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New Look Browser Issues


Wazoo

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Brought this post over to fill in some gaps "here"

=-=-=-=-=

On Thu, 24 Jun 2004 15:57:39 -0400, spam Hater wrote:

> The line at the bottom actually states: "This site best viewed with

> anything but IE."

>

> Sounds like personal prejudice and certainly doesn't belong on a

> professional site. Who in their right mind would tweak a site to work

> best on anything but the far and away number one browser in use around

> the world?

Spamcop is now getting only about 57% of hits from IE - still could be

considered #1, I guess. But falling behind. And that text is atached to

the code which does a super-ugly hack to try to make the layout work in IE

- no small feat. IE appers to be severely lagging behind other browsers

(in this case, it lacks support for the max-width style attribute). That

message is there because encorageing users to move away from IE is good

for the users and for viewing the spamcop site.

Microsoft can't really complain about people suggesting which browser to

use either - they started this war, now they aren't keeping up with it.

When they introduced IE, they launched a huge campaign to get webmasters

to display "best viewed with IE" logos on their sites. Now the chickens

come home to roost.

I'll be documenting the problem with IE and the fix so other web

developers can benefit from my painful experience.

-=Julian=-

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Guest art101

I remember an email exchange with Julian a few eons ago - no wait... it was just a few years ago. At the time, I was working up a new design for the SpamCop logo. I was pestering him to make the site more pretty and user-friendly for the fabulous new browsers that were then coming online. He resisted. He was going for the "form follows function" approach: Plain old HTML with no bells and whistles.

In retrospect, I think he made a wise decision. He was waiting until the browser wars sorted it all out - waiting for the day when some sort of standard could be established for our awful new online tower of babel. That day will never come, but I think he chose a good moment to make a stand.

I think Julian and his team have done a great job with the new interface and page design. I think it covers all the bases very well. It's easier to navigate and works reliably for most users. It works well across a wide range of platforms and browsers. Bill Gates is an evil jerk and I never use IE. Oops. Sorry. I'm venting. I didn't mean that (yes I did).

All various and sundry browser boo-boos will be sorted out in good time. Julian opened up a can of worms by making these much-needed changes. I hope this won't distract him too much from SpamCop's primary purpose. Take a deep breath and stay focussed on stopping the spammers who steal global time an bandwidth.

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Brought this post over to fill in some gaps "here"

=-=-=-=-=

<snip>

IE appers to be severely lagging behind other browsers

(in this case, it lacks support for the max-width style attribute).

<snip>

-=Julian=-

...Microsoft claims that IE 5.5 and 6 are compliant with CSS1. I don't see max-width defined in CSS1 (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1). Am I missing something?

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For older browsers and those like to disable CSS, the new

reporting system pages are annoying because the reporting

section appears "below the fold" and requires scrolling.

Using TABLE instead of DIV would solve this. However, if that

idea isn't deemed desirable, could the "Site Search" and "Site

Style" DIV sections be moved down to the end of the HTML? Then

when CSS is disabled, the navigation bar and the reporting

sections will appear at the top of the page.

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...Microsoft claims that IE 5.5 and 6 are compliant with CSS1.  I don't see max-width defined in CSS1 (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1).  Am I missing something?

CSS 2.0 from 1998:

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/visudet.html#propdef-max-width

I will try to tone down the IE message, but I don't want the point to be lost - people should *upgrade* away from IE. Good for them, good for us (website designers in general).

I would welcome a new version of IE from microsoft which really fixed some of the issues, but that seems a long way off at this point. The evidence available seems to indicate nobody is even working on IE at this point. I wouldn't be surprised if microsoft switched to gecko too. Their embrace and extend strategy seems to have failed WRT HTML and so I don't know if they have the same incentive to produce a free browser any more - they might as well just join the gecko crowd and give their users a decent product, at little cost to them.

-=Julian=-

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...Microsoft claims that IE 5.5 and 6 are compliant with CSS1.  I don't see max-width defined in CSS1 (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1).  Am I missing something?

CSS 2.0 from 1998:

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/visudet.html#propdef-max-width

I will try to tone down the IE message, but I don't want the point to be lost - people should *upgrade* away from IE. Good for them, good for us (website designers in general).

I would welcome a new version of IE from microsoft which really fixed some of the issues, but that seems a long way off at this point. The evidence available seems to indicate nobody is even working on IE at this point. I wouldn't be surprised if microsoft switched to gecko too. Their embrace and extend strategy seems to have failed WRT HTML and so I don't know if they have the same incentive to produce a free browser any more - they might as well just join the gecko crowd and give their users a decent product, at little cost to them.

-=Julian=-

...Yep, I did notice that the CSS1 spec had a rather ancient date (as computer-related items go)!

...By the way, I (and many others) don't get to decide for ourselves what browser we use -- our employer tells us what we will use. Why else would savvy types such as us SpamCop users use IE? :D <G>

...As for the message, something along the lines of: "This site uses features that are not supported by Microsoft™ Internet Explorer." Hopefully, it will be obvious to those of us stuck with IE that SpamCop still works with it!

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And, as if you needed more reasons not to use IE as your browser, there's this:

http://securityfocus.com/news/8983

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1617046,00.asp

Basically, it looks like using IE to browse the web can cause you to have a keylogger downloaded and installed on your machine, just by viewing an image. Not cool. (Or maybe I'm reading it wrong. For those millions using IE as their web browser, I hope I'm reading it wrong. :))

-JEV

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I am using Mozilla 1.0.

This is the stuff in the "About Mozilla" window:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win 9x 4.90; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020530

With the new SpamCop reporting screen, when I report a spam, I get "please wait", it starts to download the tech. details, then it jumps forward to a white screen. (I had copied the URL of the blank screen, but then, DOH! I copied the Mozilla browser info.) I can page back to the reporting page to submit the spam, but it is annoying.

This morning, when I first went to http://www.spamcop.net/ , it jumped forward to the white screen before I could even paste the spam in.

It's not life-threatening, just a pain!

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The 24/6 18.00 (cet) i came home and open my mailbox and found 2 spammails. i opend my Explore and connected to spamcop to submit my spammail whit the copy/past form (As i have don for more than a year now)

Abouth 20.30 i got a new spam and wanted to report it. so agin i open my Explore but now i cant conect :o my explore simply freez when loading the page, I'll have to force Quit :angry:

I then tryd connecting whit my Netscape, and BINGO. i works. but now i see a new desing B)

the last 2 days i have tryd connecting whit my Explore but with no luck ? What is happenning ???

Dos the new design not work on my Explore ??

I use IE 5.2.2 and NN 7.02 on Mac OS 9.2.2

It works on my NN 7.02 but not on my IE 5.2.2

In the time betwen spamcop working on my IE and not working, i have made no changing on my computersettings, or websetting.

I dont get this and hope someone can tell my whats is going on here, why cant i connect with my IE. :huh:

in the statusbar on the IE it looks like its frezzing while loading some .gif or .jpg files. :huh:

I realy hope someone can help mee :rolleyes:

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I am running the latest version of IE for Macintosh on a G4 with OS 9.2.2. I have been using SpamCop for ages and now all of a sudden I can no longer get to the SpamCop page. Does anyone have any idea why or what I can do? :(

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OK, this morning/day has seen two posts over in the newsgroups and two posts "here" that state that IE 5.2 and Mac OS 9.2.2 are non-usable with the current "new look" features of the SpamCop web-pages. Only one user has mentioned that Netscape 7 runs on OS 9.2.2 and does fly with the new SpamCop pages. Any other "old" Mac users out there that might be able to recommend a 'current' browser that will still fly on 9.2.2, in addition to Netscape 7? I've got an iBook here with OSX 10.2 / Safari / IE 5.2.3 ... and an LC-475 back in the bathroom with some version of OS 7.5 and Netscape 4.x (I seem to recall) ... Guess I need to fire them up and see if I can discover something, but ...

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Been using the free reporting service for a while now and it's always worked well. However, starting about two days ago, am unable to complete the reporting process for reasons not understood.

What happens is: (1) get a spam message and report it to SpamCop via e-mail; (2) SpamCop responds w/an e-mail containing an URL to connect to to actually send the spam reports to the involved parties; (3) click on the URL, the web browser attempts to load the reporting page ... and it never completes the process. Have to force quit the browser to regain control of it.

Using Entourage 10.1.4 and Explorer 5.2.3 on an eMac G4-1GHz/1GB/80GB running Mac OS 10.3.4.

A "weirdity" ... Safari will connect up to the reporting URL w/no problem; Explorer will not even connect to "http://www.spamcop.net/" w/out hanging up.

Seems to be an Explorer problem. Have reinstalled it w/a fresh download after trashing all the old preferences, etc. .. no different. Also have done all the normal Mac maintenance stuff (checked permissions, etc.) and, again, no help.

Would prefer to continue using Explorer. Any ideas on how to make it work again?

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There was an update to the look of spamcop a couple of days ago and extra work was required to get IE working properly. This could be fallout from that change. There is possibly nothing to do on your end to fix this. Since Wazoo has noticed messages here and in the newsgroups, he has probably already alerted the deputies, but the people experiencing the problem could also contact them at deputies<at>spamcop.net

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This site best viewed with a CSS2-compatible browser like Mozilla Firefox.

OK

All that talk abouth CSS2 but 3 of the stylesheets AINT valid CSS 2

The:

common.css

default.css

And:

clean.css

And all the pages is NOT HTML 4.01 valid.

Mayby it voud bee a good ideer to get that right before blaming IE ???

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Yep, I blew a couple of hours this afternoon trying all kinds of nasty things o this iBook to get IE 5.2.3 to fly ... wasn't able to get it done, only managing to get different graphic images listed in the status bar ... found it odd that I had to "Force Quit" twice to actually kill off the IE process .... A note was dropped to Deputies based on that Julian so rarely comes in here and the newsgroups are just such a mess with various arguements that I figured that an e-mail might be quicker to pass the word on up.

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about spamcop and MAC OS 9.2.2 it seem to work with with Opera 6.03 :D

Buth with a java scri_pt execution error when loading the submit side

Error:

name: TypeError

message: Statement on line 293 : Expression evaluated to null or undfined an is not convertible to Object:

a.getAttribute("rel")

;)

the same error shows on all the sides when processing spam and reporting them

The Google ads did not show on the submit page, showd on the other

the submitside keeps trying to load somthing... but it works

:rolleyes:

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This site best viewed with a CSS2-compatible browser like Mozilla Firefox.

OK

All that talk abouth CSS2 but 3 of the stylesheets AINT valid CSS 2

The:

common.css

default.css

And:

clean.css

And all the pages is NOT HTML 4.01 valid.

Mayby it voud bee a good ideer to get that right before blaming IE ???

LOL.

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All that talk abouth CSS2 but 3 of the stylesheets AINT valid CSS 2

Mayby it voud bee a good ideer to get that right before blaming IE ???

I'll run them through the CSS validator here to correct any problems.

But that isn't going to change the fact the IE is broken. The small syntax problems in the style sheets isn't what's causing the problems with IE. IE just does not support CSS2.

If you could in the future, be more specific about the problems, that would help alot. Please point out the bits of code which are note HTML4 comlpliant, and I'll do my best to make them right.

-=Julian=-

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Julian

But that isn't going to change the fact the IE is broken.

I know, but its not nice to point fingers if one own work is not wright

And getting the HTML to validate will make it wright to say that its the IE that is bad, and not the site

:rolleyes:

If you could in the future, be more specific about the problems, that would help alot. Please point out the bits of code which are note HTML4 comlpliant, and I'll do my best to make them right.

Well try run the submit site true the HTML validator on http://validator.w3.org/ ther is 65 erros

(If trying to validat as transitional 29 erros)

The doctype dont work it shud say < !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">or < !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">

not < !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Strict//EN">

Ther is no encodingtype like < meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8"> or < meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1">

abouth validation errors , her is some of them:

Line 17, column 17: there is no attribute "LANGUAGE"

< scri_pt language="java scri_pt" type="text/java scri_pt" src="http://www.spamcop.net

Line 22-23-24-25-26 and 28 document type does not allow element "INPUT" here; missing one of "P", "H1", "H2", "H3", "H4", "H5", "H6", "PRE", "DIV", "ADDRESS" start-tag

< input class="small" type="submit" value="Login:">

Line 29, column 54: general entity "returnurl" not defined and no default entity

...ww.spamcop.net/mcgi?action=loginform&returnurl=%2F%3Fcode%3DY19CJHlmd2IoIoXl"

Line 29, column 63: reference to entity "returnurl" for which no system identifier could be generated

...p.net/mcgi?action=loginform&returnurl=%2F%3Fcode%3DY19CJHlmd2IoIoXl">Advanced

Line 29, column 53: entity was defined here

...www.spamcop.net/mcgi?action=loginform&returnurl=%2F%3Fcode%3DY19CJHlmd2IoIoXl

Line 29, column 94: document type does not allow element "A" here; missing one of "P", "H1", "H2", "H3", "H4", "H5", "H6", "PRE", "DIV", "ADDRESS" start-tag

...urnurl=%2F%3Fcode%3DY19CJHlmd2IoIoXl">Advanced< /a>

Line 30, column 6: end tag for "FORM" which is not finished

< /form>

Line 36, column 8: there is no attribute "ALIGN"

align="top" border=0

Line 36, column 21: there is no attribute "BORDER"

align="top" border=0

That was some of them , Try for you self and you'll find them :)

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Error:

name: TypeError

message: Statement on line 293 : Expression evaluated to null or undfined an is not convertible to Object:

a.getAttribute("rel")

This is the error reported by another mac user, and I have attempted to address it. But not seeing the error myself, I don't know if my fix worked or not.

If you still get this error, make sure you aren't seeing the old cached version of the scri_pt file:

The url (old or new) is:

http://www.spamcop.net/images/scri_pt.js

And this is the function in it's hopefully-fixed state (toward the bottom):

function getPreferredStyleSheet() {

var i, a;

for(i=0; (a = document.getElementsByTagName("link")); i++) {

if ((a.getAttribute("rel"))

&& (a.getAttribute("rel").indexOf("style") != -1)

&& (a.getAttribute("rel").indexOf("alt") == -1)

&& (a.getAttribute("title"))

) {

return a.getAttribute("title");

}

}

return null;

}

Note above the line:

if ((a.getAttribute("rel"))

That shoulf fix the problem - I hope. Can anyone confirm or deny that?

-=Julian=-

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All that talk abouth CSS2 but 3 of the stylesheets AINT valid CSS 2

Mayby it voud bee a good ideer to get that right before blaming IE ???

I'll run them through the CSS validator here to correct any problems.

But that isn't going to change the fact the IE is broken.

...That I do not understand. Can you please elaborate? My view is that since IE claims to be CSS1 compliant then, if it is, it is NOT broken -- it is only broken if it actually IS NOT CSS1 compliant. But I admit I am not particularly conversant regarding the proper manner for referring to browser compliance to standards.

The small syntax problems in the style sheets isn't what's causing the problems with IE.  IE just does not support CSS2.

<snip>

...That is true.

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But that isn't going to change the fact the IE is broken.

...That I do not understand. Can you please elaborate? My view is that since IE claims to be CSS1 compliant then, if it is, it is NOT broken -- it is only broken if it actually IS NOT CSS1 compliant. But I admit I am not particularly conversant regarding the proper manner for referring to browser compliance to standards.

As mentioned in another thread, CSS1 is OLD and even CSS2 is from 1998 so any browser released after that time, claiming to be standards compliant should be CSS2 compliant. That is why it is considered broken. IE6 was released fairly recently and still does not comply with this 1998 standard.

P.S. Around the same time (1998) we started using IE as our corporate standard because too many web sites were simply broken on the previous standard and it is simpler to keep updated with the OS. We have not sen any complaints about IE be broken on any web sites yet. IE so dominiates the market that people work around the problems. My last check (about 1 month ago) showed our web site getting hit by only ~10% non IE5 or IE6 browsers.

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Julian

That shoulf fix the problem - I hope. Can anyone confirm or deny that?

Well ther is no more a error in line 293 now its in line 278 :(

Error:

name: TypeError

message: Statement on line 278 : Expression evaluated to null or undfined an is not convertible to Object:

a.getAttribute("rel")

Opera 6.03 on MAC OS 9.2.2

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:) I dont know what happend or what you have don . but now it works on my IE 5.2.2 on mac OS 9.2.2 :)

however it looks like its having truble loading the last part of the "Official endorsments:" part and the "PayPal Donate" bottom it tok abouth 3 min to finsh the load. ;)

Can it bee somthing in the JScript that IE didnt like ???

:wub: keep op the god work :wub:

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