Comments on: Random griping about Dreamweaver/Firefox/HTML

By: Factory

Factory — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 08:30:43 +0000

Dunno if you changed the code or not, but the sidebox is now displayed fine in Firefox 1.5.

By: Phil Steinmeyer

Phil Steinmeyer — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 22:57:28 +0000

Jos – What you say is true. The visitors to this blog run about 55% Firefox, 35% I.E., and 10% all others.

But my company website (www.newcrayon.com) is targeted at casual game players/buyers, and I’m guessing they’ll be at least as much I.E. loyal as the web population as a whole, perhaps somewhat more so.

I may draw a bit disproportionately high for Mac/Safari, as the game does have a Mac version – I’ll keep an eye on that.

By: Jos

Jos — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 22:36:39 +0000

While you are right that dev’s need to look at market share, you also have to look a bit more deeply then just “IE has 90% of the market”. If you are targeting technically minded people, IE might not be 90% of that market. Or, if your software is cross-platform, but your market is the type that buy mac’s as often as PC’s, you’d want to support Safari.

By: Phil Steinmeyer

Phil Steinmeyer — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 21:32:36 +0000

PJay – thanks for the tip. And I’ll take a look at that DOM inspector after I do a general Firefox upgrade when 1.5 comes out this week.

Factory – I agree that it’s hard to ask Firefox to replicate I.E. bugs. For that matter, when I see pages displaying incorrectly on one browser or the other, I don’t know whose ‘bug’ it truly is. But that doesn’t really matter – pure market share forces developers (smart ones anyways) to pay closest attention to the bigger player, and as you move down the scale from I.E. -> Firefox -> Safari -> Opera -> Konqueror -> etc, you’re going to see fewer and fewer webmasters testing their pages on these browsers, much less optimizing for them.

By: PJay

PJay — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 19:07:41 +0000

delete line 82 and 156:

82 =

156 =

I don’t know why IE doesn’t display those lines though, the code looks like you deliberately put them there.

And, I think you might have had less trouble finding these error if you write the html by hand from the beginning. Ofcourse, I know you are no web designer, but it’s always hard find your way in such a generated-code.

A tip for easier debug html in firefox: the DOM inspector lets you click through a tree-like structure of the code and you see the corresponding item flash in the browser: http://www.codestore.net/store.nsf/unid/BLOG-20050228

By: Factory

Factory — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 11:55:12 +0000

“Microsoft and has a 90% share, any other browser that displays pages differently is out of luck.”
In defence of Firefox, coding to replicate bugs is just asking for HTML coding to be more complex in the long run.

By: William Willing

William Willing — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 09:54:04 +0000

Don’t take this the wrong way, but part of the problem is that you’re not using HTML right. You really shouldn’t use tables for layout; use CSS instead. There’s a bit of a learning curve, but you’ll be able to create much better web pages. You might even (re)discover why HTML behaves the way it does.

I agree with the IE/Firefox problem, though. It doesn’t really matter who’s more standards compliant, it just sucks that they treat the same HTML differently. I take it you are not about to test on Opera, Safari and other browsers. :-p