blog
IE 5.0 compatible!
The updates to jonathanpoh.com are almost all done, with only a few bugs and kinks to work out before the new year. Today I installed Windows 98 within Virtual PC just so I could test out the site using IE 5.0 and guess what, it's not broken at all! I feared the worst, with IE 5 having all its quirks and oddities that people have to write hacks and workarounds in their HTML/CSS to support it. Well, it's not entirely perfectly rendered...there's a big gap between the header line and the top navigation links, but I'm genuinely surprised the columns didn't break, as for a while I was having that problem with IE 6!
Conversely, after installing Win98, I ran the Windows Update as any good Windows-user should do immediately after (re)installation and the WU site looks terribly cramped at the default 640×480 resolution (i'm running the VPC in a window). The text box containing the description of the updates is only 4 lines high and it's really tedious to read. Especially when you have 13 updates to install immediately after installation of the OS.
Comments
HUH?!?!?
January 3, 2004 5:13 AM | Viceice said:
Yea, and it's all MS's fault.. If only they'd be standards compliant like Mozilla.
January 13, 2004 1:30 AM | Tim said:
Dude,
Adobe Golive (and I think Dreamweaver too) has testing environments of several versions of Internet Explorer on a variety of platforms and different versions of Windows. You didn't have to install Virtual PC. Granted, the testing environments aren't terribly accurate, it's still better than nothing. Also, if you're a coder, BBedit also has testing environments to test for breaking in code. I use BBedit and I just go to the internet cafes to test the websites on PC -- I already test on Mac because I use one.
Tim
January 13, 2004 10:00 AM | jonathanpoh said:
hi tim, yes i know about those features in Dreamweaver and GoLive, but as far as i know they just validate the code for the target browsers you specify. While the code may be valid for those browsers, it does not show you how the page will look, and when dealing with older browsers with incomplete CSS support, things can end up looking really bad.
I will check and see if those apps actually have a "preview rendered page" for specific browser versions, even if you don't have that browser installed.
January 13, 2004 11:36 PM | Tim said:
That's why you MEMORISE how CSS works in different browsers and platforms. It takes a lot of experience. But it will come ;-)
Tim
January 14, 2004 1:29 AM | jonathanpoh said:
thanks for the hint but i'm not that capable of memorizing how IE 5 renders the CSS box-model incorrectly and how it miscalculates the padding and margins resulting in totally broken layouts which would be an eyesore as I have totally dropped tables in favour of divs and CSS positioning for my site.
I would still prefer to have a browser I can see and test with, and in IE's case, is not possible to have multiple versions of it simultaneously, hence the use of VPC. Maybe one day I will develop your skill in memorizing browser rendering engines.
December 30, 2003 11:31 PM | RaYz said: