Pressure to Cave to MSIE Bugs, Misfeatures, and Nonstandardisms
Daniel R. Tobias
there's a conflict between those who want Mozilla to follow standards,
logic, and general good taste, and those who want it to thoroughly
emulate MSIE down to every last bug, misfeature, quirk, security hole,
and standards violation. I'm very much in the first camp; what's the
point of non-MS browsers even existing if they can't ever do anything
different (even if more standards-compliant, logical, secure, or
user-friendly)? But there are dozens of battlefronts where people
insist that whatever MSIE does, however perverted, is the "de-facto
standard" and should be mindlessly emulated. Advocates of such
"caving in" often threaten to "defect" to MSIE unless Mozilla "fixes"
their problem right away, and they call the opposition "religious
fanatics" for resisting. Myself, I've *never* used MSIE as my default
browser (I used Netscape from 0.9 Beta through 4.7 then went straight
to Mozilla), so anything Mozilla does to "be more like MSIE" is a step
away from my preferred browsing experience.
Here are some of the bugs that I've found that fit in this category;
in some, Mozilla has regrettably already "caved", while others are
still open issues with battle lines drawn (there are some where they
"caved" but backed it out later). If anybody has any to add to this
list, I'd like to see it.
Cases where Mozilla (or related projects like Chimera) "caved" to
pressure to pander to MSIE quirks:
Added nonstandard MARQUEE tag because "popular sites in China use it"
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=156979
Cookie domain settings don't go strictly by standards (actually,
Netscape caused this by not following their own documented standards
way back when they invented cookies; since then, an RFC gives new
"standards" that contradict both Netscape's stated standard and its
actual behavior, so this whole thing is a pretty big mess)
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8743
Scripts have ability to suppress right-click context menu (a very
annoying "feature" -- it used to be one of the good things about
Mozilla that it was immune to this, but they caved under pressure
from "web application developers" who insisted it was essential)
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=72084
Referers are sent between different HTTPS sites, though this is bad
for security, because it breaks some sites if they're not
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141641
Chimera added MIME-type second-guessing by file extension because most
webmasters are too clueless to serve Mac downloads correctly
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=175848
User-agent strings; not precisely emulating MSIE (unlike Opera, which
actually does have "MSIE" in its default UA string [gag, vomit]), but
still allowing the "Mozilla/5.0" part to become fossilized instead of
a "live" version identifier as Mozilla's own standards document
requires, due to being deathly afraid of being rejected by clueless
browser sniffers
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65764
Cases where they caved but backed it out again:
Second-guessing MIME types to get sites to "work" with misconfigured
servers
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=163568
The above "fix" caused news posts from Australia to be processed as
audio files due to .au domain ending, among other problems
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=169991
Aggressively searching for favicons (MSIE-style) instead of more
sensible use of LINK element
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=109843
Cases where they didn't cave (yet) despite pressure:
Make Mozilla mailer more fit for top-posters by moving signature position
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62429
Automatically adding www.*.com to URLs, contributing to "all the
world's a dot-com" mindset
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=37867
Showing ALT text as tooltip (TITLE element is proper one to use for
this purpose; ALT is supposed to be a *replacement* when image is not
shown)
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25537
Showing scrollbar at right of page even where unnecessary (designers
who like nitpickily pixel-precise layouts don't like the slightest
variability)
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=72540
Make misused symbol fonts "work" for characters instead of proper
Unicode (the standards say, like Aristotle and Ayn Rand, that A is A;
it doesn't become a Greek alpha just because somebody slaps a font tag
around it)
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33127
Support bogus forms of file: URLs because MS point-and-drool software
sometimes generates them and they're used in intranets
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=66194
Send different user agent string to plugins than to remote server, to
make it easier to use bogus MSIE-spoofing strings to get around
clueless browser sniffing, without causing plugins to crash because
they take the UA string seriously and think they're being launched by MSIE
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=102042
Better cases: they're considering adopting some good parts of IE
behavior without the stupid parts:
Generating error pages instead of dialog boxes (but *not* replacing
server-supplied error pages with dumb "friendly" ones per IE)
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28586
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/
Geoff
> It's an ongoing theme in the newsgroups and Bugzilla comments that
> there's a conflict between those who want Mozilla to follow standards,
> logic, and general good taste, and those who want it to thoroughly
> emulate MSIE down to every last bug, misfeature, quirk, security hole,
> and standards violation. I'm very much in the first camp; what's the
> point of non-MS browsers even existing if they can't ever do anything
> different (even if more standards-compliant, logical, secure, or
> user-friendly)?
Maybe there is a difference here between Windows users and *nix users. If
you use Windows you can easily power up IE (if your conscience will let
you), when you come across a site that won't render properly in Moz.
The situation is obviously different for those of us on the other side of
the fence. It is not just a matter of personal inconvenience for
enthusiasts, because the lack of a go-anywhere do-anything browser is
bound to put new users (especially busines users), off converting to
Linux.
I work from home and I could name at least three sites access to which is
vital to my work and which are (effectively), IE only. I have written the
litany of helpful/irritated/pleading/murder-threatening emails to the
webmasters and you will be astonished to learn that I have had zero
success. There are colleagues in my business whom I could influence to
change to Linux, but I simply can't do that for as long as they would need
vmware or the like to get to the sites I have mentioned.
> But there
> are dozens of battlefronts where people insist that whatever MSIE does,
> however perverted, is the "de-facto standard" and should be mindlessly
> emulated. Advocates of such "caving in" often threaten to "defect" to
> MSIE unless Mozilla "fixes" their problem right away, and they call the
> opposition "religious fanatics" for resisting.
I have posted here on this theme once or twice before, but I have never
committed any of the above sins. Nor do I condone them, especially the
ludicrous threats of defection. It constantly amazes me that people have
the gall to write to the developers and users of free software threatening
or complaining about anything short of a bug that made the 'puter catch
fire.
> Myself, I've *never* used
> MSIE as my default browser (I used Netscape from 0.9 Beta through 4.7
> then went straight to Mozilla), so anything Mozilla does to "be more
> like MSIE" is a step away from my preferred browsing experience.
Me too. I used Netscape in long-gone Windows days and various Open Source
browsers since then.
> Here are some of the bugs that I've found that fit in this category; in
> some, Mozilla has regrettably already "caved", while others are still
> open issues with battle lines drawn (there are some where they "caved"
> but backed it out later). If anybody has any to add to this list, I'd
> like to see it.
I am on the same side as you are. I don't want every "feature" of IE
replicated in Moz. I do have a feeling, however, that there may be a core
of IE characteristics which are frequently encountered on commercial
web-sites. I continue to wish that Moz could handle them.
Fraternally,
Geoff
-----
"There's no pleasure on earth that's worth sacrificing for the sake of an
extra five years in the geriatric ward of the Sunset Old People's Home,
Weston-Super-Mare."
j0bu
Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
> It's an ongoing theme in the newsgroups and Bugzilla comments that
> there's a conflict between those who want Mozilla to follow standards,
> logic, and general good taste, and those who want it to thoroughly
> emulate MSIE down to every last bug, misfeature, quirk, security hole,
> and standards violation.
interesting read: http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-966575.html
i have also read sometime ago about microsoft's idea of security.
"we would like to make our products secure so we will patch them but the
patch may cause your software to not work properly or not work at all
but be rest assured our software is secure."
what is the point of making software that doesn't work and releasing it
to the public? or patching something to make it secure but not work?
can we say $35/call tech support?
they gotta keep milking that cash cow i mean after all these are the
only two software (office suites & os) that microsoft makes money on!
> I'm very much in the first camp; what's the
> point of non-MS browsers even existing if they can't ever do anything
> different (even if more standards-compliant, logical, secure, or
> user-friendly)? But there are dozens of battlefronts where people
> insist that whatever MSIE does, however perverted, is the "de-facto
> standard" and should be mindlessly emulated. Advocates of such "caving
> in" often threaten to "defect" to MSIE unless Mozilla "fixes" their
> problem right away, and they call the opposition "religious fanatics"
> for resisting. Myself, I've *never* used MSIE as my default browser (I
> used Netscape from 0.9 Beta through 4.7 then went straight to Mozilla),
> so anything Mozilla does to "be more like MSIE" is a step away from my
> preferred browsing experience.
i was a mac user my first puter was a mac performa. i didn't have any
problems with it. i switched to a wintel machine because of my job. as
far as browsers go i always have used ns and have been using mozilla nad
my default setting is mozilla. never ie!
Johnny Yen
news:arlabf$rt...@ripley.netscape.com...
> It's an ongoing theme in the newsgroups and Bugzilla comments that
> there's a conflict between those who want Mozilla to follow standards,
> logic, and general good taste, and those who want it to thoroughly
> emulate MSIE down to every last bug, misfeature, quirk, security hole,
> and standards violation. I'm very much in the first camp; what's the
> point of non-MS browsers even existing if they can't ever do anything
> different (even if more standards-compliant, logical, secure, or
> user-friendly)? But there are dozens of battlefronts where people
> insist that whatever MSIE does, however perverted, is the "de-facto
> standard" and should be mindlessly emulated. Advocates of such
> "caving in" often threaten to "defect" to MSIE unless Mozilla "fixes"
> their problem right away, and they call the opposition "religious
> fanatics" for resisting. Myself, I've *never* used MSIE as my default
> browser (I used Netscape from 0.9 Beta through 4.7 then went straight
> to Mozilla), so anything Mozilla does to "be more like MSIE" is a step
> away from my preferred browsing experience.
You're missing (at least) my point. I want N7/Moz to "Handle" ALL pages so
I don't HAVE to use IE. N7/Moz is missing an oportunity here: If they
would 'decently' render ALL IE-specific pages, they could put up a little
one line bar accross the top of the page saying something like "page was not
written to web standards, but to IE and has been 'fixed' for viewing"...
That way, EVERYone would get "the message" each and every IE-specific page
they went to. And maybe a button to shoot the website an informative e-mail
to that effect.
--
johnny yen
Sailfish
It seems to me that given the choice of spending valuable and limited
development resources on getting "bad" sites to render versus getting
the browser to render "good" sites along with enabling the new W3C
specifications, the choice becomes more clear.
I'd prefer them devoting all their effort for the new technologies, not
bloating the program with a bunch of *Case:* statements so it can guess
at how to handle bad code...
--
Netscape FAQs: http://www.ufaq.org
Netscape 6/7 Tips: http://www.hmetzger.de/net6e.html
Netscape 6 FAQ: http://home.adelphia.net/~sremick/ns6faq.html
Netscape 7 Help/Tips: http://techaholic.net/ns7.html
Web page validation: http://validator.w3.org
About Mozilla: http://www.mozilla.org
Daniel Wang
<http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51015>? :p
Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
> It's an ongoing theme in the newsgroups and Bugzilla comments that
> there's a conflict between those who want Mozilla to follow standards,
> logic, and general good taste, and those who want it to thoroughly
> emulate MSIE down to every last bug, misfeature, quirk, security hole,
> and standards violation.
No conflict exists; we simply ignore the agitators :p
> I'm very much in the first camp; what's the point of non-MS
> browsers even existing if they can't ever do anything different
> (even if more standards-compliant, logical, secure, or
> user-friendly)?
Point a bit misguided here. What's the point of building a site if it
will work differently in different browsers?
> But there are dozens of battlefronts where people
> insist that whatever MSIE does, however perverted, is the "de-facto
> standard" and should be mindlessly emulated.
Microsoft Internet Explorer is NOT a standard. What is termed “de-facto
standard” here is actually “implementation” which has major differences
from standards:
Implementation is the actual functionalities, characteristics, and
behaviors built into a product or process.
Standards, are “documented agreements containing technical
specifications or other precise criteria to be used consistently as
rules, guidelines, or definitions of characteristics, to ensure that
materials, products, processes and services are fit for their purpose”
(Deb Stacey, “Software Standards”
<http://hebb.cis.uoguelph.ca/~dave/343/Lectures/standards.html> 1997)
Microsoft has no Internet standards in that all of technical documents
it publishes pertaining to HTML, CSS, Javascript, and the like are
actually “reference” information describing the behaviors of a
particular version of its software.
The scope of their documents are thus severely limited in that they do
not describe the intended software behaviors but rather the current
behaviors. Thus any behavior described can be a bug, an unintended side
effect, or an actual feature. The documents do not provide any
confidence whether any feature, characteristic, or behavior is stable
and will not change in the future.
Furthermore, due to lack of real specifications, all versions of
Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) earlier than 6.0 and all MSIE 6.0 or
later in standards-compliance mode are unpredictable in that their
rendering behavior depends almost entirely on the specific context.
Microsoft's documentations do not describe why something behaves certain
way. For example, the following two behavior are not documented or
explained by any public materials published by Micrsoft:
If a table element is relatively sized and it contains only images,
then the table element will have the smallest size possible,
regardless of the size computed from the size attributes.
If a image is sized relatively but the size attribute is very small
(say 10%), then the image will be sized at its full dimensions.
(This may depend on other conditions.)
The only confidence an author or developer can have is that something
does work in certain way by testing a document against a particular version.
It is, therefore, impossible to guarentee that a page does work in MSIE.
MSIE tends to render pages not by following strict logics of the code
structure but by guessing the visual presentation as intended by the
developer or author. MSIE tends to works around or fixes errors
frequently committed by Web developers or authors at its best efforts.
Unfortunately such best efforts change from versions to versions. An
example is bookmark anchors. In MSIE 6.0 for Windows and perhaps MSIE
5.5, <a name="#bookmark"> will be interpretated as <a name="bookmark">
so that <a href="#bookmark"> will work. But in MSIE 5.0 or earlier this
fix wasn't present and <a href="#bookmark"> will not work.
Compatibility against an implementation cannot be verified or validated
unless such implementation is built against some specifications or test
procedures. It is, therefore, illogical to claim something best works
with MSIE or other non-standard-based browsers.
There's a summary of differences between implementations and standards:
Implementations Standards
------------------------------------------------------------------
stability very unstable stable
------------------------------------------------------------------
predictability unpredictable predictable
------------------------------------------------------------------
compatibility neither forward or partial to full
backword compatible compatibility
------------------------------------------------------------------
testability cannot be verified or self-consistent
validated against itself and verifiable
------------------------------------------------------------------
flexibility very flexible depends
------------------------------------------------------------------
reproducability cannot be emulated always
and portability or imitated
------------------------------------------------------------------
product quality no quality assurance quality is
manageable
------------------------------------------------------------------
certifiability cannot be certified can be certified
> Advocates of such "caving
> in" often threaten to "defect" to MSIE unless Mozilla "fixes" their
> problem right away, and they call the opposition "religious fanatics"
> for resisting.
Does anyone care if we lose one particular user? I don't; Mozilla has
hundreds of bugs needing attention and I don't have time winning converts.
> Myself, I've *never* used MSIE as my default browser (I
> used Netscape from 0.9 Beta through 4.7 then went straight to Mozilla),
> so anything Mozilla does to "be more like MSIE" is a step away from my
> preferred browsing experience.
MSIE cannot be emulated or imitated. Period. (see above)
> Here are some of the bugs that I've found that fit in this category; in
> some, Mozilla has regrettably already "caved",
for good, logical reaons
> while others are still open issues with battle lines drawn (there
> are some where they "caved" but backed it out later).
So who is religious here? Despite our efforts, people won't always agree
with each other.
> If anybody has any to add to this list, I'd like to see it.
You do realize no particular set of standards is sufficient enough for
any browser? Sometimes we will have to make decisions. Also, not all of
items in your list are faults of Microsoft.
> Cases where Mozilla (or related projects like Chimera) "caved" to
> pressure to pander to MSIE quirks:
>
> Added nonstandard MARQUEE tag because "popular sites in China use it"
> “XBL emulation of marquee”
> <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=156979>
Addition of marquee is not a violation of W3C standards as handling of
elements not specified in the standards are undefined. The decision may
be bad, but for reasons other than breaking standards.
> Cookie domain settings don't go strictly by standards (actually,
> Netscape caused this by not following their own documented standards
> way back when they invented cookies; since then, an RFC gives new
> "standards" that contradict both Netscape's stated standard and its
> actual behavior, so this whole thing is a pretty big mess)
> “Cookie not set error ?”
> <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8743>
dunno
> Scripts have ability to suppress right-click context menu (a very
> annoying "feature" -- it used to be one of the good things about
> Mozilla that it was immune to this, but they caved under pressure
> from "web application developers" who insisted it was essential)
> “There is no way to disable the context menu upon right-click
> (oncontextmenu?)”
> <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=72084>
I don't understand why this bug is fixed as it has 0 votes, few
duplicates, and 0 gotta_fix comment and I've never heard of complaints
from Web developers about this in newsgroups...
> Referers are sent between different HTTPS sites, though this is bad for
> security, because it breaks some sites if they're not
> “disabling cross-site HTTPS referrers breaks sites [was: when leaving https,
> should send host+port as referrer instead of no referer]”
> <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141641>
http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/netwerk/protocol/http/src/nsHttpChannel.cpp#2591
// Support referrals from a secure server if this is a secure site
// and (optionally) if the host names are the same.
> Chimera added MIME-type second-guessing by file extension because most
> webmasters are too clueless to serve Mac downloads correctly
> “Can't implicitly trust text/plain content type”
> <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=175848>
blame DOS vendors...
> User-agent strings; not precisely emulating MSIE (unlike Opera, which
> actually does have "MSIE" in its default UA string [gag, vomit]), but
> still allowing the "Mozilla/5.0" part to become fossilized instead of
> a "live" version identifier as Mozilla's own standards document
> requires, due to being deathly afraid of being rejected by clueless
> browser sniffers
> “New mozilla user-agent string”
> <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65764>
> Cases where they caved but backed it out again:
>
> [snip]
> Better cases: they're considering adopting some good parts of IE
> behavior without the stupid parts:
>
> [snip]
I'd add Intellimouse support
Daniel Wang
>
> You're missing (at least) my point. I want N7/Moz to "Handle" ALL pages so
> I don't HAVE to use IE.
The only time Mozilla does not handle a page is when the site
specfically block the browser or browser with certain configuration from
accessing it. Otherwise Mozilla will handle all pages okay.
> N7/Moz is missing an oportunity here: If they
> would 'decently' render ALL IE-specific pages,
Please give examples where Mozilla does NOT DECENTLY render IE-specific
page...
> they could put up a little one line bar accross the top of the page
> saying something like "page was not written to web standards, but to
> IE and has been 'fixed' for viewing"...
Per ethical and legal considerations, Mozilla.org should not implicate
Microsoft for any fault committted by Web developers, nor should
Mozilla.org implicate any Web developers for making inaccessible or
insecure sites except for warning users about accessibility and security
issues.
> That way, EVERYone would get "the message" each and every IE-specific page
> they went to.
When is a page IE-specific and when is it not? A page claiming to work
only for MSIE 5.0 or later may well break in MSIE 5.0 for Mac or even
MSIE 7.0 ...
> And maybe a button to shoot the website an informative e-mail
> to that effect.
I'd prefer a gun to shoot to that effect :p
> johnny yen
michael lefevre
> On 23 Nov 2002, I vada'd that Geoff had trolled into
> netscape.public.mozilla.general and left a bona messagette; to which I
> have responded as follows:
>> Maybe there is a difference here between Windows users and *nix users.
>> If you use Windows you can easily power up IE (if your conscience
>> will let you), when you come across a site that won't render properly
>> in Moz.
>> The situation is obviously different for those of us on the other
>> side of the fence.
>
there *WAS*.
> It's available from Micro$oft's website....
not any more - http://www.microsoft.com/unix/ie/
--
michael
Pascal Chevrel
> On 23 Nov 2002, I vada'd that Geoff had trolled into
> netscape.public.mozilla.general and left a bona messagette; to which I
> have responded as follows:
>
>
>> If you use Windows you can easily power up IE (if your conscience
>>will let you), when you come across a site that won't render properly
>>in Moz.
>> The situation is obviously different for those of us on the other
>> side of the fence.
>
>
>
>
>
>
Get your facts straight, Microsoft dropped Unix support a long time ago,
I believe the last version they dis was 4.0 and it is now longer
downloadable.
http://www.microsoft.com/unix/ie/default.asp
Pascal
--
FAQ Mozilla/Netscape 7 en français : http://pascal.chevrel.free.fr/
"What we're seeing with Web sites that are viewable only with IE is the
privatization of the Web."
(Mitchell Baker)
Daniel R. Tobias
> Point a bit misguided here. What's the point of building a site if it
> will work differently in different browsers?
While a standards-compliant site should work *correctly* in all
standards-compliant browsers, that doesn't equate to not working
"differently", for some definitions of "different". There are many
elements in the standards which are capable of variation in
implementation, or are allowed to be disabled or ignored. HTML was
never designed for pixel-perfect design. CSS is capable of suggesting
such "perfection", but can be overrided by user stylesheets or
disabled altogether. Different browsers might vary a lot in user
interface, and be running on systems with different screen resolution
and color depth, among other things. There can also be text-mode
browsers (Lynx, Links), aural browsers (IBM Home Page Reader;
pwWebSpeak), cell phone browsers, and others that could be completely
standards-compliant while having widely different manners of
functionality.
With CSS fully supported and enabled, and not overridden, and a site
using absolute size and position attributes, it's true that the
presentation within the browser window should be identical in all
compliant browsers, but that still leaves lots of things such as the
browser "chrome", mouse and keyboard commands, context menus, etc.
that can vary between browsers.
> Standards, are “documented agreements containing technical
> specifications or other precise criteria to be used consistently as
> rules, guidelines, or definitions of characteristics, to ensure that
> materials, products, processes and services are fit for their purpose”
> (Deb Stacey, “Software Standards”
> <http://hebb.cis.uoguelph.ca/~dave/343/Lectures/standards.html> 1997)
...like the character set standards that say that characters 147 and
148 (in the Unicode standard and in most common standard encodings)
are control characters, not printable ones; that didn't stop you from
using them above where quotation marks belong. Technically, you
didn't break the standard, because your message used the header
"charset=windows-1252", declaring it to be in the proprietary
Microsoftism character set that has so-called "smart" quotes in those
positions, but it's not a really good idea for interoperability to use
such a proprietary thing. It's safer to use standard ASCII quotes (")
unless you're using a Unicode encoding which can accomodate the
high-numbered correct values for "curly quotes". The fact that
Mozilla allows the use of these nonstandard characters belongs on my
list... is there a bug number on it? (Actually, if a Web page is sent
as charset "us-ascii", any attempts to use 8-bit characters get
replaced with a question mark in inverse within a diamond; I've run
into lots of bogus sites that fall into this.)
> example is bookmark anchors. In MSIE 6.0 for Windows and perhaps MSIE
> 5.5, <a name="#bookmark"> will be interpretated as <a name="bookmark">
> so that <a href="#bookmark"> will work. But in MSIE 5.0 or earlier this
> fix wasn't present and <a href="#bookmark"> will not work.
Is it a "fix" to accomodate sloppy and incorrect Web authoring, or is
it part of the dumbing down of the Internet?
Daniel Wang
> On Fri, 22 Nov 2002 08:16:51 +0000, Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
>
> I work from home and I could name at least three sites access to which is
> vital to my work and which are (effectively), IE only. I have written the
> litany of helpful/irritated/pleading/murder-threatening emails to the
> webmasters and you will be astonished to learn that I have had zero
> success.
Try finding a version of Internet Explorer that will not work for the
sites (e.g. a Mac version or 4.0 version) and e-mail the Web monsters
that their sites are not as IE-compatible as claimed :)
Daniel Wang
> Daniel Wang wrote:
>
>>> I'm very much in the first camp; what's the point of non-MS
>>> browsers even existing if they can't ever do anything different
>>>
>> will work differently in different browsers?
>
> While a standards-compliant site should work *correctly* in all
> standards-compliant browsers, that doesn't equate to not working
My point is that just as we shouldn't design a browser that will work as
another brower does, we shouldn't design a browser *just* to do things
differently from that browser. Pixel-perfect rendering was not my
intended subject.
>> [snip] “Software Standards” [snip]
>
> ...like the character set standards that say that characters 147 and 148
> (in the Unicode standard and in most common standard encodings) are
> control characters, not printable ones; that didn't stop you from using
> them above where quotation marks belong. Technically, you didn't break
> the standard, because your message used the header
> "charset=windows-1252", declaring it to be in the proprietary
> Microsoftism character set that has so-called "smart" quotes in those
> positions, but it's not a really good idea for interoperability to use
> such a proprietary thing.
I was actually trying to use Unicode characters or something of that
nature but for some reason the character encoding always gets reset to
Window 1252...
> It's safer to use standard ASCII quotes (")
> unless you're using a Unicode encoding which can accomodate the
> high-numbered correct values for "curly quotes".
How do I get that quotes? I copy & paste the quotes from a Unicode HTML
but somehow Mozilla decides the character encoding has to be Window 1252...
>> example is bookmark anchors. In MSIE 6.0 for Windows and perhaps MSIE
>> 5.5, <a name="#bookmark"> will be interpretated as <a name="bookmark">
>> so that <a href="#bookmark"> will work. But in MSIE 5.0 or earlier
>> this fix wasn't present and <a href="#bookmark"> will not work.
>
> Is it a "fix" to accomodate sloppy and incorrect Web authoring, or is it
> part of the dumbing down of the Internet?
>
Don't know. But this shows that MSIE is not compatible with itself.
J.B. Moreno
Daniel Wang <danielw...@aol.com> wrote:
> Microsoft Internet Explorer is NOT a standard. What is termed ìde-facto
> standardî here is actually ìimplementationî which has major differences
> from standards:
>
> Implementation is the actual functionalities, characteristics, and
> behaviors built into a product or process.
Not to argue the point that MSIE isn't a standard, but for netnews,
there's a whole lot of things where the "standard" is limited to
reference implementations (e.g. XOVER wasn't documented officially
until Oct 2000, but was in use for 6 or 7 years prior to that).
--
J.B. Moreno
Ron Hunter
I have to agree. In the REAL world, Microsoft IS the standard, any other
'standards' just don't really matter to the average user. If NS wants to
recapture any market share, this slavish adherence to an 'industry standard'
will have to be put aside.
--
Ron Hunter rphu...@charter.net
Henri Sivonen
"Johnny Yen" <joh...@yen.cam> wrote:
> If they would 'decently' render ALL IE-specific pages,
An IE specific page is by definition a page that can't be rendered
elsewhere.
> they could put up a little
> one line bar accross the top of the page saying something like "page was not
> written to web standards, but to IE and has been 'fixed' for viewing"...
Have you considered what it would take to programmatically "fix" any
random page? (Finding out "what the author intended" may require psychic
abilitites.)
--
Henri Sivonen
hsiv...@niksula.hut.fi
http://www.hut.fi/u/hsivonen/
Ron Hunter
Henri Sivonen wrote:
> In article <arlvs4$1c...@ripley.netscape.com>,
> "Johnny Yen" <joh...@yen.cam> wrote:
>
>
>>If they would 'decently' render ALL IE-specific pages,
>
>
> An IE specific page is by definition a page that can't be rendered
> elsewhere.
>
>
>>they could put up a little
>>one line bar accross the top of the page saying something like "page was not
>>written to web standards, but to IE and has been 'fixed' for viewing"...
>
>
> Have you considered what it would take to programmatically "fix" any
> random page? (Finding out "what the author intended" may require psychic
> abilitites.)
>
Uhhh, does that mean IE has psychic powers? I think NOT. The answer is to be
more 'broadminded' about the rules, and to interpret pages the same way IE
would. This seems to be very hard for some people to grasp.
--
Ron Hunter rphu...@charter.net
Daniel R. Tobias
> Uhhh, does that mean IE has psychic powers? I think NOT. The answer is
> to be more 'broadminded' about the rules, and to interpret pages the
> same way IE would. This seems to be very hard for some people to grasp.
Sometimes this attitude causes standards-compliant sites to be
rendered incorrectly. A good example is that attempts to use CGI
scripts that generate output of type text/plain quite often fail in
MSIE due to its MIME-type second-guessing (these scripts work fine in
Mozilla).
Lancelot Link Secret Chimp
<d...@tobias.name> wrote:
> But there are dozens of battlefronts where people
>insist that whatever MSIE does, however perverted, is the "de-facto
>standard" and should be mindlessly emulated.
While you insist that "standards" should be mindlessly emulated, with
no regard for what's really going on.
You call it "caving in", I call it being sensible and trying to make a
browser that is is as useful as possible. The issue is not emulating
the flaws/features of MSIE -- the issue is creating a web browser that
properly displays all the millions of websites out there. How that
is achieved is irrelevant -- the only thing that matters is the end
result -- "does the page display properly".
Standards are great -- but what is the point of a web browser that is
"100% standards compliant" when the vast majority of web sites in the
world do not follow those standards? Mindlessly adhering to
"standards", with no regard for what is really going on in the world,
gaurantees one thing and one thing alone: You'll produce a browser
that doesn't properly display a lot of pages.
A recent survey of over 400 websites run by W3C members showed that
less than 5% of them were fully compliant with W3C standards. Yes,
that's right -- the members of W3C don't follow their own standards
and design their sites for MSIE instead.
Do I like this situation? No. I think MSIE (and Microsoft in general)
sucks. Do I wish that stupid web designers would would follow
published standards? Absolutely.
However, the simple fact of the matter is, it is *NOT* within the
power of programmers to change the behavior of stupid web designers
and it is *NOT* within the power of browser programmers to rewite the
millions of non-standard web pages that currently exist. . It *IS*
within the power of programmers to build a web browser that can
properly display existing web sites.
You can preach all you want about "standards" but you're ignoring
reality: If MSIE can properly display a page, but your browser
cannot, then the problem lies with YOUR BROWSER. Period. The End.
And the creators of that browser need to make the appropriate changes
to their program so that it properly displays pages.
I've probably written a couple hundred e-mails to the operators of
websites that don't display properly with Opera or Mozilla (or that
sniff your user agent and don't even let you in if they don't see
"MSIE") and it has had ZERO effect. Life sucks. Get over it
already.
David W. Fenton
<armk9i$k8kc2$2...@ID-106624.news.dfncis.de>:
Evolt.org maintains an archive of almost all browser versions, but
they don't have this. They do have a Solaris version, though:
http://browsers.evolt.org/index.cfm/dir/ie/
The main browser list is at:
If someone has the Unix version of IE, they should contribute it to
the browser archive.
--
David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton
dfenton at bway dot net http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc
us...@domain.invalid
Put the shoe on the "other foot". You run across web sites that display
ONLY in Mozilla (the most standards compliant browser on the planet) and
NOT in IE. So now what? Whose BROWSER is at fault and what do you do
about it, re-write to suit IE or do you write an email to MS suggesting
that THEY get THEIR act together as well as trolling in IE groups that
IE sucks or what?
/cg
Geoff
<snip>
> However, the simple fact of the matter is, it is *NOT* within the power
> of programmers to change the behavior of stupid web designers and it is
> *NOT* within the power of browser programmers to rewite the millions of
> non-standard web pages that currently exist. . It *IS* within the
> power of programmers to build a web browser that can properly display
> existing web sites.
I have this recurring mental image of a day, long after I have handed in
my dinner pail, when some greybeard developer puts the finishing touches
to Moz. Eagerly he begins surfing, but soon discovers that mozdev.org is
the only site on the planet that will render.
<snip>
>
> I've probably written a couple hundred e-mails to the operators of
> websites that don't display properly with Opera or Mozilla (or that
> sniff your user agent and don't even let you in if they don't see
> "MSIE") and it has had ZERO effect.
I mentioned my identical experience in an earlier post. Perhaps you and I
should just exchange such emails directly between ourselves and cut out
the middle-man?
Geoff
--
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Ron Hunter
I have better things to do with my time than troll IE groups. However,
suggesting that MS do things by some standard other than theirs is like trying
to tell the 400 lb. gorilla which side of the bowl to eat from.
--
Ron Hunter rphu...@charter.net
Chris Hoess
>
>
> Henri Sivonen wrote:
>>
>> Have you considered what it would take to programmatically "fix" any
>> random page? (Finding out "what the author intended" may require psychic
>> abilitites.)
>>
> Uhhh, does that mean IE has psychic powers? I think NOT. The answer is to be
> more 'broadminded' about the rules, and to interpret pages the same way IE
> would. This seems to be very hard for some people to grasp.
Perhaps if you'd actually taken any interest in the implementation of such
things, you wouldn't be so glib. I commend
<URL:http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/htmlparser/src/CNavDTD.cpp> to
your attention, as well as
<URL:http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1037910467&count=1> to see what's involved in
"the same way IE does".
--
Chris Hoess
Christopher Jahn
> Standards are great -- but what is the point of a web
> browser that is "100% standards compliant" when the vast
> majority of web sites in the world do not follow those
> standards?
Have you references for this? Any facts at all? Post them, if
you want to be taken seriously.
AFAIK, the majority in fact code to the standard, or at least
close enough for Moz to render. I've found that only about 5%
of the websites I run across have issues. And only about 2%
that flat out don't work.
Brian Heinrich
netscape.public.mozilla.general and loudly proclaimed:
> I have to agree. In the REAL world, Microsoft IS the standard, any
> other 'standards' just don't really matter to the average user. If NS
> wants to recapture any market share, this slavish adherence to an
> 'industry standard' will have to be put aside.
*sigh* We've gone thro' this before, Ron: If you truly feel that way, then
use IE. I won't say you have to use OE, but that's always an option, too.
:-P
/b.
--
Mozilla end-user questions should be directed to:
* snews://secnews.netscape.com:563/netscape.mozilla.user.general
* snews://secnews.netscape.com:563/netscape.mozilla.user.win32
* snews://secnews.netscape.com:563/netscape.mozilla.user.mac
* snews://secnews.netscape.com:563/netscape.mozilla.user.unix
Note that you need to have SSL enabled and the port set to 563.
Brian Heinrich
netscape.public.mozilla.general and loudly proclaimed:
> "Daniel R. Tobias" <d...@tobias.name> wrote in message
> news:arlabf$rt...@ripley.netscape.com...
>> It's an ongoing theme in the newsgroups and Bugzilla comments that
>> there's a conflict between those who want Mozilla to follow standards,
>> logic, and general good taste, and those who want it to thoroughly
>> emulate MSIE down to every last bug, misfeature, quirk, security hole,
>> and standards violation. I'm very much in the first camp; what's the
>> point of non-MS browsers even existing if they can't ever do anything
>> different (even if more standards-compliant, logical, secure, or
>> user-friendly)? But there are dozens of battlefronts where people
>> insist that whatever MSIE does, however perverted, is the "de-facto
>> standard" and should be mindlessly emulated. Advocates of such
>> "caving in" often threaten to "defect" to MSIE unless Mozilla "fixes"
>> their problem right away, and they call the opposition "religious
>> fanatics" for resisting. Myself, I've *never* used MSIE as my default
>> browser (I used Netscape from 0.9 Beta through 4.7 then went straight
>> to Mozilla), so anything Mozilla does to "be more like MSIE" is a step
>> away from my preferred browsing experience.
> ..........
>
> You're missing (at least) my point.
Perhaps. But you seem to be missing the point more generally, which is that
the future of the Internet lies in inter-operability, which in turn means
that it lies in standards. Web designers and Daniel's 'web monsters' are
starting to get the clue.
With a couple of exceptions, the major divergence of IE is in terms of its
proprietary DOM. But the development of the DOM by the W3C and of
ECMAScript by, well, the ECMA, have turned old-school JavaScript in to a
very powerful tool. (Moz does support innerHTML, IIRC.)
Of the divergences, Moz already supports *shudder* <marquee>. It does not
support <embed>, simply because of how <embed> is linked to Windows itself.
The most recent issue of A Lisp Atart, er, A List Apart deals in part with
this: <http://www.alistapart.com/stories/flashsatay/>
> I want N7/Moz to "Handle" ALL pages
> so I don't HAVE to use IE. N7/Moz is missing an oportunity here: If
> they would 'decently' render ALL IE-specific pages, they could put up a
> little one line bar accross the top of the page saying something like
> "page was not written to web standards, but to IE and has been 'fixed'
> for viewing"...
>
> That way, EVERYone would get "the message" each and every IE-specific
> page they went to. And maybe a button to shoot the website an
> informative e-mail to that effect.
>
> --
> johnny yen
*Psst!* Your newsreader is busted. Find the fix at <http://jump.to/oe-
quotefix>.
Ron Hunter
I am sure that trying to adhere to standards (other than that promulgated by
MS) and still interpret the Internet according to Gates is not easy, but it IS
possible to interpret a page the way IE does it, or IE couldn't do it.
--
Ron Hunter rphu...@charter.net
Ron Hunter
Christopher Jahn wrote:
> And it came to pass that Lancelot Link Secret Chimp wrote:
>
>
>>Standards are great -- but what is the point of a web
>>browser that is "100% standards compliant" when the vast
>>majority of web sites in the world do not follow those
>>standards?
>
>
> Have you references for this? Any facts at all? Post them, if
> you want to be taken seriously.
>
> AFAIK, the majority in fact code to the standard, or at least
> close enough for Moz to render. I've found that only about 5%
> of the websites I run across have issues. And only about 2%
> that flat out don't work.
>
I doubt anyone has actual figures concering the billions of websites as
obtaining these stats would take years, and would be out of date before it was
finished. However, there is NO DOUBT that many sites are coded by software
produced by MS, which seems to go to some lengths to make pages NOT display
properly in non MS browsers.
--
Ron Hunter rphu...@charter.net
Ron Hunter
Brian Heinrich wrote:
> On 23 Nov 2002, it is alleged that Ron Hunter sauntered in to
> netscape.public.mozilla.general and loudly proclaimed:
>
>> I have to agree. In the REAL world, Microsoft IS the standard, any
>> other 'standards' just don't really matter to the average user. If NS
>> wants to recapture any market share, this slavish adherence to an
>> 'industry standard' will have to be put aside.
>
>
> *sigh* We've gone thro' this before, Ron: If you truly feel that way,
> then use IE. I won't say you have to use OE, but that's always an
> option, too. :-P
>
> /b.
>
I don't like IE, and OE is so full of holes one could use it as a pasta
drainer. The point is not what I choose to use, but what 95% of the userbase
chooses to use, primarily because MS used its monopoly to offer users a tool
that they could have without effort, in contrast to NS which has to be
downloaded at great effort/time. Still, if I have a choice between coding for
IE and coding for 'standards' why bother with that 5%?
--
Ron Hunter rphu...@charter.net
michael lefevre
> And it came to pass that Lancelot Link Secret Chimp wrote:
>
>> Standards are great -- but what is the point of a web
>> browser that is "100% standards compliant" when the vast
>> majority of web sites in the world do not follow those
>> standards?
>
> Have you references for this? Any facts at all? Post them, if
> you want to be taken seriously.
>
> AFAIK, the majority in fact code to the standard, or at least
> close enough for Moz to render. I've found that only about 5%
> of the websites I run across have issues. And only about 2%
> that flat out don't work.
sites not rendering isn't quite the same thing - there's no doubt that
the majority of web sites do not follow web standards. if you need a
statistic, how about the one from a couple of months ago - less than 5%
of the 500-odd W3C member's web sites are valid (there's a link on
the webstandards.org site somewhere). Afraid I don't remember where I
saw it, but someone else checked some top-50 web sites list, and found
that none of them followed the standards. Much of the mozilla.org site
doesn't follow the standards, neither does bugzilla, neither does
netscape.
if you believe that the majority of sites code to standards, then I think
it's you that should list some well known sites which _do_.
--
michael
Henri Sivonen
Ron Hunter <rphu...@charter.net> wrote:
> > Have you considered what it would take to programmatically "fix" any
> > random page? (Finding out "what the author intended" may require psychic
> > abilitites.)
> >
> Uhhh, does that mean IE has psychic powers? I think NOT.
Neither IE not Mozilla has psychic powers. However, for some reason, the
people who cry "do what the author intended" don't hold IE and Mozilla
to the same standards--they don't even expect IE to have psychic powers.
When IE doesn't do what the author intended, the author usually either
1) Changes the page until IE does what the author wants.
2) Complains that IE doesn't support the W3C specs properly.
However, when it is about Mozilla, people suddenly want the browser to
divine the intentions of the author even in cases where the author
hasn't communicated his/her intentions properly (ie. the author hasn't
communicated the intent using the Web standards properly).
But then some people say there's no need to guess the intentions--just
do whatever IE does. Like here:
> The answer is to be more 'broadminded' about the rules, and to
> interpret pages the same way IE would. This seems to be very hard
> for some people to grasp.
The ways in which authors can botch their pages up are infinite. IE
reacts to those conditions in *some* ways, because the program has to do
*something*. These ways aren't thoroughly intentional or documented.
Since we aren't dealing with a small set of well-defined cases here but
an infinite set[1] of cases whose definitions are unknown,
reverse-engineering and duplicating IE's exact reaction to each possible
standards violation is impossible given finite time and effort. (Even
implementing the standards correctly is really, really hard.)
Mozilla is already quite "broad-minded", does fix-ups and renders most
real-world standards-incompliant pages similarly to IE or Netscape 4.x.
[1] Assuming that the input page can be of any length, there can be
infinitely many different inputs.
Henri Sivonen
Ron Hunter <rphu...@charter.net> wrote:
> but it IS possible to interpret a page the way IE does it, or IE
> couldn't do it.
To do everything in every case exatcly like IE, you need IE's source
code. And you can't change anything, because some of the things IE does
can result from unknown and unintentional interactions within the
program.
Henri Sivonen
Brian Heinrich <hum...@myrealboxXXX.com> wrote:
> Of the divergences, Moz already supports *shudder* <marquee>. It does not
> support <embed>, simply because of how <embed> is linked to Windows itself.
Mozilla does support <embed>. Because Mozilla doesn't ignore the Active
X class ID like Mac IE does, you'd need nested <object>s in order to
support Mozilla and Windows IE. Due to this (and due to Netscape 4.x),
many authors actully make pages where <embed> is the thing Mozilla uses.
Daniel R. Tobias
> Uhhh, does that mean IE has psychic powers? I think NOT. The answer is
> to be more 'broadminded' about the rules, and to interpret pages the
> same way IE would. This seems to be very hard for some people to grasp.
"Be more 'broadminded'... interpret pages the same way IE would"?
This reminds me of one of the slogans on a sticker included with an
issue of Mad magazine back in the '70s: "Be reasonable: do it my
way!" Where "my way" in this case is defined as "Microsoft's way".
Daniel R. Tobias
> Mozilla does support <embed>. Because Mozilla doesn't ignore the Active
> X class ID like Mac IE does, you'd need nested <object>s in order to
> support Mozilla and Windows IE. Due to this (and due to Netscape 4.x),
> many authors actully make pages where <embed> is the thing Mozilla uses.
If Mozilla doesn't ignore the Active X class ID, what does it do with
it? ActiveX is a proprietary Microsoftism, isn't it?
Ron Hunter
Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
> Ron Hunter wrote:
>
>> Uhhh, does that mean IE has psychic powers? I think NOT. The answer
>> is to be more 'broadminded' about the rules, and to interpret pages
>> the same way IE would. This seems to be very hard for some people to
>> grasp.
>
>
> "Be more 'broadminded'... interpret pages the same way IE would"? This
> reminds me of one of the slogans on a sticker included with an issue of
> Mad magazine back in the '70s: "Be reasonable: do it my way!" Where
> "my way" in this case is defined as "Microsoft's way".
>
>
If you are in a cage with a 400 lb. gorilla (and that's what MS IE IS), then
whatever way HE wants things done is how you better do it, even if you KNOW
it's wrong. To the extent possible, Mozilla should try to render pages with
common errors (such as the code created by Frontpage) in some reasonable
manner. Any other course just makes the user base smaller.
--
Ron Hunter rphu...@charter.net
Henri Sivonen
"Daniel R. Tobias" <d...@tobias.name> wrote:
> If Mozilla doesn't ignore the Active X class ID, what does it do with
> it?
It just sulks and considers the <object> unrenderable. I think this
approach doesn't make sense. I think the class ID should just be ignored
if Mozilla could handle the <object> content if the class ID was absent.
(That's what Mac IE does.) However, it seems this issue is on the
WONTFIX track: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46569
(Note that the bug summary has morphed masking the real issue.)
> ActiveX is a proprietary Microsoftism, isn't it?
Yes.
Brian Heinrich
netscape.public.mozilla.general and loudly proclaimed:
Because if you do your mark-up in such a way that it validates, all current
and future browsers -- not just a given version of IE -- will (OK, 'should')
be able to display it. If you do your mark-up in such a way as to take
proprietary extensions/implementations and rendering quirks in to
account,there is no guarantee that even subsequent versions of IE will be
able to display it adequately. (Altho' M$ has made a marked effort to
provide backwards 'compatibility' on some points.)
Brian Heinrich
netscape.public.mozilla.general and loudly proclaimed:
> In article <Xns92D0DD211...@204.29.187.156>,
> Brian Heinrich <hum...@myrealboxXXX.com> wrote:
>
>> Of the divergences, Moz already supports *shudder* <marquee>. It does
>> not support <embed>, simply because of how <embed> is linked to Windows
>> itself.
>
> Mozilla does support <embed>. Because Mozilla doesn't ignore the Active
> X class ID like Mac IE does, you'd need nested <object>s in order to
> support Mozilla and Windows IE. Due to this (and due to Netscape 4.x),
> many authors actully make pages where <embed> is the thing Mozilla uses.
I then sit corrected. My apologies.
Esben Mose Hansen
> If you are in a cage with a 400 lb. gorilla (and that's what MS IE IS),
> then whatever way HE wants things done is how you better do it, even if
> you KNOW it's wrong. To the extent possible, Mozilla should try to
> render pages with common errors (such as the code created by Frontpage)
> in some reasonable manner. Any other course just makes the user base
> smaller.
>
Ehhh. Mozilla does quite a lot to render "common errors". Have you even
tried reading a bit about this in bugzilla or the code? Rendering it
exactly like IE is impossible (as e.g. IE 5.5 != IE 6.0) and a bloody
waste of time. Even Microsoft is moving towards standards, so why
shouldn't we? If you want perfect IE compability, why not use IE? I'm
sure it will even run under WINE ;-)
regards, Esben
Clark Morgan
> Please give examples where Mozilla does NOT DECENTLY render IE-specific
> page...
Brian Heinrich
netscape.public.mozilla.general and loudly proclaimed:
> Daniel Wang wrote:
You seem to've neglected to read
<http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=159494#c92>: Moz isn't being
served the same CSS as IE. When it is, it renders the page nicely.
Gordon Hodgson
<hum...@myrealboxXXX.com> writes
>On 28 Nov 2002, it is alleged that Clark Morgan sauntered in to
>netscape.public.mozilla.general and loudly proclaimed:
>
>> Daniel Wang wrote:
>>> Please give examples where Mozilla does NOT DECENTLY render
>>>IE-specific page...
>> http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=159494
>
>You seem to've neglected to read
><http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=159494#c92>: Moz isn't
>being served the same CSS as IE. When it is, it renders the page nicely.
>
>/b.
Is that the same problem that appears with nme.com ? Is it the server's
fault for sending the wrong css?
Muppets.
--
Gordon Hodgson
(news)(at)(popculture)(dot)(demon)(dot)(co)(dot)(uk)
http://www.debtlinks.org/
http://www.jubileedebtcampaign.org.uk/
If you don't go in expecting the worst, how can you ever be pleasantly
surprised?
Daniel Wang
>>
>> You seem to've neglected to read
>> <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=159494#c92>: Moz isn't
>> being served the same CSS as IE. When it is, it renders the page nicely.
>>
>> /b.
>
> Is that the same problem that appears with nme.com ? Is it the server's
> fault for sending the wrong css?
>
> Muppets.
Don't see any problem with it in Mozilla 1.3a and MSIE 5. Maybe you have
Javascript disabled?
Gordon Hodgson
<danielw...@aol.com> writes
Nope, it's enabled.
And I have a javascript page on my site which works. The problems are,
by the way, that the news ticker looks just like a gray box, and some of
the different panes overlap slightly. So some buttons are obscured by
overlapping panes. This problem exists in Netscape 7 as well (but I have
since uninstalled it).
I don't install alpha or beta releases, not worth the hassle for me.
Brian Heinrich
netscape.public.mozilla.general and loudly proclaimed:
> In message <as9ee2$ml...@ripley.netscape.com>, Daniel Wang
> <danielw...@aol.com> writes
>>Gordon Hodgson wrote:
>>>>
>>>> You seem to've neglected to read
>>>><http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=159494#c92>: Moz isn't
>>>>being served the same CSS as IE. When it is, it renders the page nicely.
>>>>
>>>> /b.
>>> Is that the same problem that appears with nme.com ? Is it the
>>>server's fault for sending the wrong css?
>>> Muppets.
>>
>>Don't see any problem with it in Mozilla 1.3a and MSIE 5. Maybe you
>>have Javascript disabled?
>
> Nope, it's enabled.
>
> And I have a javascript page on my site which works. The problems are,
> by the way, that the news ticker looks just like a gray box, [ . . . ]
|<div id="ticker">
<ilayer width=&{marqueewidth}; height=&{marqueeheight};
name="cmarquee01">
<layer name="cmarquee02"></layer>
</ilayer>
</div>| would seem to be the culprit.
> [ . . . ] and some of
> the different panes overlap slightly.
Looks like bad layout to me. Oughta see it in Op 7 beta. :-(
> So some buttons are obscured by
> overlapping panes. This problem exists in Netscape 7 as well (but I have
> since uninstalled it).
>
> I don't install alpha or beta releases, not worth the hassle for me.
End-user questions should be directed to one of the fora listed in my sig;
the n.p.m.* groups are in fact intended for developer (and development-
related) discussion.
Y
> On 24 Nov 2002, it is alleged that Ron Hunter sauntered in to
> netscape.public.mozilla.general and loudly proclaimed:
>
>>
>>
>> Brian Heinrich wrote:
> Because if you do your mark-up in such a way that it validates, all
> current and future browsers -- not just a given version of IE -- will
> (OK, 'should') be able to display it. If you do your mark-up in such a
> way as to take proprietary extensions/implementations and rendering
> quirks in to account,there is no guarantee that even subsequent versions
> of IE will be able to display it adequately. (Altho' M$ has made a
> marked effort to provide backwards 'compatibility' on some points.)
Which is not a bad thing, in my opinion. I mean the IE backward compatibility. For me, one of the big mistakes of Netscape was to release Netscape 6 (needless to talk about the horrendous 6.0) without any compatibility with the old Communicator. During the happy days of the browsers war (Netscape and Microsoft sharing the market) the guys from Netscape were selling their product as the best browser ever made. Programmers like me who believed that it would be a bad thing if a single browser became in fact the only one used, programmed our pages for Communicator (not without much effort) and IE, of course having to use their propietary extensions. Those pages made 3 or 4 years ago still work with the latest versions of IE; they don't work with Netscape anymore, because the guys of Netscape embraced the standards (like Microsoft did too), and this is good, but at the same time telling us: "well, you know?, all what we said about our Communicator was bullshit, that browser is a
crap, so those pages that you made so nicely because you believed in us have to be rewriten from scratch." It would have been appreciated some kind of backward compatibility, to make less painful the transition from Communicator (they shared a big percentage of the market with it) to the standards.
> /b.
>
Daniel Wang
> Brian Heinrich wrote:
>
>> On 24 Nov 2002, it is alleged that Ron Hunter sauntered in to
>> netscape.public.mozilla.general and loudly proclaimed:
>>
>>> Brian Heinrich wrote:
>>
>> Because if you do your mark-up in such a way that it validates, all
>> current and future browsers -- not just a given version of IE -- will
>> (OK, 'should') be able to display it. If you do your mark-up in such
>> a way as to take proprietary extensions/implementations and rendering
>> quirks in to account,there is no guarantee that even subsequent
>> versions of IE will be able to display it adequately. (Altho' M$ has
>> made a marked effort to provide backwards 'compatibility' on some
>> points.)
>
> Which is not a bad thing, in my opinion. I mean the IE backward
> compatibility. For me, one of the big mistakes of Netscape was to
> release Netscape 6 (needless to talk about the horrendous 6.0) without
> any compatibility with the old Communicator.
I don't think of it as a big mistake, but you are entitled of your
opinion ;)
> During the happy days of
> the browsers war (Netscape and Microsoft sharing the market) the guys
> from Netscape were selling their product as the best browser ever made.
Netscape 3 was the best :) But MSIE 4.0 was better :(
> Programmers like me who believed that it would be a bad thing if a
> single browser became in fact the only one used, programmed our pages
> for Communicator (not without much effort) and IE, of course having to
> use their propietary extensions.
MSIE 4 was released later than Netscape 4 was, so MSIE's proprietary
technologies was closer to W3C standards
> Those pages made 3 or 4 years ago still work with the latest versions
> of IE;
even with MSIE/Mac ?
> they don't work with Netscape anymore, because the guys of Netscape
> embraced the standards (like Microsoft did too), and this is good,
yes
> but at the same time telling us: "well, you know?, all what we
> said about our Communicator was bullshit, that browser is a crap,
it was
> so those pages that you made so nicely because you believed in us
> have to be rewriten from scratch." It would have been appreciated
> some kind of backward compatibility, to make less painful the
> transition from Communicator (they shared a big percentage of the
> market with it) to the standards.
Are you talking about DOM or HTML/CSS? If you used <div> instead of
<layer>, it would be easy to port to Mozilla (using @import rule). For
DOM... I don't know. Never a big fan of DHTML myself.
Y
I never used <layer>, you could do the same with the cross browser tag <div>. At first I liked Communicator 4 when it was released, it was the first step to the dhtml (sorry, I like it, but used with measure), but when using it for long time and having to program for it I started to hate it, because of the bunch of bugs that never were fixed in the new releases. And Microsoft improved its Explorer on each new version. The pages we made a few years ago that worked in Mac still work with the newest Explorer. Yes, it was a hard work to make them cross platform and cross browser, actually using the standards any page works almost (almost) identicaly in any platform and using any dom compliant browser (IE and Mozilla/Netscape; sorry for Opera, it doesn't work properly). But we had to program for the browsers people were using at that time, Communicator had almost the 50% of the market, so we put our efforts to make our pages look decently with Navigator. Maybe it was not a big mi
stake to build the new Netscape from scratch, Communicator was already dead and buried, but the fact that Netscape throw away Communicator (admiting implicitly how bad it was) shows that if the most of the people are actually using Explorer it is not because of any Microsoft policy, but because for years, until Gecko appeared, Explorer has been the best browser.
Christopher Jahn
Let's not change what I actually said: that is dishonesst of
you to claim that I said that, when in fact I did not.
You are leaving out half of my statement:
"..or at least close enough for Moz to render."
And for that, I can say quite honestly; "most of them".
Because most of them do.
If you insist, I'll post my bookmarks folder.
--
Netscape FAQs: http://www.ufaq.org
Netscape 6/7 Tips: http://www.hmetzger.de/net6e.html
Netscape 6 FAQ: http://home.adelphia.net/~sremick/ns6faq.html
Netscape 7 Help/Tips: http://techaholic.net/ns7.html
Web page validation: http://validator.w3.org
About Mozilla: http://www.mozilla.org
michael lefevre
I did quote what you said, and my first sentence was to point out that
your argument didn't refute the previous post, which you seemed to be
disagreeing with.
> And for that, I can say quite honestly; "most of them".
>
> Because most of them do.
No disagreement there...
The previous post (still quoted above) said that the majority of sites
don't code to standards. You asked if there were any facts to back that
up, which seemed to imply that you didn't think it was the case.
I think we're all agreeing here that 1) most sites don't code to
standards and 2) most sites work fine in mozilla despite not coding to
standards.
--
michael