Re: Not as strict as it could have been

Hi Ian

On Mon 03-Jul-2000 at 07:28:36PM -0400, Ian Jacobs wrote:
> > 
> > There is no browser sniffing on my site in terms of CSS :-)
> > 
> > All browsers get the default style sheet (or another if they
> > selected a different one using cookies)
> 
> Can you explain what that means: "or another if they
> have selected a different one using cookies"? 

I'm using this perl script: http://www.vex.net/~gonzo/scripts/
to serve the CSS.

> > and then browsers that
> > support @import (IE 4/5 and NN6) get an additional style sheet
> > which sents some sizes using em's (this is to prevent IE3 doing
> > daft things) and finally there is a third style sheet only used
> > on the front page and this does the columns and it's called using
> > @import as well so Netscape 4 won't get it.
> 
> This is absolutely browser sniffing: you are giving some clients
> content that others do not get (based on their known support
> for @import). 

I understood sniffing to mean detecting a user agent and then serving up
different content to different ones...

If using stuff that one knows is supported in one browser and not in
others then just using CSS is sniffing as Netscape 3 doesn't support
CSS...

> Our style sheet has been designed to work across 
> a number of browsers, but once we've decided that 
> (and it's an all-too-small subset of the CSS specification) 
> everyone gets the same style sheet. 

That means that you have use the first version of IE3 which supported
CSS as your base-line -- yuck!!

This might be worth looking at:
http://www.webreference.com/html/tutorial19/ 

I don't know what IE3 would make of it but it's a column layout that
works in NN4 and IE4.

Chris

-- 
Chris Croome <chris@webarchitects.co.uk>

http://www.webarchitects.co.uk/
http://chris.croome.net/