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Tobi Waves


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Webstandards and self fulfilling Prophecies

Friday, March 07, 2003 21:26 // Aarburg, Switzerland // href

Over the last few days I have redesigned the Website of my Department, and implemented it purely with CSS2. I had to discover the hard way that even 4 years after the standard has been published, we are not there yet. While Mozilla is shining bright with its good implementation, many other entries like Opera, Konqueror and IE are working hard to do a good job but fail in odd places. What is amazing is where they do not work. Opera, for example, can not grok, that a box which is defined by its distance from all edges of the browser window is fully defined an can be displayed propperly. It just ignores part of the settings to be able to draw in the wong place and size.

Why does this not get fixed? First I thought there must be many bugs, and they just don't get round to fix this particular one. But then I got another theory: Everybody who does serious CSS2 Webdesign is working hard to make sure that his pages work with all the players in the CSS arena (Opera, Mozilla, Konqueror and Internet Explorer). Therefore these stupid bugs don't disappear as nobody will notice them but Webdesigners who then successfully hide the bugs from the end users by going the extra mile to make their pages work with all browsers.

How about a website which collects pages that pass all CSS/HTML conformance tests at (validator.w3.org ...) with flying colors, but got axed because display problems in some browser prevented them from working fully 'cross platform'

 

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