Re: OT: Web standards & browsers (Was: Chelume - My Conlang website up.)

Caleb Hines wrote:
>
> I still don't understand what's wrong with frames, though.
They mostly just make pages hard to bookmark. If you bookmark the
frameset, you just get the starting frame contents, not the subpages you
had open at the time. I think Opera can actually bookmark frame state,
but I'm not sure.

>>Rather, you should keep with the standards.
>>They are there for a reason. Not so many
>>people use IE as you might think (not a
>>problem for me, Opera shows up the page
>>perfectly).
>
>
> Which standards?
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/

> In particular, where did I break the standards?
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.umsl.edu%2F~cph9fa%2Fchelume%2F

It actually validates as HTML 4.01 Transitional. Or at least it would if
you supplied a doctype and charset.

> But a question: I do use IE b/c its what I have and its what I'm most
> familiar with. Its apparently also what many other people use, who don't
> have these other browsers (the exact %-age doesn't matter, I'm sure its a
> majority at any rate, even if a shrinking one). If I conform to these
> standards, (whatever they are) will I make the pages unreadable to IE?
Not unless you're doing something really fancy. Support for CSS2 is
spotty (and CSS3 is pretty much nonexistent), but CSS1 is fully supported.

Just make sure you test things before they go live.

>>It does, [show only the XML source]
>>but through no fault of your own
>>(unless you're the server admin)
>>...apparently your webserver isn't
>>configured to know what XML is and
>>serves it as "text/plain".
>
> I'm not the server admin. But that doesn't make sense. If theres a server
> problem, then why can I see the transformed document just fine, on any
> computer I've used?
Because you've only used IE, which ignores MIME types entirely, going
only by the file extention. This masks problems with misconfigured MIME
types, but causes problems of its own (there are many different file
types that have the same file extention, e.g. RealPlayer Media and
Redhat Package Manager files are both .rpm).

It may be possible to set MIME types one a case-by-case or
directory-by-directory basis with your server without having admin
priviledges, but I don't know how. Easiest way to fix it is probably to
bug your admin until he fixes it.