[WEB4LIB] RE: Draft home page not usable on my IE 6

[Thomas Dowling]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Drew, Bill" <drewwe at MORRISVILLE.EDU>
To: "Multiple recipients of list" <web4lib at webjunction.org>
Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2001 12:01 PM
Subject: [WEB4LIB] RE: Draft home page not usable on my IE 6


> I wasn't really objecting to the testing under IE6, I was objecting to
the
> conclusion that something was wrong with the CSS.  I have run our pages
> through TIDY and several CSS validators without any errors.

Well, at the moment, neither the HTML nor the CSS validate.

Before you write off comments about your page's rendering in IE6 as
"whining" (a term I believe you used in another post), read up on its
adoption of the questionable, but inevitable, practice of DOCTYPE
sniffing.  If you tell IE6 you really want it to abide by CSS standards,
it will really do it--or substantially more so than IE5.

I've dealt with vendors for years who dismissed out of hand any tests with
beta browsers.  Guess which vendors sit around with egg on their faces for
eight months after the browser goes public.  Since IE6 does not trash a
lot of pages, I'd say the onus is on you to determine why it does with
this particular page.

> ...Would there be
> any complaints if my comments had been about Netscape 6?  Probably not.
>

There would be from me, especially if the problem continued in current
Mozilla releases (I don't install Flash w/ Mozilla, so I don't know what's
happening there).  IMO, Mozilla is an important standards benchmark in
browsers.

Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu