[FX.php List] Tired of making special solutions for every browser?

Thu May 7 08:53:30 MDT 2009

7 maj 2009 kl. 16.25 skrev Tim 'Webko' Booth:

> Dear ggt,
>
> On 07/05/2009, at 10:41 PM, Gjermund Gusland Thorsen wrote:
>
>> Tired of making special solutions for every browser?
>>
>> IE 6, 7 and 8 do not interpret the page in the same manner
>>
>> Nor does FF and Safari, however Safari FF and IE 8 are more similar
>> than the others at the moment.
>>
>> One of the problems is that the different browsers have different
>> default DOCTYPEs, if you use this
>> ---
>> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
>> "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
>> <html lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
>> <head>
>> ---
>> On the top of each of your solutions, you will have less problems.  
>> Why?
>> Because this is the DOCTYPE that most browsers renders in almost  
>> the same way.
>
> I'd like for that to be true, but IE6 (still 20%+ of my users) will  
> fail this rather badly - it didn't (and never will) have proper  
> XHTML 1.0 compliance. If only IE had actually followed the standards  
> in the first place!!
>
> Use of IE 6 specific style sheet hacks will get around the worst of  
> it, but sometimes I still have to resort to table based layouts for  
> very-very-backwards compatability. Which sucks.

IE always did and always will suck, I agree. Not even in version 7,  
which isn't THAT old, did Microsoft bother to follow some of the most  
basic parts of web standards. If it was up to me, everyone would stop  
using IE below version 8.

However, one important thing to note regarding the common  
misconception that writing your site in XHTML is the way to go, is  
that the absolute majority of developers don't know how to do it,  
resulting in that their site isn't interpreted as XHTML at all (they  
just think everything is fine because all they look at is the  
validator and output XHTML from their server).

Unless you really feel confident that you know why I'm saying this  
about XHTML, you are probably serving your XHTML pages as plain HTML  
and/or your pages are just tag soup to the browser and/or it  
interprets it in quirks/tolerant mode.

There is a lot of information about this on Google. One of the  
starting points could be: http://hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml

This is not in any way a rant, I just want to spread the word a bit  
because I almost all use of XHTML I've seen in webpages is done  
incorrectly, and also because everyone seems to think that just  
because the XHTML in a page validates, it's actually used, correctly,  
by the browser.

-|