notes of suck

[egypturnash]

1. I have been told - and saw for myself, thanks to poking at it with the one Windows machine at work, that my journal's style not only looks weird on IE/Win, it actually crashes some versions of the damn thing.
   
   I hate IE. Hate, hate, hate. I think I'm just going to see if I can find a hack to hide all my CSS from it. Gyaah. If IE crashes on my journal's style for you, go get Mozilla, okay? And try tabbed browsing while you're getting used to the thing, because it really kicks ass.
   
   
2. I think I have a cold or flu or something. Sore throat and lots of watery phlegm. Lovely. And I was looking forward to doing a 24-hour comic tomorrow, too. But not if I'm sickly. Bother.
   
   
3. There was something else I wanted to list but I can't remember now. Oh. Yeah. Here's some bus doodles.

[ edit ] Okay, my LJ should now look deadly boring on IE, because I just decided to hide all CSS from all known versions of IE at the moment - this hack claims to work on IE4-6. If you're curious, the code is:
<style type="text/css">
@import url('$.stylesheet_url') screen,projection;
</style>

Also, the promised bus doodles are coming. I forgot to actually scan 'em. Watch this space.

Comments

[kamenkyote.livejournal.com]

I agree about IE. I just tried to turn it on, JUST turn it on, not go to a web page, nothing, just turn it on and it System crashed me. I really hate it. I should change, but there's fewer choices for those of us still on OS 9.

Hope you feel better. The comic can wait for sickness to pass.

-T'

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

You can get a release of Mozilla that works on 9; it's what I use at work. You have to go digging a little. Oh, now they tell you which one to grab on the download page. Or there's Opera or iCab, but I dunno how good the last 9 version of those is.

I figire a 24-hour comic is a cartoonist's equivalant of a marathon. If you're sick, you just don't want to try it. If I'm over this in the morning (it's been slowly approaching for a couple of days) I'll probably go ahead with it, but... I was looking forwards to it, too. Damn.

[neillparatzo.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty fed up with IE too. I can have my page looking perfect and identical in both Mozilla and Opera (two completely different render engines) and yet IE will go off and do something bizarre and stupid.

My current LJ style (http://www.livejournal.com/users/neillparatzo/) could have been done entirely in CSS, but I had to revert to using tables since that's the only thing both IE and the modern browsers can simultaneously understand.

I got so frustrated, I decided to add an annoying navbar box to my home page (http://www.neillcorlett.com/) that only shows up in IE. ;)

I never really did look at whether you can access user-agent info from LJ S2 code, but if you can, maybe that's your answer.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I'm enough of a geek that I'm willing to say "screw looking pretty in IE". Especially since I don't have a Windows box, and don't care about it enough to install a virtual one. So I found and implemented a hack that just utterly hides CSS from IE. And gives you a politely pissy message.

I don't think you can get browser info from S2. That would be useful.

now off to scan stuff...

[neillparatzo.livejournal.com]

Well, the bitter reality is that I'm still seeing 78.7% of my visitors using IE. So unless I want them to think I suck at HTML (which they would (http://www.livejournal.com/community/gamers/900905.html?thread=7161385#t7161385)), I have to fix it to cater to IE.

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

drymouth has a strange idea of what constitutes victoly.

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

Here's what your LJ looks like in Opera 7.02:

http://www.conmicro.cx/~kturtle/misc/etc/peggy-lj.png

Looks nice, except for the comment links colliding with the previous post's date & time. I've found that's not much of a problem, though, thanks to the handy little target-shaped post links under the user icons. :}

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Not too far off from what it's supposed to look like. The big grey circles are supposed to be behind the user pictures, poking up a little behind the horizontal line through the title - but that's close enough for now. Cross-browser testing has always been, and continues to be, hellish.

Thanks!

[kiala.livejournal.com]

Tab browsing is the happy. I can never go back.

I don't suppose you know of any [a ahref] code to open in a new tab, instead of in a new window?

[baxil.livejournal.com]

no, but I believe control-clicking links should do so. (On Mac Safari, command-click works for sure.)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

As far as I know there's no way to open a link in a new tab from the HTML. If you use the appropriate meta key-click that you'd normally use for 'open in new tab' (or right-click the link and pick open in new tab) on a link that opens a new window, it opens in a new tab instead...

The Wacom tablet driver allows you to have different settings for each program; I have it set up so that one of the buttons is the 'open in new tab' combo instead of 'double-click' like it is for the rest of the system. If you have a multi-button programmable mouse you might wanna try something similar.

[baxil.livejournal.com]

If you don't embed your styles, but use a <link> instead, do you put the style before or after the link? Does it go in the header or the body? Does it have to be enclosed in <!-- -->s the way most CSS does?

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

This isn't embedding the style, it's keeping it in another file. I used to have a nice, simple <link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' href='stylesheet.css'> in the <head>; now I have three lines for this workaround. I haven't changed anything else.

Enclosing CSS in comments is mostly a hack to hide it from ancient browsers that don't understand CSS.

[baxil.livejournal.com]

Oh, I see. You use the instead of the .

I'm with neillparatzo here. This sounds like an eminently wonderful hack, but with so much of my traffic driven by IE users, I'd love to know if there's a variant which will also give IE users a style sheet, albeit a different one customized for the broken thing.

[baxil.livejournal.com]

Oh, I see. You use the <style> instead of the <link>.

I'm with neillparatzo here. This sounds like an eminently wonderful hack, but with so much of my traffic driven by IE users, I'd love to know if there's a variant which will also give IE users a style sheet, albeit a different one customized for the broken thing.

(Apparently previewing your comment formats &lt;&gt;s into <>s. Dammit. Reposting.)

[baxil.livejournal.com]

Bwaaaaahahahaa. Okay: http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=ImportHack (http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=ImportHack). Create a very basic style sheet for IE (get the colors right) and then put the actual useful stuff inside the secondary sheet.

[trikotomy.livejournal.com]

<span style="filter: glow(color:red,strength=3); width: 100%">But... but... it doesn't display glowy text!</span>
(Er, and apparently neither does IE. At least in comments.)

Alright, alright, I've gotten mozilla already, just to see what the commotion is about (and also because I like to have something downloading while I read or else I feel like I'm being wasteful). Okay, so far I like the tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking. It's also useful for saving web pages that IE refuses to, although I don't like that they're named numbers by default. And I don't like that clicking the middle mouse button doesn't do anything, but that's rarely made use of anyway.

You win. You've gained a convert.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yay! One more strike for web standards! Gleee!

[holohedron.livejournal.com]

For colds Soken wasabi ramen is nice... spiciness to clear those sinuses, with enough salts to soothe the throat. (ymmv)

[pathia.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, IE's never crashed on your journal, though I tend to use Firefox, unless it doesn't load correctly, which is about 50% of the web. So frustrating -_-

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure which version of IE crashes on my LJ. The machine I had it happen on was running Windows Me, that's all I know.

I usually have everything seem to load fine with Mozilla derivatives - but then again, since I have no Windows box, and IE5/Mac is poop, I simply snarl and leave sites that require some particular release of IE/Win.

[pathia.livejournal.com]

Well, most of my incidents I think are with plugins that I haven't gotten around to installing on Firefox.

Though some strange things like Flash, say they're installed for Firefox, but about half the websites that use Flash don't seem to run the flash, they list 'Please Install Plugin' in a little box

Oh well.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Heh. They may well be sites with broken Flash sniffers that only work with IE or something. But I pretty much flee all-Flash sites anyway.

[catfish42.livejournal.com]

Actually, I've been meaning to mention this (and I know I've never commented on your journal before, so apologies if this is a bit... odd.) but I downloaded Mozilla awhile ago specifically because of your journal, and have since give up IE altogether. So, yes. Another Mozilla convert here. I sing the praises of the tab-things.

-m

[kriscrash.livejournal.com]

Your layout looks good in Opera, but the tables slide so that the "add comment" like hides under the date of the previous entry, but not always, only after longer entries.

And yes. Who can live without tabbed browsing?

[mattlazycat.livejournal.com]

Did you try adding the IE7 (http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/) stylesheet to see if that lets IE cope with it any better?

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. Iinteresting.

I don't know how much it'd help for LJ, as LJ peels Javascript out of everything it serves. And the core problem with me debugging stuff for IE is, as I noted above to Neil, well, there's no Windows box I have easy leisure-time access to. There's a couple at work, but I'm not about to be so blatantly slackful as to test website design at work. And there's Ashy's machine at home, which, well, has the problem of being hers.

I could try emulation, but that's a hell of a lot of work just to work around someone else's bugs. For something as personal as LJ, I just don't care - hearing that some releases of IE *crash* on my CSS was just the last straw. Rather than bug some brave volunteer to endlessly reload my attempts, I'll just give IE users something utterly undecorated, but wholly legible and hopefully not crashy.

[ultraken.livejournal.com]

I tried poking around at the HTML in Visual Studio, but didn't get very far because I don't have access to the CSS file (LiveJournal doesn't want to let me download it).

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

It's here if you really feel crazy/geeky/curious. You'll have to change how it's included in your local copy, 'cause I deliberately made it invisible to IE. (<link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' href='stylesheet.css'> instead of the style @import /style stuff.) Of course, if it doesn't crash your version of IE in the first place, it's hard to know when it stops crashing whichever IE comes with ME...

IE = poopies.

[ultraken.livejournal.com]

OK. I'll at least have a look at it. I may not be able to figure much out, but it can't hurt to try.