Re: style and browser defaults

Friday 09 February 2001 10:36, Matthew Brealey ΞΑΠΙΣΑΜ:
|   --- Kyle VanderBeek <kylev@yaga.com> wrote:
|   >
|   > The solution is, of course, to be explicit about colors that may
|   > interact (simply: "If you override one color, you should override them
|   > all").  In this case, the stylesheet should specify the A:link set of
|   > pseudo-classes since link text will be on top of the specified
|   > background.  Failing to do so produces unpredictable results in the
|   > user agent.
|
|   You are quite correct in this, and this is indeed a deficiency on the
|   W3C site; although, by no means restricted to this site - when
|   incompetent CSS is even built into the world's most popular browser
|   [Internet Explorer] [*], it seems that we aren't likely to
|   get 'correct' and accessible style sheets any time soon.
|

You already don't get it.
Look at www.zdnet.com - it uses 4 different CSS tables, for each type of 
browser/platform combination. (IE-Mac, IE-Win, NS-Mac, NS-Win)
Beisdes, I have seen sites installing 6 or even 8 different CSS tables, 
depending on own Browser Selection criteria.

What is also sad is that Linux (not speaking about FreeBSD or embedded 
widgets) is totally ignored in such browser-check-type*install-CSS-for-it 
sequences.

|   > First, I'd like to see the W3 stylesheets "fixed" so I can again read
|   > W3 specifications in Konqueror.
|
|   This would be a good idea. However, it doesn't really address the wider
|   problem of bad websites, which IMHO, will only get worse as more people
|   use style sheets - it's far easier to create a bad style sheet that
|   assumes that the user is using Internet Explorer with the factory
|   settings, than to create an accessible one. With websites now created:
|
Correct.

|   (a) using tagsoup tools such as Dreamweaver and Front Page
|   (b) according to the final result rather than by formatting a
|   structured document
|   (c) by incompetent programmers

That's all right, but what do you propose about it?
It is real life situation.
MS has around 85% market share. Netscape marketshare decreases rapidly.
For example, here, in Russia, Netscape share dropped from 15% beginning of 
the year 2000 to 8% in Nov.2000. And, BTW, only 0.68% accounted for 
Mozilla/NS6.

|   the problem will only get worse (particularly as programs like
|   Dreamweaver will make it even easier to integrate your bad CSS into a
|   site).
|
|   The standard complacent response to you would be to suggest that you
|   create a user style sheet.
|
|   BODY {background: #ddd !important;
|   color: black !important}
|
|   However, these are much easier said than done, and don't, quite
|   frankly, provide a consistent solution - it is difficult to get the
|   same style sheet to work on pages made from tables with backgrounds and
|   on pages with margins on the body element.
|
|   [Incidentally, I'm not sure if Konqueror allows you to use user style
|   sheets; it certainly didn't last time I used it, but that was v1.93.]

Konqueror allows it. See related mail from Lars Knoll on kfm-devel.
Pls do not make *suggestions* on Konqueror before updating your version to 
latest stable. KDE 2.1 will be released on Feb.12th, update to it.

|
|   This turns out to be a user agent issue, since it's not [short of
|   legislative changes of the kind that have been applied in Australia,
|   and that apply in the USA to governmental organisations] really
|   possible to effect changes to the ever growing tide of such websites.
|   As a result, you might like to investigate improving Konqueror's
|   handling of this issue, or else use Opera, which has a variety of ways
|   of dealing with this issue, including hotkey togglable style sheets,
|   the ability to disable parts of the document's style [tables, colours,
|   fonts, etc.], etc.
|
|   > Second, I think it would be good to include
|   > mention of the issues I am raising in this email in a future edition of
|   > relevant recommendations (HTML, XHTML, and CSS all come to mind).
|
|   Indeed. This specific issue has been mentioned before.
|
|   However, it is neither appropriate nor possible to provide a complete
|   list of recommendations; furthermore, too few people read and fully
|   digest the specification for it to make any difference.
|
|   * Try Tools/Internet Options, and then Accessibility. Click ignore font
|   sizes and ignore font styles. Then go to res://madeup. This brings up a
|   404 page, which will be unsightly in the extreme because of the use of
|   an absolute size (11pt) for line-height. This bad CSS is unfortunately
|   present in every single page in Internet Explorer.

:-)
And, once more, what do you suggest to do about it?
It looks like that MS IE6 will be integrated in Windows XP (a-ka Witzler), so 
it would be quite difficult to install different browser in Windows and make 
it usable for something.

-- 

Vadim Plessky
http://kde2.newmail.ru  (English)
http://kde2.newmail.ru/index_rus.html  (Russian)
Do you have Arial font installed? Just test it!
http://kde2.newmail.ru/font_test_arial.html

Received on Friday, 9 February 2001 07:17:33 UTC