in the normal flow, and then move to the right (or left).  From there, they move downward if they must, but not up.  Unless I give them a negative top margin to move them up, of course.

The behavior I just described is what IE5.5/Win and Gecko-based browsers do, to pick two examples.  But what Opera 7 (and, in many cases, IE5/Mac) does is not a bug, because it doesn’t violate the CSS specification, so I retract my earlier statement.  I believe that what it does is not what  site authors would want, but it isn’t wrong.  Thanks to the wording in CSS2:9.5.1, neither are the browsers that don’t agree with Opera 7 wrong, although I would accept that they’re further away from the letter of the specification.  Whether or not they violate its spirit isn’t clear, and it’s in cases like this that browsers tend to do whatever their programmers thought best.

So what we have here is a gray area in which I believe the letter and spirit of CSS are pulling in different directions, and browsers are splitting over which path they choose.  Hopefully CSS2.1 will be clarified to address what should happen, and we won’t have to bother arguing about who’s doing what better in which way for whom.

As for css/edge, yes, I hear you.  Opera 7 gets most or all of the demos correct, and may in fact reveal some erroneous assumptions on my part in the pure CSS menus demo (or maybe not; I don’t know yet).  When I get time to actually run Opera 7 through all the demos and evaluate its behavior, I’ll see if I can get the support information updated.  Unless of course I finally decide that the support information is becoming too much trouble to have around, in which case I’ll update it into oblivion.  It never really helped prevent people from misrepresenting what the demos were supposed to do anyway.

Personally, I like Opera 7 (or did once I switched its skin to the classic look), and my comments weren’t meant to cast it into the junkbin of bad browsers.  If I were a Windows user, I’d probably use it a lot more than I do.  There are rough edges, as with any browser, but overall it’s quite good—I think I said that already, but some people don’t seem to have heard that part.  Opera 7 handles a site redesign project I’m working on a lot better than Opera 6 does, I’ll say that much.

• The Silence of the Fat Lady was published on Saturday, February 8th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, CSS, and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

Imagine the ability to spread a bunch of sub-millimeter sensors around and then collect the data.  Now go read “Companies test prototype wireless-sensor nets” at EE Times Advanced Technology.  Then, assuming you haven’t, go read A Deepness In The Sky by Vernor Vinge.  It goes on rather longer than I might have liked, but it’s still full of interesting ideas, including the use of a “smart dust” sensor network.  It would seem that privacy as we know it really will be over.  David Brin touched on this topic in Earth, and apparently addresses it directly in The Transparent Society, which I haven’t read.  Is the only defense against technological invasion of privacy the ability to detect the invasion, and the ability to counter-invade?  I don’t see too many other options, frankly.  It might be possible to jam some forms of invasion privacy, but who could afford the gear to detect and defeat all possible forms of invasion?

Along similar lines, the more I hear about the things that can happen to IE/Win users, the happier I am about being a Macintosh user who works for Netscape.  The very idea that a Web browser can be taken over, and seriously mess up the operating system in the process, makes my eyes cross.  I’m starting to wonder how any company with the slightest shred of concern over security could possibly justify running IE/Win.  Here’s a scenario:  a high-level manager wanders past a site that does a drive-by download of a toolbar which then does its own download of a small program that quietly transfers all of the hard drive contents to another system.  Hey, were those your corporate secrets leaving the building just now?  Yeah, I think they passed a virulent data-eating virus on its way in.

Then again, if said company is also running Outlook, I suppose getting upset over virus infections became passé a long time ago.  In any case, the only defense against this sort of thing is the ability to find out that it’s happening and put a stop to it.  If there were a way to inflict similar damage on the original perpetrators, we’d all be mini-Cold War actors: don’t mess with my data and I won’t mess with yours.  In that kind of situation, how long would it take someone to decide a first strike was a good idea, and how much damage could they inflict?

• Stay in View, Please was published on Thursday, January 30th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and Personal categories.
• There have been no replies.

I’m feeling better, thanks.  About most things, anyway.

If you’re seeing layout or other rendering bugs on this site in Safari, as some people have said they are, please use the bug icon in the browser to report the problem.  I can’t run Safari or else I’d report problems myself.  Apparently there are some weirdnesses with the navigation links in the sidebar, if nothing else.  Whatever problem you see, it’s worth reporting, so please do.

Most of you probably already know that Mark Pilgrim is upset with XHTML 2.0, and many of you may be aware that Tantek and Daniel Glazman are in agreement.  I’m broadly sympathetic with their frustrations, but since I was never that thrilled with XHTML in the first place, I can’t get too worked up about the breaks between 1.x and 2.0.  I never really got why HTML had to be reformulated as XML.  Yes, I’ve read all the arguments about later ease of conversion and all that.  I suppose there was some good in easing authors into XML authoring habits using a language they mostly recognized.  That just didn’t seem like enough.  This site has been, and continues to be, HTML 4.01 Transitional for a reason.

I do broadly agree that XHTML 2.0 is way too unrealistic for its own good.  It outright drops too many things authors find useful, like the style attribute (although I admit I’m biased there) and heading elements.  For that matter, yes, Virginia, there is a difference between abbr and acronym, so dropping either one seems like a mistake.  On the other hand, if this stuff was deprecated instead of eliminated, I’d have many fewer points of concern about XHTML 2.0.  I’d be worried that the deprecated stuff would be dropped in the next version of XHTML, but XHTML 2.0 would bother me less.

Then again, given that you can take XML and CSS and create your own documents out of whatever markup language you can invent, and use XSLT to bridge the gap between old browsers and new ones, I find XHTML to be of minor import.  If it gets too ivory, then it will be ignored, and some other XML-based language will take it place.  Or, more likely, lots of markup languages.  Either way it will be interesting, and the XHTML 2.0 advocates won’t be able to blame anyone else for the explosion of non-interoperable languages.  Which, I suppose, is the point of all the sturm und drang of late.  If XHTML 2.0 were interoperable with XHTML 1.1, people wouldn’t be nearly so upset.

Wow… all this concern over making things work together.  Can it be that the Web is getting all growed up?

• Agony and Ivory was published on Tuesday, January 14th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, Standards, and Web categories.
• There have been no replies.

In response to my rantings yesterday, David Hyatt has stated unequivocally that the Safari team did not, in fact, co-opt Netscape evangelism efforts during development.  I’m really very glad to hear that’s the case, and if I hadn’t had such a bad day Tuesday, I probably wouldn’t have mentioned the rumor in the first place.  Then again, the end result of my ranting is a negative rumor laid to rest, so perhaps it was all for the best.  That’s what I’ll tell myself to feel better about the whole situation, anyway.

To make it formal: I apologize for casting any unwarranted aspersions on the Safari team, Apple, etc.  With any luck this will help stamp out the rumors that were reaching me.

On to more trivial matters!  This is quite possibly the coolest review I’ve yet received:

Last year, I watched “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and I was amazed at the swordsmanship on display. Swords were no longer weapons, but extensions of arms – as if they were new appendages grown especially for the task. Eric Meyer can wield CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) in just the same way as those actors could wield swords.

Being a big fan of the movie, I can’t help but be deeply flattered.  I’m just wondering if said reader pictures me as Li Mu Bai, Yu Shu Lien, or Jen Yu.

• Lookin’ Up was published on Thursday, January 9th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Books, Browsers, Web, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

First Nike claimed (so far as I can tell) a right to deceive the public under the First Amendment, and now Citrix is claiming that paying taxes violates its First Amendment rights.  I find it odd and faintly troubling  that I keep finding references to these cases on the O’Reilly Network, and not via more traditional news sources like CNN.

You know, I’m a big fan of capitalism.  It’s the one form of economics I’ve ever seen that best fits with basic human nature.  It allows capital to move around freely, which is the key to a healthy economy.  It’s based on currency, which is a very useful way to abstractly (and yet tangibly) represent the effort one expends in doing a task, and the worth of that effort.  It’s one step up from the barter system, but it’s an unimaginably powerful step.  It makes possible everything we take for granted in Western society.

Nonetheless, I do not and will not ever accept that capitalist actors—companies as well as individuals—should be totally unfettered and untaxed by government entities.  The government provides very useful services, ones I wouldn’t want to live without and that I can’t reasonably perform myself.  Like the people who inspect food to make sure it’s not going to kill me, for example.  They’re sort of important.  They aren’t perfect, but without them around I suspect food poisoning deaths would be a great deal more common in America.  After all, cleanliness is expensive.  Similarly, I think the EPA is useful, or would be if allowed to do its job.  In any case, taxes support those services.  Not to mention the military, which I’ve been given to understand is a popular institution with the American people these days.  No taxes?  No military.

I can hardly believe that any company has the gall to claim that they have First Amendment rights to not pay taxes.  Maybe, just maybe, the cumulative effect of these cases will be to have the Supreme Court definitively rule that corporations do not have rights, but are instead accorded privileges.  Am I dreaming?  Yeah, probably.

Meanwhile, I’ve heard credible rumors that Apple, while it was working on Safari, filed Bugzilla evangelism bugs so that the Standards Evangelists at Netscape (of which I’m one) would get the sites to fix their code to work with Gecko and other standards-compliant browsers.  This would then, they apparently hoped, get the sites working in Safari as well.  If this turns out to be true, I’m going to be furious; just the idea that it could be true makes me angry.  I don’t mind helping out Apple.  I’m a Macintosh guy and have been for more than a decade now.  I do mind being tricked into doing their work for them.  Hey, guys, what’s wrong with saying, “We’re both working on standards-based browsers, so let’s work together to get sites to support standards?”  You know, being honest?  How about that?  Anyone think of that?

The more I learn about corporate behavior these days, the more I think about becoming a hermit.  A high school friend of mine always said he could easily see me being a backwoods hermit philosopher, muttering about the Deep Mysteries to a bunch of squirrels and throwing a waist-length beard over my shoulder while munching wild strawberries.  Maybe he was just being prescient.

• Beyond the Pale was published on Wednesday, January 8th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and Politics categories.
• There have been no replies.

Apple has launched a new open-source browser called Safari.  I wonder how Tim O’Reilly feels about that, given how long ago he launched his own Safari.

Unfortunately, the user agent string of Safari is Netscape 5.0 Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/48 (like Gecko) Safari/48.  “Like Gecko?”  Right.  So if you’re doing client sniffing, better make sure you aren’t catching Safari in your “test for Gecko” code, because it’s not very much like Gecko.  Once again we see why client detection is a dangerously fragile and ultimately futile approach to, well, anything on the Web.  If you absolutely must detect, do object detection: look for support for the things you need to make your application work.  Otherwise, follow the standards and don’t try to serve up customized content, styles, or scripts to anyone.

• Beware of the Leopard was published on Tuesday, January 7th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Browsers category.
• There have been no replies.

Netscape 7.01 has been released, and there’s a lot more to it than a one-hundredth version number increment would indicate.  The new release includes popup controls, which let you globally block unrequested popups while defining a whitelist of sites where you accept popups; and a way to make a collection of Web sites your home page, with each one opened in its own tab.  If you’re using Netscape, you should definitely grab this release.  Netscape 7.0 had over 12 million downloads, and with these new features I’d bet the update will be even more popular.

At some point in recent weeks New Riders posted an interview with me, and I completely missed that fact until some time last night.  Since it’s a publisher interview I spend a little more time than usual talking about why I write books at all, but it covers other ground as well, including advice for people starting to learn CSS and what I think about tables for layout.

• Releases New and Old was published on Tuesday, December 10th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and Interviews categories.
• There have been no replies.

I hope everyone enjoyed the “Eric Meyer made up Jeffrey Zeldman” thing.  I’m still sort of amazed by it all, and Kat and I have gotten more than a few chuckles out of it.  I freely admit that I don’t have the creativity to come up with Jeff—he’s far too unique and interesting a guy to be my invention.

So Netscape 4.8 was released.  The howls of protest began immediately; I noticed disparaging comments from Zeldman (who was pretty funny about it, of course), Shirley, and Meryl, among others who I can’t recall at the moment, not to mention a mercifully short thread on css-discuss.  Apparently this release is the worst thing to happen to the Web in memory, or something like that.

To which I say: could we all please calm the %#@$#! down?  As I’ve tried to explain several times, updates to Netscape 4.x are driven by security patches.  Period.  End of story.  The rendering engine does not change, so it’s not like there are new bugs to worry about there.  These updates are required by support contracts between Netscape and enterprise users.  I suppose Netscape could just abandon the product line and leave enterprise customers open to future security exploits, rather like some other companies that spring to mind.  Yeah, that sounds like a swell idea.

To get back to my original point: the louder people howl about new a NN4.x release, the higher its visibility, and so the more people will actually download it.  See where I’m going with this one?  If people would just ignore the NN4.x releases, there would be fewer NN4.x installs in the world.  Users would instead find another, more current browser.  Everybody wins.  How hard is that?

Sometimes I’m astonished by the human drive to stir up controversy where none need exist, not to mention the ever greater drive to complain at length about trivial things.  Sort of like I’m doing right now, in fact…

• Let It Go, People was published on Tuesday, August 20th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Browsers category.
• There have been no replies.