Amaya not displaying pages as do IE8 and Firefox 3

[Apologies if this query gets posted twice.  I made a newbie
  mistake and sent it from a non-subscriber address yesterday.]

Greetings.

I am a new user of Amaya, so I am as yet unaware of such things as
what level of CSS it supports, which I think is probably the main
matter at issue in the problem I am about to describe.  I hope that
someone(s) on this list might have some ideas about whether Amaya
is doing what it should be given the (correctly validating) input
it is being given, and whether it might be a useful tool to help
solve display problems on older browsers.  Any references to useful
sources of information would also be appreciated.  (I do not have
access to IE7, which also exhibits a (different) display problem
from the one I see using Amaya - that problem has only been
described to me.)

I am in the process of developing software for a site that was
designed by someone using Adobe Dreamweaver who seems to expect
that it is reasonable for visitors to that site to be using only
the latest versions of mainstream browsers.  However, as we all
know (or should know), it can take several years before older
versions of browsers are no longer used widely enough that support
for them can safely be dropped.

The site, athttp://btlonline.org/  , does display as intended if
one uses Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.x or recent versions of
Opera or Konqueror/Safari.  However, there are serious display
problems if the site is viewed in IE7.  Though I installed Amaya
a few days ago mainly to test it for possible use by HTML-unsavvy
people who we would like to be able to author their own sections
on the site, I quickly discovered that the site in question does
not display properly under Amaya either.  (I don't know at this
point whether this mailing list supports image attachments, so at
http://btlonline.org/demo/101122-amaya_display.html  you will find
a page containing a screenshot of how Amaya displays the page
which is now athttp://btlonline.org/2010/101126-btl-gst.html
(that page is my own rendering of the current week's Between the
Lines show page athttp://btlonline.org/2010/101126-btl.html  - my
version lacks the right sidebar "newswire" section, which contains
HTML problems that prevent the page from validating correctly).

The differences between the two displays will be immediately
obvious to anyone taking a look - the image that is supposed to
be shown at the top of the first section has drifted to below
the end of the right sidebar (and there are similar problems
with other images further down the page).  A second pair of
Amaya/Firefox screenshots shows what is supposed to happen
further down the page and what Amaya displays (text from the
center column overwrites a portion of the left column).

Please note that I am not here claiming there is a problem with
Amaya, only that it displays the BTL site differently than do
either IE8 or Firefox 3.x.  (If anyone out there has IE7 and
could send me one or more screenshots to show how the page at
http://btlonline.org/2010/101126-btl-gst.html  looks in that
browser, I will add those images to the page.  Please send me
such contributions at "gst [at] btlonline.org.")  My own view is
that the graphics designer should not have expected that site
visitors will be using only the latest versions of browsers.
I feel we should avoid using features that depend upon whatever
it is that is causing problems for both Amaya and IE7 (I hope,
in fact, that these problems are related, and that fixing the
site to display properly under Amaya will also take care of the
IE7 problem.)

I plan to learn more than I know at present about CSS, to see
if I can suggest, or even implement, a solution to this problem.
Meanwhile, I hope that someone can tell me whether Amaya is in
fact performing as it should be, given the versions of HTML and
CSS proclaimed in the DTDs of our pages (which might themselves
be the problem, for all I know at present).

Thanks in advance to anyone who might be able to shed some light
onto this problem.

Gary Trujillo
gst [at] btlonline.org ("amaya [at] btlonline.org" for subscription
purposes)

Received on Tuesday, 23 November 2010 15:03:24 UTC