Helping the Apple Web Community w/o an Apple Computer? 117
ptaff asks: "Web developing can burn some braincells when trying to get a page to render fine in all browsers. Using XHTML/CSS on Win/Linux, thou can get a 'satisfying' result among PC browsers (MSIE, Mozilla-and-derivatives, Konqueror, Opera) - but when it comes to Apple browsers (Mac-MSIE, Safari, Omniweb, iCab, and others), and there's no Mac around to test, how can you tell if things will work out fine? I personally experienced a CSS border directive on an input tag that completely messed up a simple document. There are some CSS compatablity sheets (this
comes to mind), but can you test further than that? is there any way a web developer can check for Apple-browser-compliance without a Mac?" If only HTML validation were as simple as submitting pages to the proper emulator, and viewing the results.
That's what standards are for! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That's what standards are for! (Score:5, Insightful)
Before you go and tell me that it is the browsers fault, will you go try to explain that to every browser user on the planet so they don't bitch at me?
Re:That's what standards are for! (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, it's not always that simple. Take a look at David Hyatt's Surfin' Safari [mozillazine.org] blog some time, where he writes about how he is trying to make Safari adhere to the W3 specs, while also getting the browser to emulate the quirks in IE or Mozilla.
Some of the other browser's quirks are just bugs, but people have developed sites that depend on them -- if he went with the spec instead of the bug, people would assume that Safari was the broken browser, even though its behavior in such a situation would be technically correct.
In other cases, the spec is ambiguous, and IE & Mozilla have come up with what seem to be equally valid interpretations in their implementation. What should Safari do then but choose one of those paths or come up with yet another interpretation to follow.
Standards compliance is nice and all, but in practice a properly standards compliant page can still have quite a bit of variability in how it's rendered on different browsers.
In the end, the only way to really know is to test, test, test. Just as, unfortunately, it has always been...
Should be simpler (Score:5, Insightful)
<rant>
Should be even simpler than this
-- if you code XHTML, then all XHTML compliant browsers should render the same.
-- if you code CSS, then all CSS compliant browsers should render the same.
-- if you code XYZ, then all XYZ compliant apps should do the same thing.
Isn't this what standards are all about?
Imagine if different electric companies supplied different types of power, while all "be standards compliant"
Image if different car companies produced cars that did not comply to "the standard road" or "the standard gas pump"
Do I have to test my public-access TV show on multiple channels, on multiple different TVs, just to make sure it works on all of them?
It's NUTZ! </rant>
Re:Should be simpler (Score:2, Insightful)
If you want the same picture to be displayed on all platforms, then CSS and XHTML may not be the right tool for the job. Though I'm not certain if there is a better way to present content identically on many different platforms.
What about hyperlinked PDF?
Re:Should be simpler (Score:5, Funny)
What about hyperlinked PDF?
Yep. You're Definately not a web developer.
old sk00l! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not evil - I'm just compiled that way.
Re:Should be simpler (Score:5, Informative)
[OT] Slash mucking (Score:1)
I've never figured that out on
Re:[OT] Slash mucking (Score:5, Informative)
<rant> == <rant>
Escape characters
Now this post was tricky to do !
Re:[OT] Slash mucking (Score:3, Funny)
&lt;rant&gt; == <rant>
right?
Yikes, we'd better stop this. At this rate, the reply to this will be eerily long....
Re:[OT] Slash mucking (Score:1)
Re:[OT] Slash mucking (Score:2)
Elwood:
forsetti:
Dude. How do you manage to be informative and funny in the same post?
I've never figured that out on /.
-- MarkusQ
Now this post was easy to do!
Re:Should be simpler (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Should be simpler (Score:4, Funny)
Just think
I tell 'em, you want the dancing monkey, you stick with Explainer. You want the blank spot, you stick with your gay Macintush with the fruit and shit. All the hip web designers are using dancing monkeys all over the place, while the Mac poseurs are trying to emulate it in JavaScript. It's just not the same.
PS: we have our own JavaScript implementation, MonkeyScript, which is just like javascript except dancingMonkey objects are RIGHT in the DOM. You can load it up and set all kinds of attributes like number of bananas, type of dance, or whether he's got the little diaper or not. Can you imagine DYNAMICALLY changing the number of bananas in response to form input?? I tell you this shit is WHITE HOT!
Re:Should be simpler (Score:1)
Re:Should be simpler (Score:5, Insightful)
This assumes that there is no ambiguity in the standards. In the case of XHTML+CSS, there are plenty of vague/conflicting descriptions in the standard as to how something should render. Of the top of my head, here is a recent (and thorough) description of such a problem [mozillazine.org], from Dave Hyatt's Safari blog [mozillazine.org]
Re:Should be simpler (Score:5, Insightful)
Ever tried to write an HTML document which "renders" correctly for a blind person?
Ever consider that HTML is meant to instruct the browser on what is intended and not on how to render it? The idea of these markup languages is that you "mark" text as the heading, or as a paragraph, and let the user agent (normally a web browser) sort it out.
You can demand that CSS code always renders the same, except that the user may choose to override your settings. If you depend on using your CSS-based layout to be able to navigate your website, then you wrote your webpage incorrectly. I see the ambiguity in the standards as saying "don't rely on me!", and you simply shouldn't rely on them.
Re:Should be simpler (Score:1)
-- if you code XHTML, then all XHTML compliant browsers should render the same.
Isn't this what standards are all about?
No. You misunderstand the nature of XHTML, which is a semantic markup language, and does little to define how a document is rendered.
A valid XHTML document can (and should!) be rendered differently on different browsers. That is one of the central design features of XHTML.
Re:Should be simpler (Score:4, Insightful)
No they shouldn't. Differences in rendering are why you can surf the web on different size screens, with text-only interfaces, on PDAs, and so on. Do you really think that the Googlebot should render HTML documents in the same way as a normal browser? And the same as lynx? And the same as IBM Homepage Reader?
HTML encodes meaning. It's up to the user-agent to decide upon a method of presenting that information to the user.
Not according the the specification. There are plenty of areas that leave the final decision up to the user-agent, and that's not even taking into account variable pixel sizes, user stylesheets, relative units for lengths, and so on.
"Rendering the same" is impossible on the web. Even if you narrow it down to commonly used desktop configurations, what's a good rendering for somebody with a 21" monitor and perfect vision might not be good for somebody with a 15" monitor and poor vision. The Web is not paper, don't impose paper's limitations upon the web.
Standards aid interoperability. They aren't magic - there's no way to ensure a decent layout without a lot of human effort on a case-by-case basis.
Re:Should be simpler (Score:1)
p.nicelabelstyle {
padding-top : 4pt;
padding-bottom : 5pt;
padding-right : 8pt;
padding-left : 8pt;
font : bold 9pt "Trebuchet MS", Times, serif;
color : white;
background : #660000;
display : inline;
}
apply this to an html or xhtml bit. View it in MSIE on the Window or Mac Platform. View on in Safari, or a Mozilla browser on Mac or Linux platforms.
MS supports CSS like they support PNG graphics.
Re: Should be simpler? It's almost simple. (Score:3, Informative)
The specifications leave certain decisions up to the browser (and the user), so it's never going to be pixel-for-pixel identical. However:
Re:Should be simpler (Score:2)
Actually yes. The amount of your screen different TVs show varies. That's why you have title-safe areas and action-safe areas. Not to mention PAL vs NTSC.
Re:Should be simpler (Score:2)
wow!!! (Score:3, Funny)
If only Slashdot HTML validation were as simple as submitting pages to the W3C Validator, and viewing the results.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://slashdot
Well, hey, not a new idea there (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, if only... oh, wait, it is [w3.org].
Of course, testing for validation and compliance to standards is not quite the same thing as "does my web page look okay in Arbitrary Browser Foo," which is what the submitter was asking about. At some point you simply have to say, "any browser will work as long as it doesn't suck with regards to published open standards."
get a mac (Score:5, Insightful)
A Mac with old Mac IE and new Safari (Mozilla/Netscape and Camino optional)
A PC with various flavors of IE and Mozilla/Netscape.
A Linux machine with the current Red Hat, with Mozilla and Konqueror.
Personally I have a Mac and Linux machine with VMWare running multiple OSes.
Sure you can dig into iCab and Opera and fringe browsers but the above list is good enough (I can just hear the Opera user(s) priming their flamethrowers, sorry guys).
Also keep this in Mind: the Mac folks are really trying hard for a standards-compliant browser that ALSO renders all the quirks of IE and other browsers. So if your code doesn't work right on the Mac there's a button right there on Safari that let's you submit the page to Apple as a bug. Maybe it's your bug or misunderstanding but if not you can be sure the Mac folks will fix it.
Check out David Hyatt's blog [mozillazine.org].
Re:get a mac (Score:3, Informative)
Re:get a mac (Score:1)
Re:get a mac AND VirtualPC (Score:3, Informative)
OK, so life could be better, I could be independently wealthy.
Re:get a mac AND VirtualPC (Score:2)
Re:get a mac AND VirtualPC (Score:1)
Netscape 4 on the other hand will render substantially different i'd imagine.
Re:get a mac (Score:2)
No flamethrower needed.
Re:get a mac (Score:4, Insightful)
Short of buying a copy of VMWare, how exactly would one do this for IE? Remember, since IE is embedded in the operating system, you're normally not allowed to have multiple copies of the same IE DLL files resident on the same system.
Microsoft used to let you install a patch that allowed you to run IE5 in an IE4 emulation mode (or it may have even been IE4 in an IE3 mode -- it's been a while), but I seem to remember that the emulation wasn't perfectly identical to the earlier browser anyway. If a more recent version of that tool was ever produced, I'm not aware of it, and after poking aound on the official IE site [microsoft.com] for ten minutes or so, the only such add-on i can find is a beta for a "user rights mis-management [microsoft.com]" tool. Nice to see where the IE development focus is drifting these days.
Short of VMWare or multiple computers or *ugh* booting multiple copies of Windows on the same machine, I think MS has made it impossible to run multiple, concurrent versions of any modern IE version (5, 5.5, 6). If anyone knows of a less cumbersome way to do this -- because obviously it helps web developers to be able to test against multiple versions, even if average users don't need such a thing -- I'd love to learn how to do it.
It's not the standards, people (Score:5, Informative)
This story's at three comments, and already I'm hearing that "if you just use standards, it'll be OK." That's a load of bull, actually. Standards make the cross-platform problem easier to solve, but there are always differences in interpretation of a spec. Safari has CSS bugs that Mozilla doesn't, and IE's Javascript parser does things differently than Opera's. Standards support helps this situation immensely, but by no means is it a panacea. I'm a big fan of designing sites that validate to XHTML 1.1 and CSS2 (and indeed, all of mine do), but it's still a lot of effort to come up with something that both looks good and works similarly and accessibly across five major browsers and three platforms.
My advice to the poster is to do one of three things:
Re:It's not the standards, people (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's not the standards, people (Score:2)
Not usually, no. The Apple rep at my local store is quite the dick, and goes ape when a customer so much as asks to look at the machine's internals. (That might've been something to do with me returning three defective Airport Extreme cards in a row, though.) They take a pretty dim view of anyone taking anything into their store, especially electronics; I brought along a DVD once while trying a few of their players, and I got harassed by both employees and the security guard for it.
It'd be a lot more rea
you are soooo unlucky dude! (Score:1)
I have had Wang, IBM, Amiga, 6 generic PCs, finally a couple of Apple machines, a G4 laptop, a G3 laptop, finally 25 DV iMacs last year and now 8 G4 duals and 17 iMacs (classroom.) The odd bad motherboard or bad stick of ram from time to time.
It's so cool to yell at the kids,"Don't you EVER reboot without asking first!"
Re:It's not the standards, people (Score:1)
Re:It's not the standards, people (Score:1)
Re:It's not the standards, people (Score:1)
Re:It's not the standards, people (Score:5, Insightful)
The Apple retail stores would be another option, if there's one close. You could even test on a new G5. They will for sure let you use the CD drives; they'd probably even let you make changes to your code, verify, and then burn it to a CD (but you'd have to bring the blank CD yourself.)
If you get hassled, you might explain what you're doing--and if they're alert enough, they'll do anything they can to encourage you in making sure your pages work with the Mac, and thank you for making the effort. I might suggest going during the weekday though.
Re:It's not the standards, people (Score:2)
Just drop $900 for an eMac, already. If you aren't actually making money developing these web sites, then why the hell go to all the effort of making them flashy enough to have rendering issues?
Re:It's not the standards, people (Score:2)
Okay let's do the introductions. Business Sense this is Web Development. Web Development, this is Business Sense.
The standards mess (Score:2)
That's correct but it doesn't even begin to describe the problem. Which is that every browser implementer picks and chooses the HTML and CSS features it wants to support, and doesn't consider it urgent to fill in the blanks. CSS2 has been out for 5 years, and still has many unsupported features.
CSS advocates claim that it can help with cross-browser problems, by eliminating the complicated HTML that
Re:It's not the standards, people (Score:2)
Right, and at a minimum you can get an OSX-capable iMac for $150 on ebay [ebay.com]. So, with an OSX license and RAM you can be testing on a real mac for $300.
Re:It's not the standards, people (Score:2)
Just out of curiosity I looked on eBay under 'iMac' and found a 333Mhz one going for under $200, with 2 hours left in the auction. That's good enough to run OS X and OS 9 with all the browsers you might want. I don't think there ever was an iMac without Ethernet, so you're good to go in
Re:Whatever you do.... (Score:2)
Re:Whatever you do.... (Score:2)
iCab... (Score:1)
Safari (Score:2, Insightful)
I use Safari almost exclusively and I browse all sorts of sites that I know were only previewed in winIE or were designed specifically for it and very very rarely have any sort of major rendering problems.
In fact, most sites look better in Safari because the text anti-aliasing looks so much nicer. Like, even Slashdot looks all right! Who would of t
Re:Safari (Score:1)
Graphic Artist (Score:1, Flamebait)
If not, quit your job, and find a job at a respectable place of business
Do you really need one? (Score:2)
In fact, the only time I use MSIE at all, is when some webpage puts in some wierd mandatory IE only B$. (although I am seing less of this, maybe im just staying away from those sites now)
But in all reality, Safari uses konqerors khtml engine, and mozilla is mozilla, and mac users are moving from IE to Safari.
testing still important with standards (Score:3, Insightful)
We code and validate [w3.org] our sites to HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0. But we still test our sites on IE (for both Mac and Windows), Mozilla-based browsers, and Safari. Why? Because while coding to standards works great for us developers, these browsers still have bugs (especially CSS bugs). We routinely find CSS bugs in IE 5.5 for Windows, a few here and there in Safari, and (ironically enough) the current worst of the lot: IE 5 for Macintosh (ironic because, as some of you know, this browser used to be considered the most CSS-compliant). We don't sniff for browsers - we just try to avoid markup and style definitions that don't consistently work across the board.
Yes, it takes more work than just validating code. However, it still 10x less work than doing hacks and tricks to make stuff work in that piece-of-crap Netscape 4.
My Experience (Score:1)
Use Konqueror (Score:5, Informative)
Apple's Safari team has already submitted patches to the KHTML code base. Over time Konqueror, and Safari will be the same. The one caveat is that Safari will have fixes, often before Konqueror due to a lag incorporating the Safari team's patches.
Safari 1.1 will be out by December. (Score:2)
With this in mind, it's likely the discrepancies in the two browsers will remain minimal.
It's simple (Score:5, Funny)
Put the site up. Mac users aren't exactly a quiet bunch when something doesn't work quite right on their machines. Believe me, you'll know rather quickly if something doesn't work.
Re:It's simple (Score:3, Funny)
Recommend Mozilla; when wrong, it's wrong xplat! (Score:5, Insightful)
The most important thing about Mozilla, and what impressed me most with the excellent browser, is that Mozilla's behavor was the same across platforms when it came to Javascript, CSS, and other rendering. More importantly, rendering errors showed the same behavior in the same version of Mozilla, regardless of platform! That's impressive.
Sure, fonts, icons, etc are *slightly* different, but I made some pretty dhtml intensive stuff (click "Query Storms") [noaa.gov] that behaved exactly the same on Linux on Windows, Linux, and both Mac OS 8-9 & OS X.
You basically have two choices. Make a Google-like site with such simple html that it'll render correctly everywhere, even in Lynx, or program higher-end, thicker client, dhtml jive for IE and Moz. That covers the vast majority of your hits (IE) and will give the option to most anyone on an alternative OS to, at worst, download a free browser that'll behave exactly as you'd expect (Moz). (Okay, three choices -- make two sites. One's dumbed down for lynx, the other for IE/Moz.) Now you've covered Mac, Linux, and heavens knows what else just by testing, give or take, on Windows. Mozilla's good enough that it is a platform.
Check for DOM (document.all and document.layers), give a warning to anyone who doesn't conform, and feel good that you've give people who *need* to see your pages an option without wasting hours and hours testing and writing for browsers that will make up a very low volume of your visits. Yes, you potentially exclude Granny Smith on dial-up with Mac OS 8.1 or Joe Apple Diehard who only uses Safari and won't even touch Camino, but let's face it, you're better off spending that time writing a new site and reaching 99% of a new audience anyhow.
Good luck!
An interesting viewpoint (Score:2)
He didn't ask 'should I support Mac users at all, or should I just say 'screw 'em'?' Telling them to download a new browser, set it up, and use it JUST FOR YOUR SITE is basically saying 'screw 'em'. You can get away with it if you don't care about the audience, or if you can enforce their brows
browser cam (Score:4, Informative)
Re:browser cam (Score:2)
It does make testing small fixes for a single browser a little slow, but it's great for ensuring that the fix you made for IE 5.5 didn't break IE 6 (which it usually will).
NO I DIDN't READ THE ARTICLE (Score:1, Offtopic)
OK flaim the hell out of me but I still believe in what I just said.
Re:NO I DIDN't READ THE ARTICLE (Score:2, Funny)
oh on its cathcing! Dman YOu! i use Gen2 and IT'll take me days 2 recompil everythang to fixc my mzolille!!!!1!
Konqueror should do it (Score:2)
Personally, if a site works well without change in IE, Mozilla, and Konqueror, then I'd take that as pretty good evidence that it's using standards and should work anywhere. But then I'm not a web designer by trade...
iCab for error checking (Score:1)
Theres a little smiley/frowny face right next the URL/location bar, if its smiley then the site is compliant - frowny, not. Click on frowny to get an error report. You can change it thru prefs.
MrMac
Buy a Mac. (Score:2, Funny)
And what is that frickin' dot. I can see it you know. I can see the little dot up there all
Actually, this is a good idea. (Score:2)
Accept an HTML page via email, or a URL to such a page, render it with a specific browser/machine combination (say, specified in the command line), and email back the redered page as a PNG or GIF.
Send an email indicating how far back in the queue the request is, with an option of canceling jobs that haven't been run yet.
That way, I could use "render-by-email" to simulate the joy of Windws IE.
Ratboy.
Browser screenshot service already exists (Score:2, Redundant)
It sounds like an ideal way of testing a site without having every popular platform / browser combination available.
check out zeldman et al (Score:5, Informative)
I've been reading Zeldman's book Designing for Web Standards [oreilly.com] at safari.oreilly.com and it addresses this quite well. Safari and Mac IE 5.2 are very compliant to standards [w3.org] moreso than any version of IE on Windows, so it's not as big a deal now as it once was during the browser war era. Yeesh what a mess that was.
You can rest assured that as long as you don't code with a certain browser in mind your site(s) will look pretty close across platforms, IF you design with standards [w3.org] in mind. Losing table based layouts or at least minimizing their usage is one of the best things you can do to increase consistency across browser version/platform. Try not to use deprecated code either, like the venerable <br> or bgcolor = * and <P align="right"> etc. Always specify a DOCTYPE [w3.org].If you can move away from using old pre-war coding practices you'll be a step ahead in the fight. Check out these sites for more info on coding pages that look good in any browser on any platform:
Designing with XHTML and CSS means not leaving anybody out. From Web-enabled phones to IE 6 to text only browsers like lynx or links you'll only need to write your code once. I say do away with javascript browser detection scripts and write once, run (almost) anywhere!
There is a last resort you can go to if you must. Macromedia Flash [macromedia.com] looks the same in any browser provided you have the proper plugin. :) Although that is not my recommended solution.
I had the same problem... (Score:4, Funny)
...so I used it as an excuse to buy a mac. Of course, everyone in the whole world wants a mac, but most people can't justify it. If web design is your business, you now have a legitimate excuse! You no longer have to steal quick glances at the beautiful gleaming machines in a shop window, afraid that one of your linux friends might see you. And if they start giving you a hard time about it just say that you need that "piece of junk" for work.
But two months down the road, when the seductive glow of the pulsing sleep indicator makes you use your new Mac as your primary machine, you'd better have an excuse when your linux buddies spot this among the headers in your emails:My name is Orestes, and I'm a mac user.
Equivalents (Score:3, Informative)
you test in Mozilla (either Navigator or Firebird), you've got Camino
covered also. Didn't OmniWeb recently switch to one of those two
rendering engines also? That of course leaves out MSIE, the mac
version of which has very different rendering quirks from the Windows
version, but Safari will hopefully phase out the Mac version of MSIE
within a couple of years.
My problem is MSIE for Windows. Even assuming I'm willing to boot
into Windows for testing, how can I test in both IE5 and IE6? I
am *not* going through the uninstall/reinstall process every time
I want to test a web page. Currently I'm just writing to specs and
*hoping* it will do mostly okay in MSIE, but in practice I know that
there will be times when it doesn't. I recently discovered, for
example, that MSIE5.5 does not support applying CSS attributes to
child elements (e.g., ".sidebar > div { padding: 0.5em; }"). I
haven't tested that in IE6... do I really have to get VMWare just
to test my web pages?
Is IE for the MAC == IE for the PC (Score:1)
Simple answer on the Mac (Score:2)
Now if only they would actually update the thing.
without a PC (Score:2, Funny)
Re:without a PC (Score:2)
IE has two ways fo doing things, the W3C way (which works in the above browsers) and the 'leftover' way from IE4. Unfortunately, lots of deveoplers learned the IE4 way, and still use it, which reslts in most web-compatability issues.
Naw, they need VPC (Score:2)
It's cheaper for them, it makes them almost as much money, and it makes the Mac look really bad (awful, slow, and the same UI as the PC!) What more could you ask?
-fred
2, OK, 3 options ( summary of existing posts ) (Score:1)
1) You're worried about how it looks on OS X? Get a machine which runs OS X ! You'll be glad you did.
2) Check your page on both Mozilla and something else which uses the KHTML open-source engine in Safari, as those are open-source cross-platform rendering engines.
3) use W3C validation engines and tell users any problem is with the browser.
Flash? (Score:2)
My advice (Score:1, Interesting)
IE: One would assume anything that looks OK on IE/Win would be OK, but I'm not sure...
Netscape/Mozilla: Same goes, recent versions of Netscape use Gecko anyway.
Safari: uses KHTML/KJS, so anything which looks reasonable in Konq ought to be fine for Safari.
Camino/Chimera: Uses Gecko. See Mozilla.
OmniWeb: v4.5+ use the same engine as Safari. Previous versions CSS/JavaScript support was a joke that made me switch to Camino. Don't even try t
A couple of points (Score:2, Interesting)
Any pages I make are XHTML compliant, but, as was stated earlier, this does not mean diddly as to how it will render. One thing I used to do (before actually getting a Mac) was test using Ba
Might seem obvious . . . (Score:2)
Mozilla seems to render pretty similarly across platforms, and with X11 you can just compile KDE/Konqueror in OS X. Seems like if one is in web design the best platform would be Mac -- you can test almost anything on one machine -- without rebooting. An iBook wouldn't set you back very much either.
I don't get it... (Score:1)
I think you all have it backwards...
Cheaper to just get a Mac (Score:2)
A tool for web developers to test their pages against all known Mac browsers would have to be expensive. Some developer would have to carefully work out, and emulate, each browser's bugs. And they'd have to keep a big database of these bugs, and update it as each new revision comes out. After all version 1.1 of a browser may render differently from version 1.2 or 2.0, etc.
This is going to be difficult program to develop, which will
doing silly tricks with MacOSX (Score:1)
HOW TO view a web page in MacOSX without using a browser...
Open the application Terminal and type the following...
Re:Topic AMD? (Score:1, Offtopic)
Funny, your name doesn't have a star next to it.