| From: | Andy Wanless |
| Date: | 13 Mar 2001 at 15:21:22 |
| Subject: | Re: Javascript Does'nt work on my amiga ??? |
----- Original Message -----
From: Matt Sealey <matt@kittycat.co.uk>
>
[lots of snipping here - life's too short ;]
> > Deciding against IE-specific features like ActiveX is also a very good
plan
> > too.
>
> They didn't "decide against" ActiveX, it's impossible for them to do :)
Who'd have thought impossible could ever be a good thing? ;)
> > And don't forget, IE also has all sorts of weird JS bugs too, so they're
not
> > sticking to any standards.
>
> A bug, by definition, is not a thought-out decision not to comply to
written
> specification. Care to name one of these bugs? I found a juicy one in NS4
> the other day, where a misplaced comment in JS would break the script
Can't name one just like that, just accept that both IE and NS are full of
lots
of little bugs that pop up to annoy me, I work round them, and then forget
about them.
> <SCRIPT><!--// cam counter
>
> ble bah boo;
>
> //--></SCRIPT>
>
>
> NS was actually adding garbage characters (C<!--) and breaking
> script functions just because I put the HTML comment too close to the
> <SCRIPT> tag and the // comment too close to the HTML comment.
Well, if you do go and write ugly looking code... ;)
> Now if that isn't one of those bugs that makes you so annoyed about
> a browser that you refuse to write for it..
No, you write decent looking code instead. If you try and cram
2 different flavours of comments on one line, plus the <script> tag,
you get everything you deserver ;)
> >> Owt with support for the decent side of the DOM.
>
> IE4/5 supports it. There, with NS6 and IE4 support, you've trapped 90%
> of the browser market already (btw, I checked, Opera does it as well,
> that's 92% :)
So NS4 has, at most, 8% of the browser market? It's still a fair bit more
than that, depending who you believe.
> It seems that people lament the "loss" of Netscape in the browser war as
> a bad thing only because they've never had to really deal with anything
> but a crap toolbar system and the lame HTML support.. dig deeper, and
> ye shall find much sewage..
That and the fact that it's given people an excuse for making crap webpages
that are unusable in anything other than IE.
> > In some cases, you have to make sure a site works fine in NS4.x.
>
> I don't :P Whee!!! My job is ace :P
So's mine :P And sorting out the little bugs in all browsers for my
designers
is hardly a huge problem, really.
> > the sites I've done in the past year is getting around 50% NS4. And a
fair
> > amount of traffic for a fairly specialised and obscure site. (Ok, most
hits
> > are from .ac.uk domains, apart from the random 190k hits from a .mil.us
> > domain ;)
>
> Academic institutions need slapping. A lot of them are controlled by
idiots,
> and self-righteous software panels who hold a misplaced fear of everything
> they may actually get product support on. So they use Netscape on things
> like Windows 95 OSR1, and wonder why the web dev team is always shouting
> at them..
They need several slappings if you ask me. This was actually for the AUT,
so not technically an academic institution. They'll all seem to use IE, but
all the universities use NS, so that was a fun one. And of course, that
missing stylesheet problem kept popping up. (IE doesn't care, NS complains).
> > And no, I didn't report it to them. Got better things to do with my
time.
>
> So you'd rather let this "bug" lie, and live with it, than report it to
people
> who might just say "jesus, this is annoying. We'll fix that for IE6".
>
> What the HELL are you complaining about?
IE being crap? And if it did get fixed, I wouldn't have the fun of confused
designers trying to work out what s: has got to do with anything when
they can't view a page ;)
> > that annoying, really, just sometimes pisses me off. And it was just an
> > example of the many things that are crap about IE5.x
>
> The fact that it doesn't re-format your badly inputted URI's to something
> usable before attempting to access the site? I don't know, maybe if you
> preach about standards compliance you might actually want to follow
> those standards yourself. Missing off the http:// protocol bit is a dumb
> idea, expecting IE to fill in the blanks is slack. And when it goes wrong,
> you say IE is crap. Hmm.. can you say h y p o c r i t e ? :)
www.whateveritis.com:8080 is a perfectly valid URI. It's not a valid URL
though. You'd reasonably expect a web browser to assume HTTP as the
protocol if you don't specify it, the same way you'd expect it to use port
80 if you don't specify it. Every other browser does.
Mind you, you could say the same about adding a slash at the end, so
you don't have that redirect causing problems. (Try a site without a domain
name, just an IP address and see what fun you have there sometimes :)
> > IE still has rather dodgy support for various other standards (like
XML?).
>
> Or, IE has in fact got the most support for XML on any platform, in fact.
> Dodgy support? Hahaha, you've gotta be kidding. The IE5.5 release had
> virtually no real-world HTML fixes, it was all XML subsystem additions.
I was thinking more of IE5 there, as it's still in wide use. IE5 had such
useless XML support that I never got around to checking it out in IE5.5 yet.
> > get me wrong, all browsers are pretty crap anyway. NS6 would be great if
it
> > wasn't so slow. (Ok, the layout engine is wonderfully fast, it's just
the
> > rest that's slow).
>
> OpenSource bites. Too many cooks spoil thr broth. Too many Netscape
> engineers spoil the browser, especially when egged on by OpenSource freaks
:P
We could go on for weeks about that one, but let's not. Then again, if it
wasn't for OpenSource, we wouldn't be getting these emails anyway. And
there'd be about 6 websites in the world so we wouldn't need this argument.
> > And a URL without the http:// bit is technically not right, but find me
any
> > other browser that won't assume the http:// bit and not fall over with
some
> > silly error.
>
> In principle you shouldn't be typing it in anyway, Standards Boy.
Ideally, my webbrowser should know where I want to go before I do,
but that's not going to happen so I'd better be able to type it in.
> > Speaking of which, IE generally doesn't give you anything in the way of
> > helpful errors anyway.
>
> So don't make mistakes yourself :)
With the likes of you and IE about, getting up in the morning is a pretty
big
mistake ;)
Andy Wanless
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