On Tue, Oct 04, 2005, Uri Even-Chen wrote about "FireFox - not compatible with IE": > 1. Music - When you enter some of my pages, such as > http://www.speedy.co.il/composer/ , with IE, you hear music > automatically. When you enter with FireFox you don't (at least not on > my computer, or maybe you have to install a plugin).
I don't know why this happened, but I'm glad it does. There's hardly anything more annoying on the web than Web-pages that insist to talk or play music when you enter them. I hardly ever use the Internet when I'm completely alone. I'm either at work, in a shared office, or at home, with my wife. In either case, a sudden surge of unexplained music or speech from my computer is bizarre at best (sometimes it is even offensive, if other people are trying to concentrate, or talk, or something). I accept and expect short beeps from my computer once in a while, but not long sessions of music or sales-pitches. > 2. JavaScript - my mail site [http://mail.speedy.co.il/] is not fully > compatible with FireFox. For example, when you enter your account with > IE, selecting a line changes its color and you can select all lines at > once. With FireFox it just doesn't work. As a programmer for many years, I know that this issue has nothing to do specifically with Javascript, or with IE or Firefox. It has to do with any programming language, especially one that hasn't been standardized or whose standard hasn't been followed strictly enough. The problem is called "portability". Many years ago, you used to write a C program on one Unix machine, and when you tried it on another Unix machine, it "almost" worked, but not quite. Perhaps the program did not compile because of small differences in the compiler or include files, or it compiled but didn't work properly because of similar differences, or differences in the environment (system file locations, and so on). Programmers knew that they had to check their C programs on several computers to be portable - this wasn't A LOT of work (i.e., it didn't require rewriting the software for each new machine) but it required some work. Programs started having long "configure" scripts and "#ifdefs" inside them to cater for all these possible systems. The only thing that helped this situation somewhat was the advent of ANSI C and POSIX, which standardized the C language and its include files. After that, the chance that an unmodified program will work on many compilers greatly increased. The lesson is - if you also want your Javascript code to work on many browsers, try to adhere to the Javascript standard. Though it is possible that Firefox has a bug in handling one of your Javascript scripts, it is far more likely that you used a Javascript feature which is not in the standard (there is a standard!). It is likely that either you learned Javascript from an IE-specific book, or you copied someone else's IE- specific example. If you learned the Javascript standard instead, your code now would be working without change and without you having to invest any more time. That *is* economical. > By the way, these problems are one of the reasons why I don't use > FireFox as a user. I just don't want to lose features when I surf at > non-FireFox-compatible websites. And there are no non-IE-compatible > websites. Not as far as I know. There is one - the page about my pets :) http://nadav.harel.org.il/homepage/doggie.html The pictures of each animal on that page should appear to the left of each paragraph, and does on Mozilla. In IE, the particular CSS trick I use doesn't work (I don't know why), and the animal pictures do not show. I never really bothered too much to find out why. -- Nadav Har'El | Tuesday, Oct 4 2005, 1 Tishri 5766 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |A Nobel Peace Prize? I would KILL for one http://nadav.harel.org.il |of those. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
