-- Colin Watson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote (on Friday, 21 February 2003, 01:06 PM +0000): > On Fri, Feb 21, 2003 at 06:34:35AM -0600, Gary Turner wrote: > > Paul Johnson wrote: > > >On Thu, Feb 20, 2003 at 09:27:22PM -0600, Gary Turner wrote: > > >> Telling your (potential) customers they're not welcome on your site is > > >> not an option. > > > > > >I never suggested it was. What I did state, though, is that folks run > > >a reasonably recent version of whatever browser they prefer and file > > >bug reports against non-compliant rendering. IMO, this is the Right > > >Way to handle the problem. > > > > By suggesting that the customer is at fault because he can't see your > > site the way you intended it be seen, is to suggest they are not > > welcome. Remember, the average visitor to a web site has no idea what a > > bug report is. > > > > What is more reasonable, the shopkeeper cater to the customer --- or > > vice versa? > > Not everybody developing for the web is a shopkeeper (thank God). If I'm > not trying to sell something and therefore achieve Perfect Marketing Zen > in the quest to do so, I honestly don't care if their rendering is a bit > off due to them using a five-year-old browser; I'll write > standards-compliant content - which means that browsers should be able > to extract the information even if not all the formatting - and if the > rendering doesn't look right then that's their problem. > > In general, people who think of the way pages are "intended to be seen" > are missing the point of the web. Will your pixel-perfect design look > the way you intended it to look on my PDA? The standards emphasize > semantic markup, not physical markup, and leave the details of rendering > up to the browser where they belong. CSS merely provides hints.
I completely agree. But that's not the issue. There's good, standards-compliant content that can still trigger rendering bugs in older browsers that makes the content unreadable. An instance I found this week was with setting margins on a <ul> item -- in IE 5, it caused all <ul> items styled in this fashion to float top-left in the window overlapping the content (and if there were multiple <ul> items, then they overlapped each other, as well). I didn't care so much that the rendering wasn't how I'd designed it and how it looked in Mozilla -- I cared that anybody viewing it in IE 5 wouldn't be able to read it. So I still need to test the site in older browsers and on other platforms -- until I can catalog *all* the possible rendering bugs on *all* the browsers... ;-) -- Matthew Weier O'Phinney [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
