stephenbrooks.orgForumOtherBrowser WarsRepresentation for Netscape 4.x. Superior to Mozilla!
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NN4USER
2002-09-15 10:52:33
mad Navigator 4.x is the best browser available.  We demand representation.  mad
Stephen Brooks
2002-09-15 11:10:25
Trouble is, if NS4.x has "Mozilla" and no "Netscape" in its browser ID string, there is no way for the site to tell what it is.  Do you know the 'user_agent' ID string for a NS4 browser?


"As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline"
NN4USER
2002-09-15 13:03:37
New research indicates the following user_agent differences:

Navigator 4.7 is "Mozilla/4.7 [en] (WinNT; I)"
Navigator 4.79 is "Mozilla/4.79 [en] (WinNT; I);
Mozilla 1 is "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv"
Stephen Brooks
2002-09-15 14:17:00
Looks like 'Mozilla/4' would be a good detection string for NS4.x, since the _real_ Mozilla version is still somewhere around 1.0001

Having the name of the browser not mentioned in the actual string is a bit dumb but at least I can work around it (until Mozilla 4.0 comes out and people start complaining that Moz is beaing identified as NS!).
NN4USER
2002-09-15 14:29:12
big grin Excellent big grin
Stephen Brooks
2002-09-15 15:37:11
Whoops -- went a bit too far there and made IE6 into "Netscape" as well.  Hopefully that's sorted out now and your Netscape still registers as the correct thing.


"As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline"
NN4USER
2002-09-15 17:12:50
It's working perfectly in both browsers.  It occured to me after I posted that last message that you would have to test for the "Compatible" string.  This is a great game, btw.
hoshie
2002-10-30 21:58:33
Mr Brooks:

Prior to the Mozilla project in 1998, "Mozilla" has always been a codename for Netscape's browsers.  Example: Netscape Communicator 4.79 has a user agent of:

Mozilla/4.79 [en] (Windows NT 5.0; U)

That changed in with Mozilla's User Agent.  You can always tell what Mozilla you are running by looking at the 'rv:' part.  Example:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826
Tom King
2002-10-31 08:51:27
I think Netscape is superior to something adhering to the bottom of my shoe, but its a close thing.

#
gilbert
2002-10-31 16:11:49
quote:
Originally posted by Thomas King:
I think Netscape is superior to something adhering to the bottom of my shoe, but its a close thing.

<a href='/forum/redhash.html' class='redhash'>#</a>


Well at least that means it is superior to IE.
Tom King
2002-11-01 12:26:41
Well, what's so wrong with IE?  I've never had any problems with it, unlike nutscrape which consistently won't display java applets, tables, web pages, symbols, normal letters, and stuff like that.

#

[This message was edited by Stephen Brooks on 2002-Nov-01 at 21:13.]
gilbert
2002-11-05 12:38:12
quote:
Originally posted by Thomas King:
Well, what's so wrong with IE?  I've never had any problems with it, unlike nutscrape which consistently won't display java applets, tables, web pages, symbols, normal letters, and stuff like that.



I don't have time to go through everything now, but here's a link: http://www.euronet.nl/users/frankvw/IhateMS.html . Also, what do you mean by "normal letters?" I've never had a problem with any browser (even IE) displaying alphabetic characters.  Do you have example code/pages for each of these problems?  I know that many problems with tables in non-MS browsers are due to the fact that IE displays tables incorrectly.  Really, this wouldn't matter if webmasters would just use tables the way they are intended--tabular data.
Tom King
2002-11-05 13:00:43
I didn't know that IE displays tables incorrectly, I'd have thought that because it was the most used browser on the planet the sheer force of numbers would have made its way the correct way.  I'm just going on all the lectures I've been to where the lecturer has said something like "Well, there should be an Angstrom sign there" or "there ought to be a model of a wavefunction there" or "well, its not meant to look like THAT" or "oh **** I've got no idea whats going on there" or "Damn computing's hide for this".

And that diatribe on hating microsoft is certainly impressive.  All that time that could have been spent writing something useful or interesting.  I mean really.

Yes, they're a big evil mangey horrible dishonest company.  They provide bloated and bizzare programs.  However, the most people don't actually care.  I certainly don't. Yeah, linux is really great and I have nothing against it, but I'd be lying if I said it was easy to use.  Ok, I do have something against it, well, not it personally, but evangelical advocators of it.  I'm not a programmer, I'm an end user.  I like to browse the internet, play a few games, listen to some music.  I don't have a particular thing for lines of code, I don't particuarly relish having to manually set up everything from my soundcard through network card to video card.  That's why I'm buying a mac.  Anway.  Digression.  Heh.  (Thinks: MacOSX: Unix gone right).  Oh well. 

Actually, seeing as I'm a moderator I ought to be impartial and stuff but I've got the flu at the moment and am therefore feeling a little cranky.
Stephen Brooks
2002-11-05 13:09:27
quote:
Originally posted by gilbert:
I know that many problems with tables in non-MS browsers are due to the fact that IE displays tables incorrectly.


Any examples?  I've never had any conflict of table-display between IE and another browser, although Opera persisently misaligns the BrowserWars game grid to the left when it is inside a paragraph that is blatantly labelled <p align="center">.

quote:
Really, this wouldn't matter if webmasters would just use tables the way they are intended--tabular data.


And end up with incredibly dull websites everywhere.  Tables are applicable whenever the user wants a grided layout for something.  There are also frames and CSS floats and boxes you can use to get other assorted effects, but tables are often still the best way.


"As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline"
Stephen Brooks
2002-11-05 13:14:02
quote:
Originally posted by Thomas King:
(Thinks: MacOSX: Unix gone right).


(Thinks - MacOSX: Unix with semitransparent plastic thingeys).

I quite like Microsoft programs too.  Apart from Visual Basic.  That's RANK.  It should be destroyed.


"As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline"
gilbert
2002-11-05 14:01:17
--[Checking the W3C specifications (something which too many "web designers" have never done), I realize that IE's display of tables is correct, although the same can be said of Netscape and Opera.  But in any case, something is correct because it follows the standards, not because a particular browser does it.]--

This is entirely correct, and since IE renders tables correctly, I see no reason not to use it!

--[As for Opera displaying the game grid improperly, I don't see any p align="center" in the source code.]--

It's in the bit that says:
<p align='center'><a name='board'>
<table cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0><tr>
<td colspan=3>Board 2 <font color=#A0C0A0>
<small>Game #1915</small></
...that's in the individual board views not the main board-index screen.

--[Table-less sites need not be boring or dull.  Using CSS and div elements, you can build a website just as interesting as a table based site.  In my opinion, opera.com is an excellent CSS-based site.]--

I think it's only been fairly recently that CSS has got good enough to do the whole site-layout thing with.  As with the silly arguments over the "font" tag, there is more than one way of doing things, and 'table' gets the job done.

Oh that's interesting... I clicked edit instead of "reply". I KEEP doing that by mistake.

[This message was edited by Stephen Brooks on 2002-Nov-05 at 21:33.]
gilbert
2002-11-05 15:40:09
Oh that's interesting... I clicked edit instead of "reply". I KEEP doing that by mistake.

IMO, it's more infuriating than interesting, seeing as you cut out some of my stuff.

As for CSS only being good for whole-site layout recently, that's mostly false.  It has been possible in Opera for quite a while.  It's only that IE hasn't had good enough CSS support.  IE still has much room for improvement in CSS 2.

I do see where you have p align='center' (not p align="center" as you originally stated).  align is a deprecated HTML attribute, so you should use CSS instead here.
Stephen Brooks
2002-11-05 16:29:24
They seem to be removing the "useful" tags from HTML and putting them into CSS as properties.  Eventually HTML will just consist of paragraphs and divs, and a few other things like lists etc.!


"As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline"
gilbert
2002-11-05 17:12:57
quote:
Originally posted by Stephen Brooks:
They seem to be removing the "useful" tags from HTML and putting them into CSS as properties.  Eventually HTML will just consist of paragraphs and divs, and a few other things like lists etc.!




I don't think this is a bad thing at all.  It makes it much easier to change things quickly on multiple pages and it gives the user much more control over a page.
Stephen Brooks
2002-11-05 17:38:58
Yes although it seems a strange duplication of effort - they put tags in like "font" only to take them out again about 10 years later, shifting the information across to another file.  For things like setting the default font for various tags, CSS seems good, but I am in two minds about using it where there is only one specific object being formatted - so instead of p align=center, you do p id=something and then have to put #something {text-align:center} in the stylesheet.  I thought the good part about style sheets was that they could be separated from the HTML document and applied to other documents, to move the style across, but when you've got one particular element being formatted, which won't appear in another document, I'd think formatting-markup would be more sensible.


"As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline"
gilbert
2002-11-05 17:41:36
The font tag was actually introduced by Netscape back in the days of the browser wars, and later adopted and expanded by M$. I don't know that it was ever a part of HTML strict, so it doesn't surprise me that it's deprecated.
Kwil
2002-11-06 15:03:05
quote:
Originally posted by Stephen Brooks:
I thought the good part about style sheets was that they could be separated from the HTML document and applied to other documents, to move the style across, but when you've got one particular element being formatted, which won't appear in another document, I'd think formatting-markup would be more sensible.



Of course, the real reason for this is so that alternative browsers can fall back to other ways of processing the document information.  "align='center'" makes no sense for a screen reader, however you still might want some type of fallback to show the emphasis indicated by centering something. 

Perhaps in a screen reader, the css equivalent of align='center' will translate to a user style of {chngaudio:endpauses='40ms', volume='+1'}
Kevin W
2002-11-09 23:27:20
quote:
I'd think formatting-markup would be more sensible.


The whole point of markup is that it's not formatting based!!!  Markup is for structural markup; it describes the structure of the information, not the colours and fonts and backgrounds and borders and positioning, etc: that is the job of stylesheets.

Besides, you can always use <span style="property:value;"></span> if you're really stuck, but that can also be even more harmful if you don't use it properly.

Another thing: compare the source code of two pages, one written properly (eg.  http://www.webstandards.org/), and the other one in code soup (eg.  http://www.yahoo.com/). Which one is easier to read?
gilbert
2002-11-10 12:31:36
Ironically, webstandards.org doesn't validate.  Try w3.org or opera.com
Stephen Brooks
2002-11-10 15:21:51
Yahoo's page is difficult to understand primarily through the use of JavaScript, although I get the impression a lot of that is just stuff for browser-detection and working around legacy bugs.  In fact Yahoo hasn't got much in the way of formatting-markup _or_ CSS (which is one reason why it looks REALLY FOUL).  The other site you gave is easy enough to understand.

You have convinced me to use CSS a bit more though.  On newer pages like http://stephenbrooks.org/muon1/servers.php , I've used it for most of the formatting I can.  You'll notice there's still a lot of "font" stuff around some of the headings, but that's because the page is generated from a PPML page, which has some macro things that get expanded into that.  The original source for the page is nice to read, the HTML source a bit less so, but it works.

CSS2 _nearly_ does what I want with for the headings with the :before and :after pseudo-elements, but because I've been arty and did some multicoloured text around the h2 headings, I can't do that (I think the inserted content goes in as CDATA not a markup subtree).  Also IE6 doesn't do the inserting of content AT ALL, which is rather lame of it.

Also I've provided a CSS class on this board called 'edited', which makes
Edits to your text look like this if you insert the appropriate span or div +class thing around them when you edit
. Again, Opera inserts the text "edit:" before the text, IE does not.


"As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline"
Kwil
2002-11-10 17:56:34
Speaking of CSS, fonts, colours, and formatting - one thing which I've noticed is how the time from last move over the game slowly shifts from a light blue to a darker blue as time goes on.

I just wanted to say that that's a very cool design touch, and a great use of colour for UI design.  Kudos.  smile
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