Oh Holy IE - not again!

Joel Fagin · Post by **Joel Fagin** » Fri Jun 25, 2004 6:46 pm

Varuna Shiru wrote:For one, my webcomic site does not appear correctly when I use Firefox. The background is supposed to be dark blue and the text white, but when I use Firefox the background is white and the text black. I did alter the color options in Firefox but that didn't seem to work...

Same with Mozilla, yet when I saved your site to the HD, it worked fine.

I'll get back to you. As a webpage programmer, it would be good if I knew what this was for future reference.

Edit, two minutes later: Done!

Code: Select all

<body bgcolor="#000033" text="#FFFFFF" ="" link="#9966FF" vlink="#660099" alink="#CC99FF">

Note the hashes (#). Those are something you should have in front of every hex colour value but obviously IE is a bit more slack than Mozilla on that point. That's the problem with HTML. You do it right and W3C compliant and everything, and it'll be fine, but if you do even a little thing wrong, the browsers have to make assumptions about what you wanted. Different browsers make different assumptions.

- Joel Fagin

McDuffies · Post by **McDuffies** » Fri Jun 25, 2004 6:51 pm

clawster wrote:okay, this topic has gotten me a bit parnoid
at the moment i seem to be alright, i've got an updated IE6 and NAV04 working with Adaware6

mind if i turn this into an argument about mozilla (firefox?) vs opera? if i were to switch, to which one, and why?

Opera: Faster, on my comp at least.
Gives you option "open new tab in background" which is usefull to me 'cause I often open several tabs at once (Mozzila doesn't have this but firebird does).
All in all smoother, for me at least.

Mozzila: Better for saving webpages - it puts all files in one folder, while Opera throws them all over the place.

Joel Fagin · Post by **Joel Fagin** » Fri Jun 25, 2004 6:56 pm

clawster wrote:mind if i turn this into an argument about mozilla (firefox?) vs opera? if i were to switch, to which one, and why?

Firefox seems to do everything Opera does now but Opera has an advertising banner and Firefox is still in Beta. Firefox is also, purportedly, faster than Opera at rendering pages. Opera was the fastest for a long time.

So, basically, once Firefox's got to version 1.0, there should be no reason to use Opera bar personal preference.

(And even then, I've no doubt someone will create a Opera theme for Firefox.

)

- -Joel Fagin

Melody · Post by **Melody** » Fri Jun 25, 2004 7:01 pm

If you want speed and security, use Lynx. http://img78.photobucket.com/albums/v259/tocca/lynx.png

I think the main problem is that functionality and security are not exactly on the same side of the fence.

Varuna Shiru · Post by **Varuna Shiru** » Fri Jun 25, 2004 7:07 pm

Joel Fagin wrote:
Varuna Shiru wrote:For one, my webcomic site does not appear correctly when I use Firefox. The background is supposed to be dark blue and the text white, but when I use Firefox the background is white and the text black. I did alter the color options in Firefox but that didn't seem to work...
Same with Mozilla, yet when I saved your site to the HD, it worked fine.

I'll get back to you. As a webpage programmer, it would be good if I knew what this was for future reference.

Edit, two minutes later: Done!
Code: Select all
<body bgcolor="#000033" text="#FFFFFF" ="" link="#9966FF" vlink="#660099" alink="#CC99FF">
Note the hashes (#). Those are something you should have in front of every hex colour value but obviously IE is a bit more slack than Mozilla on that point. That's the problem with HTML. You do it right and W3C compliant and everything, and it'll be fine, but if you do even a little thing wrong, the browsers have to make assumptions about what you wanted. Different browsers make different assumptions.

- Joel Fagin

So THAT was the problem. I can't believe I missed that. Well, I edited the pages and now everything is the way it should be. Thank you very much for the help!

Melody · Post by **Melody** » Fri Jun 25, 2004 7:10 pm

Yeah, good job. Does that mean I can enter colors in decimal and other formats?

Joel Fagin · Post by **Joel Fagin** » Fri Jun 25, 2004 7:14 pm

Varuna Shiru wrote:So THAT was the problem. I can't believe I missed that. Well, I edited the pages and now everything is the way it should be. Thank you very much for the help!

Not a problem.

Melody wrote:Yeah, good job. Does that mean I can enter colors in decimal and other formats?

Uh... not sure. I never do that, myself.* I think you can with style sheets but I have a feeling you can't with HTML.

- Joel Fagin

* I used to do graphics programming. Hexadecimal all the way! Whoo!

Esoterik · Post by **Esoterik** » Fri Jun 25, 2004 9:22 pm

Hmm. Had a look at Firefox, and it looks good. But my comic page doesn't show up properly either, and it has nothing to do with the colors. I use the html tags LEFTMARGIN and TOPMARGIN in my <BODY> tag to position my comic's "logo" so it fits overtop the background image seamlessly. It seems that Firefox doesn't know this tag, because my image is a fair bit below the background image.

It lines up fine with IE.

Joel Fagin · Post by **Joel Fagin** » Fri Jun 25, 2004 9:30 pm

Esoterik wrote:Hmm. Had a look at Firefox, and it looks good. But my comic page doesn't show up properly either, and it has nothing to do with the colors. I use the html tags LEFTMARGIN and TOPMARGIN in my <BODY> tag to position my comic's "logo" so it fits overtop the background image seamlessly. It seems that Firefox doesn't know this tag, because my image is a fair bit below the background image.

TOPMARGIN=0 LEFTMARGIN=0 MARGINHEIGHT=0 MARGINWIDTH=0

- Joel Fagin

Liriel · Post by **Liriel** » Fri Jun 25, 2004 11:13 pm

Heh, yeah I kinda noticed a while ago that IE was a LOT more forgiving of missing or typo HTML code. Like when testing pages prior to going live it'd work fine, and then later on someone with 'zilla would say "Hey! This link don't work!" And I'd take a closer look and sure enough I'd left out a < / a > or something equally inane... but IE would just overlook it for some reason.

~Liriel

Melody · Post by **Melody** » Fri Jun 25, 2004 11:27 pm

I am not religious, but God damn. http://www.ondotnet.com/pub/a/dotnet/20 ... ghorn.html
What this means is desktop applications can be written about as easily as an HTML page. I see Microsoft as the Hitokiri Battousai of the computer world. While other groups are struggling to get their stuff together, MS has already slit their throats, layed mines on the battlefield, and moved on to the next. Crazy.

RadPal · Post by **RadPal** » Fri Jun 25, 2004 11:35 pm

I use Firefox. Friend of mine introduced me to it and I've loved it ever since.

I've used Opera before and I just don't like it all that much. And like Joel said, soon there will be no reason to use it anymore.

Firefox has all the good parts of Mozilla, without the annoying two-second load up screen.

And oddly enough, my site appears correctly on all browsers except IE. Who knows.

Esoterik · Post by **Esoterik** » Sat Jun 26, 2004 12:25 am

Joel Fagin wrote:
Esoterik wrote:Hmm. Had a look at Firefox, and it looks good. But my comic page doesn't show up properly either, and it has nothing to do with the colors. I use the html tags LEFTMARGIN and TOPMARGIN in my <BODY> tag to position my comic's "logo" so it fits overtop the background image seamlessly. It seems that Firefox doesn't know this tag, because my image is a fair bit below the background image.
TOPMARGIN=0 LEFTMARGIN=0 MARGINHEIGHT=0 MARGINWIDTH=0

- Joel Fagin

You're my hero. All is well with my site now. Count me in! I'll be using Firefox from now on. 8)

Jops · Post by **Jops** » Sat Jun 26, 2004 12:31 am

Happily dropped IE for Mozilla a long ago.
Unluckily i know a couple of sites that for unknown reasons don't display correctly on Mozzilla, so I happen to resurrect that crap of IE once in a while (always making sure that's a loooong while tought, and i use it for as little as possible).

Faub · Post by **Faub** » Sat Jun 26, 2004 1:05 am

Without trying to drag this into a Microsoft vrs. Open Source argument...

I've never had any of the problems any of you have described with Mozilla, at least not since like very 0.7 or before. (There was a time when Mozilla couldn't download files properly. I used Opera.) I have always been able to log into Keenspace (siteadmin, forums, etc) through Mozilla and really I don't think I've ever seriously used another browser since I've had a Keenspace account.

Popups are annoying. Opera had them for a long time but it dealt with them by keeping everything in the same window. You have one main window instead of having your screen and your start bar cluttered with windows. Excellent improvement. I didn't care too much for tabbed browsing until recently. Really, popups aren't the best reason to switch from IE.

IE and Outlook/Outlook Express are major propogators of viruses. Whether you're fully updated or not, they're buggy. People are out there exploiting these programs and new viruses are coming out every day despite Microsoft's best efforts to counter this problem. For this reason, I refuse to use either program. I don't run a virus scanner because I don't need it. When I get my first Firefox/Thunderbird virus, I'll move to Konqueror. When it has problems, there will be an alternative available. Heck, I'll write a web browser in Java if I have to. The chances of IT getting a virus are absolutely zero because no one would ever have a reason to write a self replicating program for one program on one machine.

IE and Outlook/Outlook Express are unsafe.

The reason IE loads so quickly is because it resides partly in memory at all times. It's used for the help system at least and many of the other web-based components in Windows. That's partially why Microsoft claimed that Windows and IE could not be separated. You can load Mozilla partially in memory as well and have it load quickly. I couldn't say how the two compare because it's utterly pointless to waste memory on Mozilla when it doesn't do anything for the system.

Liriel wrote: I kinda noticed a while ago that IE was a LOT more forgiving of missing or typo HTML code.

That's because it is. It also makes people write sloppy HTML that really shouldn't work based on the recognized standards. So, the page displays wrong in browsers that try to follow those standards more closely. IE also handles active X controls and displays ASP pages correctly. I don't think I've looked at an ASP lately that didn't error out in Mozilla. Has this problem affected me? I can't run the online virus scanners in Firefox so I have to use IE for that. I do find it ironic that I need to use the program that would be propogating the viruses in order to find them.

Melody wrote:What this means is desktop applications can be written about as easily as an HTML page. I see Microsoft as the Hitokiri Battousai of the computer world. While other groups are struggling to get their stuff together, MS has already slit their throats, layed mines on the battlefield, and moved on to the next. Crazy.

Crazy, not really. As neat as programming in XML might sound, developers will never see that. Visual Basic will just save the files in that format and Microsoft will sue anyone who tries to decode it (they'll probably lose but they'll have fun suing). As far as .NET goes, there's the Mono project which can compile and run C# programs. Where Visual C# is a Windows only program, Mono will (probably, never tried it) run on any computer/OS that GTK+ and gcc runs on, which is far more than just a Pentium class machine with some flavor of linux installed.

*EDIT: removed an unjustified attack on Microsoft* Other people have done much better jobs than I could. Suffice to say, I haven't had good things to say about Microsoft's product line since about 1997.

If your HTML doesn't look right in Mozilla, go here:
http://validator.w3.org/

Make it the way the people who wrote the format wanted it and then figure out why Mozilla screwed it up. You might find that you were as much to blame as the browser for screwing up your page.
XHTML: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/
CSS: http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/

But when it comes right down to it, it's your decision how you make your website. If IE is all you use and IE is all your readers use and you don't want to bother with all the technical stuff, by all means make a page that only IE can display. This stuff is very easy for me and I think everyone should design websites for cross-browser compatibility. If you can't or won't, it's your problem.

KittyKatBlack · Post by **KittyKatBlack** » Sat Jun 26, 2004 1:29 am

I might give firefox a try. Mozzilla was one of those things that I tried, but gave me a bad impression when I first saw it. Some problems:

A) Images on the forums wouldn't show.

B) The color issue, as stated before by Joel.

C) Table formatting is not as complient with Mozzilla it seems. It doesn't understand how to adjust content inside of a data cell correctly (Or it's another one of those "It needs to be exactly perfect" issues that I just haven't noticed).

D) Loading screen/Splash Page. Really really really annoying. It's like a popup every time you run it. IE also loads faster. But I've had quite a few bugs with IE, like settings getting changed by webpages, and things secretlly getting installed into it, (Like GAIN Publishing software. AUGH.) So I'm not totally against tossing away IE. I just haven't found anything that doesn't frustrate me any less yet.

JexKerome · Post by **JexKerome** » Sat Jun 26, 2004 1:38 am

Since my house's LAN is maintained by my younger brother, who's a PC engineer, we can and do use IE pretty much for anything we want without fear of viruses or their ilk. Serious hackers would be a problem, but we have nothing a hacker could possibly want in our systems. So we're pretty mush safe.

KittyKatBlack · Post by **KittyKatBlack** » Sat Jun 26, 2004 1:45 am

So far, Firefox seems to be working great for me. I might just stick with this.

Joel Fagin · Post by **Joel Fagin** » Sat Jun 26, 2004 2:27 am

KittyKatBlack wrote:C) Table formatting is not as complient with Mozzilla it seems. It doesn't understand how to adjust content inside of a data cell correctly (Or it's another one of those "It needs to be exactly perfect" issues that I just haven't noticed).

I concede that you might have seen a very early version of Mozilla but generally, Mozilla doesn't handle tables incorrectly, it's just different to how IE does - and that's what's everyone's used to writing HTML for.

- Joel Fagin

Melody · Post by **Melody** » Sat Jun 26, 2004 4:07 am

faub wrote:
Melody wrote:What this means is desktop applications can be written about as easily as an HTML page. I see Microsoft as the Hitokiri Battousai of the computer world. While other groups are struggling to get their stuff together, MS has already slit their throats, layed mines on the battlefield, and moved on to the next. Crazy.
Crazy, not really. As neat as programming in XML might sound, developers will never see that. Visual Basic will just save the files in that format and Microsoft will sue anyone who tries to decode it (they'll probably lose but they'll have fun suing). As far as .NET goes, there's the Mono project which can compile and run C# programs. Where Visual C# is a Windows only program, Mono will (probably, never tried it) run on any computer/OS that GTK+ and gcc runs on, which is far more than just a Pentium class machine with some flavor of linux installed.

That XML language, XAML, is not being hidden by Microsoft. http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/defau ... rnch03.asp I am also aware of Mono, I have used it. The reason Mono legally exists is because Microsoft proposed .NET as a standard. They _want_ their framework to be supported by many different systems. The .NET CLR ("Common Language Runtime") is like Java. When you compile a C# file on Windows, you get an EXE executable. When you compile a C# file on Mono running on, say, Linux, you get an EXE executable. Both of those executables can run on any platform with .NET, Mono, or any other .NET implementation without any recompiling. "Write once, run anywhere." This is why to me it is as if Microsoft has layed mines. .NET will grow in popularity, and Microsoft's operating system will support it naturally. This is the defining aspect of its next operating system, currently named "Longhorn."

--edit--
Actually, the .NET CLR is better than Java because many different languages can be compiled to it, hence its name, "Common Language Runtime." For example, you currently have Visual Basic, C#, JavaScript, C++, and Java (you can make .NET programs using the Java language - lol ) as well as other languages in the works or already finished by third parties such as Perl and FORTRAN. http://www.jasonbock.net/dotnetlanguages.html The CLR itself is object-oriented assembly. And again, this is an open standard. Anyone can freely make a CLR compiler for any language and any resulting EXE's will run on any .NET-able system regardless of where they were compiled. This language-independence is awesome, because say you have a complex software system to develop. You could create the part that has to parse and generate documents in Perl, the part that has to perform complex algorithms in C#, and the GUI with XAML.
-------

KittyKatBlack wrote:D) Loading screen/Splash Page. Really really really annoying. It's like a popup every time you run it. IE also loads faster. But I've had quite a few bugs with IE, like settings getting changed by webpages, and things secretlly getting installed into it, (Like GAIN Publishing software. AUGH.) So I'm not totally against tossing away IE. I just haven't found anything that doesn't frustrate me any less yet.

Go to Tools->Internet Options, Click on the Security Tab, and click on "Custom Level..." The stuff that gets installed automatically is done via ActiveX. Look on the internet for good security settings. http://www.winnetmag.com/WindowsSecurit ... 20468.html looks like a good set of articles. In the ActiveX section I have "Run ActiveX controls and plug-ins" enabled and everything else disabled. This is pretty safe because the programs that automatically install themselves on your computer depend on "Download un/signed ActiveX controls" being enabled. I think.

--edit--
Yeah, I seem to have edited this post a lot...

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Oh Holy IE - not again!

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