Re: Where does everyone live?

* R A Brown said on 2005-11-06 08:46:21 +0100
> * Henrik Theiling wrote:
> > What's the big problem about designing pages that are at
> > least visible in all browsers?  *shakes head*
>
> I've more than once spent considerable trying to get things to behave
> more or less the same way in different browsers on my Mac only to
> discover when I view the pages on my wife's PC running Windows XP that
> at least one browser - usually IE - mangles the thing   :=(
>
> What's the big problem with the browser designers getting them all to
> read read code in a similar way? *shakes head*
<rant>
Ah, but you see, there are two standards. One de jure, which is defined
to painstaking detail by w3c.org, the other de facto, defined by however
Internet Explorer behaves this week. The former changes slowly, the
latter each time Microsoft releases a new patch. The former can be
learnt by reading the w3c's standards, the latter by reading the w3c's
standards, implementing them and then see what does and doesn't work.
Simple, really.

However, the real problem is not Microsoft. The real problem is the
attitude is "What I the designer see is what everybody ought to see."
Why is this so hilariously wrong? Simple: You can never know in advance
whether the content you are prettifying will be read by another
designer, a real human, a program, a blind person, or a dog, on a tv, a
cellphone, a monitor, by lights blinking morse code or in some fashion
not invented yet. The most important of these is beeing readable for
programs, if a page is not, it will not be indexed by search engines,
thus be invisible and for some people (say, fanatic Wikipedians) this
means the page in question does not exist. Programs can't see the pretty
colors and the nifty left-aligned flash-scrollbar at all.

What to do? Simplify. It's not the wrapping, it's the message. Use
Occam's razor. Cut until there's nothing left that can be cut. Ignore
the desire for pixel perfection. The lovely red won't be red and lovely
for the large amount of color-blind people out there anyway.
</rant>

Now, I won't claim that my pages are perfect, I know that the frontpage
is all wrong for the color-blind for instance, and font-sizes vary like
crazy. The Taruven-pages can't even be read comfortably on extremely
small screens because the examples are set in <pre>-tags. BUT: Strip
away all the colors and effects and it's only the color-coded examples
that lose information. (I'm still working on how to improve the encoding
of examples in (x)HTML.) I used to test *all* my html in Lynx, because
if it looks good in Lynx, it'll be readable everywhere, but currently
Lynx seems to have a problem with UTF8.


t., who unfortunately averages one typo per line these days.

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