Lots of browsers out there...

...and it appears that the site is working fine in Opera 6 (Win '98) and in both Chimera 0.6 (12/20/2002 build) and in Safari 1.0 Beta 51. (OS-X 10.2.3).

So I guess you're doing something right, Jeff! :)

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Well, W3 doesn't think so! Lot of messy HTML coding, I had to choose the charset myself, went for "HTML 4.01 Transitional", and the validator freaked out. Look for yourself.

I'm just hoping this is not an XHTML 1.0 charset, or we just got a record-breaking number of errors.. You can't do everything right now can you?

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Dutch Coastin' :: European coasters, thrills and theming!

Oh, come off it already. That validator can't even read your site! First you complain about fixed width being "wrong" (and I showed you the research about why it's right), now you want to talk about the W3C? That pathetic beuarocracy is three years behind the industry at best. If we left it to those idiots to establish standards we still wouldn't have style sheets.

Tell me, what's "messy" about the HTML? No really, I want to know. If you're talking about tabbing, you really need to get over it, because the browser doesn't care if you have tabs or even line breaks.

The fact is simple... CoasterBuzz looks and works right in 99.99% of browsers out there.

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Jeff - Webmaster/Admin - CoasterBuzz.com - Sillynonsense.com
"The world rotates to The Ultra-Heavy Beat!" - KMFDM

I'm not complaining Jeff, I'm pointing something out. Sorry of you can't stand any criticism.

I try to work with W3C standards myself, you don't need to tell me that they're old-fashioned and impossible to fully implement. Doesn't change the fact that it is the standard, and that is no more than normal to validate a website according to that standard.

Concerning the "messy" HTML, it's just inconsistant. Sometimes you use uppercase tags, sometimes you use lowercase tags. You use HTML 4.01 tags, XHTML 1.0 tags, HTML 4.0 tags. Very inconsistent. Because of this it takes a longer time (yeah, I know I'm whining about nano-seconds) to parse the page. Not a big deal, but nontheless "important".

Don't start about this site looking good. I can see that myself. As for the width. I don't mind a debate with you concerning webdesign or W3C bs, but in a normal fashion. If you get insulted by the slightest comment, I won't even bother again to give my opinion..

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Dutch Coastin' :: European coasters, thrills and theming!

I'm not insulted, I just think you're wrong and you concentrate on the wrong things. What you offer isn't criticism. The browser doesn't care what version of HTML the tags are, or what case they are. The fact is, it's not important.

The W3C is crap. Give me a break, my page is invalid because I don't use alt tags on invisible spacer graphics? Ha!

Not only that, but you can't see the big picture about the way the site operates anyway. This entire site is three pages, one for general content, one for the forum and one for photo pages. The home page has three eight discreet user controls by itself, one of them not even coded by me, and that's still not including the two http handlers that dynamically serve the style sheet and header graphic.

Even better, I give a ton of credit to Microsoft because the HTML generated by .Net for some controls (like the calendar control) works in every browser I've tested it in, Windows and Mac. The boys in Redmond done good.

So if you want to go on hand-coding every line of HTML and running it through your W3C compliance checker, you go right ahead. I'm too busy building applications that work right and look right in all browsers, and those browsers are the only standards I care about.

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Jeff - Webmaster/Admin - CoasterBuzz.com - Sillynonsense.com
"The world rotates to The Ultra-Heavy Beat!" - KMFDM

Well, if the code survives the W3C compliance checker, it should run in any browser. And actually, Jeff, you should use ALT tags for invisible spacing graphics (specifically ALT="") otherwise they show up in non-graphic browsers as

"[IMAGE]"

But remember, DRNK, CoasterBuzz is generated dynamically. The code that your browser sees is generated by a preprocessor on Jeff's server, and the resulting code doesn't have to be pretty. The only reason for formatting your HTML code or using consistent tags or any of that sort of thing is to make it easy to read when you're troubleshooting the code. But the code that you see in your browser...or rather, the code that your browser sees...does not exist on Jeff's system. It's generated on the fly by another program. Nobody has to look at that code...as long as the browser can handle it, that's what is important. And if it works in Opera and Safari, two browsers built specifically to be standards-compliant, then it's not entirely unreasonable to think of the code as 'acceptably compliant' even though the validator doesn't like it.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.
*** This post was edited by RideMan 1/31/2003 12:41:53 PM ***

Just curious Dave, do you see any layout inconsistencies at all in Safari? Konqueror seems to have trouble displaying a few things correctly (although everything functions fine :)), but then again Apple's changes to KHTML haven't made it into Konqueror yet, so who knows.

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Joe Cernelli
Webmaster, Kennywood Boulevard
"Don't criticize what you can't understand."

Draegs tested the site in the Mac browsers before launch, and I honestly expected the problems to in those. I was shocked when he sent me screen shots showing they looked right.

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Jeff - Webmaster/Admin - CoasterBuzz.com - Sillynonsense.com
"The world rotates to The Ultra-Heavy Beat!" - KMFDM

On this site, nothing stood out about Safari. There are some sites out there where Safari doesn't work well, and a few moronic webmasters who make it so that their sites will scream at you for using either Safari (which is standards compliant) or Chimera (which IS Mozilla, which IS Netscape for crying out loud) because they don't recognize those browsers as being either IE or Netscape.

I've found that there are things that Safari does better than Chimera, and some things that Chimera does better than Safari, to the extent that at home I do most of my browsing with Chimera. Both browsers are WAAAAAY better than IE5, and both are actually better than Opera on Windows. (Opera on MacOS is pretty awful...and it isn't OS-X native). Odd thing is that Chimera and Safari are both basically in Beta form, but they're both awesome browsers.

One odd thing, though: At work (Opera), I'm not getting the ads on this site. No banner at the top, and a big hole where I expect to see the skyscraper. At home, where I'm on dial-up and would actively encourage such ad suppression, I get both banners and the skyscraper. Which is odd because there are a lot more HOST-file entries at home than at work... (at work it's basically just Doubleclick that gets its traffic nuked)

--Dave Althoff, Jr.