{"id":1237,"date":"2004-11-11T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2004-11-11T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/seegras.discordia.ch\/Blog\/?p=1237"},"modified":"2019-01-18T00:12:24","modified_gmt":"2019-01-17T23:12:24","slug":"webdesign-issues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seegras.discordia.ch\/Blog\/webdesign-issues\/","title":{"rendered":"Webdesign Issues"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nProblems and Workarounds concerning Webdesign<\/i><\/div>\n
\n

Abstract<\/h2>\n

The Tao of Webdesign. Well, it’s there, its XHTML strict with
\nCSS. Sad that some browsers just can’t work with it or have
\nsevere bugs. So I asked myself the question, what public do I have,
\nand which browsers do I have to support? Support, in a sense of
\n“it has to be reasonably useable an readable”. Specifically, one
\nQuestion was whether enough (more than 1 percent) of people will
\nbe using very old (and broken) browsers like Netscape 4.x or MSIE 4.x
\n<\/i><\/p>\n

The Browsers<\/h2>\n

For determining the capabilites of browsers, it was necessary to decide
\nwhat browsers would have to be looked at. So I assembled some data
\nfrom October 2004 on swiss Webpages.<\/p>\n

A statistic from a high-traffic sports-tournament page. This gives us a
\nhint on what the majority of unsuspecting users will use. Note that this,
\nas a sports-event, will necessarily not be a representative sample of the
\nwhole population, as it is to expect that a whole lot of people are not
\ninterested in sports at all, or not interested in that specific sport;
\nthus probably under-representing certain groups of people (thought to
\nbe the technical and the scientific community, for instance).<\/p>\n

MSIE 6.x\t84.23%\nMSIE 5.x\t 8.25%\nMozilla\t\t 5.37%\nOpera \t\t 1.37%\nNetscape 3\/4\t 0.31%\nMSIE 4.x\t 0.10%\n<\/pre>\n
And one from a medium-traffic tech-news site. The Site is moderately
\ntechnical and covers also socio-technical problems or politics related
\nto technology. The sample is thus heavily skewed towards technically
\nproficient people and early adopters. But having the early adopters
\nin there makes it very interesting as a foreshadow of future development.<\/p>\n
Mozilla\t\t39.67%\nMSIE 6.x\t30.41%\nkHTML\t\t 3.99%\nOpera\t\t 3.49%\nMSIE 5.x\t 2.01%\n<\/pre>\n
We thus conclude that Netscape 4.x and MSIE 4.x are practically dead,
\nand given the brokenness of those browsers, not worth the effort of
\nsupporting at all.<\/p>\n
As general trends we can thus conclude that MSIE 5.x will fall below
\none percent in maybe a year or two, getting replaced by more modern
\nbrowsers. Support for MSIE 5.x should only be done if its a small
\neffort and does not interfere with other browsers. On a small rise
\nseem to be Opera and kHTML (the latter a library used by Konqueror
\nand Safari), definitly worth some support. The big hunk of people
\nright now is using MSIE 6.x, so that is the main target, along with
\nits contender Mozilla which might well surpass MSIE in the future.<\/p>\n
Another point is the relative standard-adherence of the browsers.
\nWhile Mozilla, Opera and kHTML strife for maximal W3C-compliance
\n(and are sometimes very close to achieve it), this cannot be said
\nfor MSIE. Since the future of MSIE is largely unknown (Microsoft
\ntalk about a new version some time in 2007); the only sane choice
\nis to adhere to the standards as much as possible. Specifically
\nwriting web-pages for MSIE 6.x seems short-sightened in this light.
\nDue to the large installed base however, MSIE 6.x justifies for
\nspecific adjustments and bug-workarounds.<\/p>\n
Standards<\/h2>\n
Given that there not only are standards, but those standards are
\nevolving and mostly implemented in the browsers, it makes sense to
\nadhere to the standards; and to adhere to the most strict version
\nof it (the transitional-versions are, well, for the transition of
\npages from an earlier standard in order to simplify work). Well,
\nbut there is not only one standard, but many.<\/p>\n
There is, for instance,
\nthe old HTML 4.0 which was surpassed by XHTML 1.0 (essentially this
\nwould be HTML 5.0). And there is not only XHTML 1.0 but 1.1 and now
\n2.0. According to the recommendations of the W3C<\/a>
\nXHTML 1.1 is a modularized version of XHTML 1.0; and XHTML 2.0 is
\nsomething completely new and incompatible to anything else. Given
\nthat browsers don’t understand XHTML 2.0; I can’t discern the differences
\nbetween XHTML 1.1 and 1.0 and given that the W3C itself uses mostly
\nXHTML 1.0\/strict, XHTML 1.1 and 2.0 can only be viewed as work-in-progress
\nor proof-of-concept which right now aren’t worth the trouble to implement.<\/p>\n
When using XHTML 1.0\/strict, we’re bound to only make layout-changes
\nthrough a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS). Now, there are different versions
\nof those as well. There’s level 1 and 2.1; and level 3 in development,
\nand not all browsers support all elements of level 2.1. Luckily all
\nrelevant browsers support level 1. The choice making sense is to use
\nCSS level 1, with selected elements of level 2, and to ignore that some
\nfeatures like :after and :before do not exist on MSIE 6.x; they aren’t
\nreally of big importance, the layout will look a bit different, but so
\nwhat.<\/p>\n
Bugs<\/h2>\n
This is a bit MSIE 6.x-heavy, but what do you expect? Pretty much
\nall of those are documented on 
\nPosition is Everything<\/a>. Of course I ran into several of them; one of
\nthem seemingly not turning on a horizontal scrollbar while positioning some
\ntext WAY to the right instead of just 350 pixels.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Peter Keel,<\/p>\n
2004-11-11<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Problems and Workarounds concerning Webdesign Abstract The Tao of Webdesign. Well, it’s there, its XHTML strict with CSS. Sad that some browsers just can’t work with it or have severe bugs. So I asked myself the question, what public do I have, and which browsers do I have to support? Support, in a sense of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-webdesign"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/seegras.discordia.ch\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/seegras.discordia.ch\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/seegras.discordia.ch\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seegras.discordia.ch\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seegras.discordia.ch\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1237"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/seegras.discordia.ch\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1289,"href":"https:\/\/seegras.discordia.ch\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1237\/revisions\/1289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/seegras.discordia.ch\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seegras.discordia.ch\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seegras.discordia.ch\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}