W3C makes ridiculously complicated CSS pages? Oh my

Alot of it is fixed in mozilla as well.

Gee the block unrequested popups check box did not work for you? It blocks all popups for me accept for the ones that I click on buttons/links etc.

A couple of sites I visit have windows (that are not ads) that open automatically (without my clicking a link or button) that are required for the site to operate correctly. Mozilla was stopping them from opening unless I went into Preferences and turned off pop-up blocking.

Rob

Haha, their home page looks like my Adobe Pagemaker test pages from when I got bored in grade school journalism class. Sure, in Mozilla those links work, and it renders correctly, but it doesn't look any less ugly.

The only "gottahaveit" implementation of CSS I've seen is the replacement for tables article at A List Apart. Not only do they do away with irritating nested tables, but their whiz-bang graphical page still prints like a charm due to their innovative CSS setup.

[later...]

Hmm, I read some more articles from that site, and I found about 50 other good reasons to use CSS. And I discovered IE for Windows can't even do PNG transparency without workarounds. And of course, reading a site about advanced HTML/CSS coding makes you realize that 90% of the CSS articles on the web are about workarounds for various browser flaws, which highlights a rediculous problem with browsers today, especially IE. Maybe I'll finally switch to a new browser.

And while I'm talking about cool site design... the International Herald Tribune's 3-column flowing text layout is the most awesome thing ever. The designer, John Weir, did an interview about how he designed the site. I'm sure there are thousands of other awesome sites with interviews of the authors to match, but this is my favorite.

I use Opera 7 - just out, it's the daddy!

Very very fast, it renders pages a lot quicker than IE.

I surf with cookies, javascript and everything else off that threatens security. So I have to use IE to log into certain sites and buy things with.

Luckily I can log into HA with Opera though

I use IE6 SP1 w/ all updates and Windows 2000 SP3 for all my browsing needs. If you download all the updates from Microsoft, IE6 is pretty safe to use. The last virus I caught was when I was browsing the web using Opera v6.05 . Then again, that was on my WinME box with no updates / Norton VS 2002 . As for pop-up blocking, Zone Alarm Pro v3.1.395 does a great job for me. From what I can tell, it works as well if not better than Mozilla's or Opera's built-in blockers. Secondly, it adds the last layer of security that all browsers lack. I have Mozilla v1.2.1 and Opera v6.05, which both do a great job. Even so, I don't like putting up with the rendering issues inherent with 3rd party browsers. Rendering speed has never been a problem for me with any of the above browsers, although Opera & IE6 are much faster than Mozilla on my older Celeron 450. As for the coder of the W3C example, he should be punished severely for making a page that renders incorrectly in IE6 AND Opera 6.05. Even when the page is rendered in Mozilla, the small box at the top right covers up text. Just imagine if the writer of CNN.com made a page that didn't render correctly in the most widely distributed browser around. He wouldn't have a job for very long .

Edit - Hit "Submit Post" by accident before I was finished

after reading this thread i gave phoenix a try. and will probably stick to it. it's exactly what i have been after. a stripped down web-browser only version mozilla. highly recommended.

That is still very much to be seen. But as for security and stability with IE don't hold your breath.



I have a hard time believing that it was actually Opera's fault and not operator error on your part. What virus was that anyway?



First off it is not a popup blocker. It has a slight bit of internet junk buster filtering but that is it. And I would take a hardware firewall or a good *NIX firewall over Zone Alarm any day.



And that is because that bit of security is completely unrelated to browsers or the act of browsing. What good is a browser that is also a firewall?



Unless you are using Amaya your browser is 3rd party. Even IE.



Yes god forbid someone follows standards. Why is it that when someone follows standards in the computer software world he is chastized to no end because he did not do it "Microsoft's" way. That sort of thing makes me sick. Would you go out and buy a piece of non standard hardware for your PC? Say something like a Mac specific add in card for your PC. Perhaps you could get honda parts for your for your ford cheaper that you could ford parts. Would you? Of course not. There are things called standards and they are there for a reason. When you buy parts for your car you buy parts made for your car. A company that makes so called compatable parts for your make and model but does not follow the standards specification will have no business what so ever.(Microsoft is the exception here because of their monopoly powers) What good is a timing belt that is an inch to long? If it were not for standards you would have to be verry picky about how you encoded your MP3s and what software you use to play them. Not to mention what hardware MP3 player you purchase because you have to be sure it supports your chosen bastardised form of MP3.

Shouldn't we be more upset/concerned with the fact that in the last six years and two versions of Internet Explorer that they have added all sorts of new security holes and non HTML rendering features but have not updated their rendering engine to be up to date with the standard circa 1997!? Let alone 2003! Microsoft itself has a bogus pattent on CSS so why are they so lax on implementing it?

I don't care if Microsoft's stollen Mosaic renamed Internet Explorer is the most used browser in the world. If anything it makes their responsibility more and their lack of compliance more agredious! I mean after all shouldn't those stuck suffering under internet explorer be allowed basic support for standard internet pages? I mean it's great and all that Mivcrosof Internet Explorer can render broken pages better than any other browser. But is it really so great when it is Microsoft software that breaks the HTML compliance in the first place?!

Sorry for the rant. It had been building for some time via the situation in general. No one in particular to blame. This was just the catylist.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/3...=thread&tid=113
Are you sure you still want to stick to IE?

Crazy Browser (and some other IE-engine browsers, maybe) don't allow extra toolbars to be installed. A blessing and a curse.

And if Mozilla was the browser 90% of people used, rather than IE, I bet those Xupiter clowns would be going after Mozilla instead. I doubt they'd have as much luck as they did with IE, but you never know.

All browsers have security issues. It's just that IE's are exploited much more frequently than other browser's. For the most part, Microsoft is fairly quick to release fixes and patches for their bugs. Most of the viruses caught today could be prevented by downloading these free patches. As for stability, I don't remember the last time IE crashed. It's much more stable than Mozilla, and right up there with Opera (At least on Win2000 ).



I was surfing the Internet. Period. I was not downloading files, nor did I have any other programs accessing the Internet. The virus was W32.Opaserv.Worm, and as I stated, it COULD have been caused by "my WinME box with no updates / [nor] Norton VS 2002." I can't be sure of the cause, but the virus was not due to reckless surfing habits.




Wrong, it has a pop-up blocker. It has the same pop-up blocking capabilities as Mozilla & Opera, and it can also block cookies, ActiveX, javascript, vbscript, java, and mime-type objects from executing on one or all websites. ZoneAlarm is the top rated software firewall, and sense I have a dial-up connection with a dynamic IP address, I feel a software firewall is all that is necessary. Out of curiosity, have you ever used the software in question?



How is masking the ports on your computer so malicious WebPages can't whore your computer unrelated to browsers or the act of browsing? Or how is blocking the server capabilities of IE unrelated?



It's not always simply about standards. I agree that standards are important, because without them nothing would work. My point was that IE was not the ONLY browser to have rendering issues with that site, and that in a real world business application, the programmer would not have a job (at least for long ) because his site worked improperly on the most dominant, widely spread browsers available. What good is a WebPages that follows standards to the letter if it won't render correctly. IE & Microsoft have their issues, and should "have.. updated their rendering engine to be up to date with the standard circa 1997!? Let alone 2003!" That doesn’t excuse a lack of browser testing to make sure that WebPages are compatible with all browsers. I'm not saying W3C's problemss are caused by a lack of testing, just that websites should be tested on all browsers so that issues like WC3's don’t appear. It's like the old LAME decoding bug in Winamp - both LAME and Winamp were following the standards, but the standard was vague to say the best. Through testing and agreement on the standard, the decoding bug was fixed. I don't know exactly why the W3C page does not render correctly on all the browsers, but I doubt its pure laziness on MS's part.

Well, perhaps it's part laziness, part incompetence, and part devious plan to overthrow the W3C :evil: . If anyone's going to write valid CSS, I hope it's the W3C, so the incorrect rendering really appears to be the fault of the IE browser.

So now we've established that IE doesn't have full CSS2 compatibility, despite MS's claims to the contrary. Does this really affect anyone other than the W3C CSS web designers? Well, yeah; IE's problems are going to affect anyone trying to do pixel-perfect placement of web page content without resorting to <table> tags. Tables in HTML are much more cumbersome to work with and even harder to restructure, so there are good reasons for web designers to avoid their use. Also, they make web browsing for the vision-impared (those using text-to-speech programs) almost impossible, since the TTS software has no idea how the page's text is supposed to flow when it's sprawled over a zillion table cells.

Your statement that web designers should do browser testing is absolutely true; the designers should know what works with which browsers, and what doesn't; that should be expected even of the W3C CSS web designers. So we can assume they know that their page doesn't work on IE. Proper procedure: if a designer wants to use new browser technology, there should be a fully functional fallback-design in place, even it if means going to text-only. In that sense, the W3C CSS site is flawed, because people using IE, or people not using the latest browser, can't use the fancy-text links at the top of the page.

On the other hand, this page is acting in advocacy of the new CSS technology, so it is making a statement with its strict CSS rendering requirements for proper page viewing; the page design make an even bigger statement than the actual text written on the site (actions speak louder than words). The W3C shouldn't have to program workarounds for browsers that say they can render CSS2 when they actually can't. I mean, if the W3C wants people to have any respect for their standards, then they have to program their sites with the expectation that browsers have complete compatibility for any standard they claim to support.

So it's a chicken-and-egg scenario: do you use new and improved technologies now, to encourage web browser programmers to update their software? Or do you wait for the browser software to get updated before you make a flashy web page? The browsers won't get updated unless there's a reason for the programmers to do so. Ideally, any slick, new-technology webpage would have an ugly-but-functional version to fall back on. That way everyone can have access to the information (in the spirit of Tim Berners-Lee), but there's also an incentive for browsers to continually improve, thus benefitting the end user's browsing experience.

[quote=ViPER1313,Jan 30 2003 - 08:33 PM][quote]That is still very much to be seen. But as for security and stability with IE don't hold your breath.[/quote]

All browsers have security issues. It's just that IE's are exploited much more frequently than other browser's. For the most part, Microsoft is fairly quick to release fixes and patches for their bugs. Most of the viruses caught today could be prevented by downloading these free patches. As for stability, I don't remember the last time IE crashed. It's much more stable than Mozilla, and right up there with Opera (At least on Win2000 ).[/quote]

Depends on who you talk to. IE crashes on me all the time. On the other hand I have a hard time recalling the last time Mozilla or even Phoenix did. Go fig?

[quote=ViPER1313,Jan 30 2003 - 08:33 PM]I was surfing the Internet. Period. I was not downloading files, nor did I have any other programs accessing the Internet. The virus was W32.Opaserv.Worm, and as I stated, it COULD have been caused by "my WinME box with no updates / [nor] Norton VS 2002." I can't be sure of the cause, but the virus was not due to reckless surfing habits.[/quote]

Little research never killed anyone. http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcen...aserv.worm.html Is your computer on a network? Looks like there is little to no liability for Opera in this case.


[quote=ViPER1313,Jan 30 2003 - 08:33 PM][quote]First off it is not a popup blocker. It has a slight bit of Internet junk buster filtering but that is it. And I would take a hardware firewall or a good *NIX firewall over Zone Alarm any day.[/quote]

Wrong, it has a pop-up blocker. It has the same pop-up blocking capabilities as Mozilla & Opera, and it can also block cookies, ActiveX, javascript, vbscript, java, and mime-type objects from executing on one or all websites. ZoneAlarm is the top rated software firewall, and sense I have a dial-up connection with a dynamic IP address, I feel a software firewall is all that is necessary. Out of curiosity, have you ever used the software in question?[/quote]

Nope. Not a popup blocker. A filtering web cache but not a popup blocker. And yes I have used it. It is a fine software along with tiny personal firewall. But a software firewall is only as secure as your software. Not to say that a hardware firewall is not vulnerable. But it is a heck of a lot less than a software one. But in a dial-up situation which you are in a hardware firewall is a bit overkill.

[quote=ViPER1313,Jan 30 2003 - 08:33 PM][quote]And that is because that bit of security is completely unrelated to browsers or the act of browsing. What good is a browser that is also a firewall?[/quote]

How is masking the ports on your computer so malicious WebPages can't whore your computer unrelated to browsers or the act of browsing? Or how is blocking the server capabilities of IE unrelated?[/quote]

What you said makes sense to you? Personally it does not to me. That sounds exactly like the job of a firewall. The only responsibility of a browser is to request, retrieve, and render HTML and images. Period. Even FTP session handling is not a requirement for a browser. Masking or blocking ports on a computer is the job of a firewall. And that is final. A browser software exists to far up in the TCP/IP stack or OSI model for port filtering. It exists in the session-aplication range. Software firewalls should be implemented in no layer after the transport or network layers. Layers which are near the root of the TCP/IP stack and encompas functionality completely unrelated to a browser.

[quote=ViPER1313,Jan 30 2003 - 08:33 PM]It's not always simply about standards. I agree that standards are important, because without them nothing would work. My point was that IE was not the ONLY browser to have rendering issues with that site, and that in a real world business application, the programmer would not have a job (at least for long ) because his site worked improperly on the most dominant, widely spread browsers available.[/quote]

Get this straight. In the real world not manufacturing a product even to a close semblance of a clear, solid, and strict standards is an offense capable of loosing you your job. If you can not comply to simple standards then you are SOL! If Microsoft did not have monopoly powers, if Microsoft did not peddle IE with every single install of Windows it would be a much differnt story. At the mear mention of internet Explorer the lay-person would be scratching their head in total ignorance of the subject while the computer techie would be laughing his arse of at someone mentioning such an obscure useless browser. Since when did Microsoft gain the power to set the standard for HTML, CSS, etc? Answer never. Keep that in mind. The W3C is not the guilty party here. I don't care if only one browser in the world can render it propperly the W3C is well within their rights and blameless. Microsoft and Opera are 100% at fault. If we were talking the unfinalised CSS 3 I would say this is all premature. But we are talking Bloody HTML 4.0, CSS 2, and PNG which were finalised over 5 years ago in 1998, 1997, and 1997 respectively. Sorry for continuing to be harsh but get real. I am tired of having to account for the ignorant clods still running netscape 2 or IE 3 for every page I design. And believe me they are out there. As a web designer I am both a programmer and an artist. Neither my artist nor programmer side see any reason not to make use of standards rattified over 5 years ago to express myself. Especially when there is software that can handle it. I always put a link on my pages where people with defficient browsers can go to upgrade. I don't ask them to download each and every nightly build of mozilla. But I don't think it is out of the question for them to spend 1 to 3 hours a year to update such software.

[quote=ViPER1313,Jan 30 2003 - 08:33 PM]What good is a WebPages that follows standards to the letter if it won't render correctly.[/quote]

And what good is it when someone follows a recipie?

[quote=ViPER1313,Jan 30 2003 - 08:33 PM]IE & Microsoft have their issues, and should "have.. updated their rendering engine to be up to date with the standard circa 1997!? Let alone 2003!" That doesn’t excuse a lack of browser testing to make sure that WebPages are compatible with all browsers.[/quote]

Yes it does. Don't tell me you are gonna be one of the guys bitching you can't get any TV reception on your current old NTSC/PAL/WHATEVER TV when everyone has gone straight HDTV. How long? I say how long are we supposed to wait for you people to catch up? Am I still gonna have to be using HTML 3.2 with no CSS and 256 color GIFs 10 years from now just for your benefit?

[quote=ViPER1313,Jan 30 2003 - 08:33 PM]I'm not saying W3C's problemss are caused by a lack of testing, just that websites should be tested on all browsers so that issues like WC3's don’t appear.[/quote]

The issue is not the W3C's. It is Microsoft's and Opera's issue. But it is damn well not the W3C's issue. Cope with it.

[quote=ViPER1313,Jan 30 2003 - 08:33 PM]It's like the old LAME decoding bug in Winamp - both LAME and Winamp were following the standards, but the standard was vague to say the best.[/quote]

It is nothing like that. The HTML and CSS standards are so well defined that there is no fuzzieness about anything what so ever anywhere in it. HTML is HTML and CSS is CSS and it is very clearly defined what they are. Even you can go to www.w3c.org and view the "exact" specifications. And if you can do it what is stopping Microsoft and Opera?

[quote=ViPER1313,Jan 30 2003 - 08:33 PM]I don't know exactly why the W3C page does not render correctly on all the browsers, but I doubt its pure laziness on MS's part.[/quote]

God yes it is. It is pure unadulterated full on lazyness on Microsoft's part. They have no excuse. They have been shown to be lazy in this and many other areas. Your inability to see this I find quite absurd and amusing. To a point. It is starting to become irksome and annoying.

Microsoft got Internet Explorer to where it is today in part by prolifferating bad broken HTML across the internet. I am gonna fight them by prolifferating the internet with good and complete/compliant HTML doccuments!

Microsoft never said "oops! the html or programs make is broken and will not render in our competitors browsers!" It was more like "ROTFLMAO! Lets see those dumbasses and their open standards cope with this! We are Microsoft and we will grind them under our foot!". So I fail to see the point in me getting all worked up over the fact that their obsolete browser can not render old standard HTML right.

ViPER1313:



Well there you go - for complying with official standards (W3C recommendations), he'd get fired. Guess whose fault that may be?

Had Microsoft and Netscape stuck to the W3C standards (instead of introducing their new elements, developing highly error-tolerant rendering engines (MS), or making a rendering engine so buggy that it requires ugly, non-standard hacks to even get it to display the most basic content correctly (Netscape 4)), this situation would be totally different.

I totally agree with Neo Neko on all of this.

I read that page, along with the one on McAfee's website when I got the virus. I didn't feel like looking it up again when I posted my messages. And no, my computer is not on a network. As soon as I caught the virus, ZoneAlarm alerted me that it was trying to access the Internet, and I denied it access.

As to all the other stuff, I'm tired of this. I don't want to fight. So your right and I'm wrong. I really don't care that much. You have more experience dealing with this type of thing as you are a "web designer,...a programmer and an artist," so you make the conclusions. Nuff said....

Well then it must have piggy backed on with something else at an earlier date.



I will not say I could never be wrong. But I know in business that if you fail to manufacture something to a standard then you will not be in business for long. The argument that Microsoft is the dominant browser and everyone must cater to them does not hold water for me. When microsoft was not the dominant player they had no qualms about breaking things and hurting the experience of the majority of those on the internet using Netscape etc. They jumped on the chance. So I fail to see why I should offer them that courtesey. Perhaps I am cold and insensitive. Honestly the state of browsers over the last several years has been truly pathetic. Only recently have Netscape and Mozilla got HTML and CSS 1&2 perfected.

Being the majority does not mean you automatically get to make the rules and set the standards. It helps. If it were not that way it would make being white, right and any other ethnic group wrong. But it just aint so. Even though the vast majority of those participating in politics etc over here in america are christian a few athiests have brought about changes against the wishes of the majority. Ie no God in the pledge because somehow the word which is not necessaily specific to any god is somehow violating the separation of church and state.

In the end you can like Internet Explorer all you like. That is your right as a person. But you do not have the right to expect that all pages will be dumbed down for the benefit of your browser. If the designer want's to do that it is his perogative. But when you do things like this then you have to start eliminating things as old as Flash or Java because someone somewhere may not have downloaded them and will refuse to do so. Good design is not offering a separate page for each browser. If you do that then you will end up getting insanely overworked for nothing. In terms of HTML and CSS Internet Explorer may not draw the page right but the pages are more often than not still quite usable.