Left Justified » browsers

Gecko 1.8: Bye-bye printed float bug!

Andrew — Tue, 29 Mar 2005 00:59:31 +0000

From Gecko 1.8 For Web Developers: Columns (via: Anne):

In particular some huge issues involving floats breaking across columns have been fixed. Since we use the same code for page layout as for columns, this also means a lot of problems with printing (and print previewing) pages with floats have been fixed

Hopefully this means that floated elements (read: columns) will be continued on the next page, as they should, instead of disappearing into some kind of magical void.

The article referenced above contains some very interesting CSS news regarding columns — go check it out! It looks like Firefox 1.1 is really going to up the stakes in the CSS 2.1 compliance field. Opera and Mozilla are certainly the driving forces at the moment, though I don’t doubt the Safari team are working hard to stay in the game.

The Acid Test Challenge

Andrew — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 04:43:52 +0000

To contribute to the challenge, I’ve thrown together a quick acid test of my own, one which combines a few challenges for IE; including

Fixed positioning (elements and backgrounds)
24-bit PNG
Sizing/positioning an element using left:; right:; top:; bottom:;
Styling of the html element (which IE6 already does… sort of )
XHTML 1.1 served with its correct mime-type (insert evil laugh here!)

I’m very tempted to make up a second acid test based solely around the multitude of bugs associated with IE’s hasLayout property, but really, what’s the point?

No More Suspect Traffic

Andrew — Sun, 30 Jan 2005 03:31:57 +0000

I’m fed up with the entire cornucopia of suspect tinned meat products that float amongst the web. I leave comments open on all my old posts to encourage further discussion in the future; whether this will remain is in serious jeopardy. While there are many effective ways of lessening comment spam, referrer spam is another beast entirely — an insidious, pointless resource hog that baffles me by its mere existence. Do they really think webmasters are going to buy SEO tools from spammers?

As a result, I have added some severe ReWrite rules to .htaccess in an attempt to stem the tides. I’ve blocked anything remotely suspicious, including all localhost IP’s (my log files reveal someone is developing locally using one of my CSS files… you idiot); any odd referrers that reside behind 403 Authorization or are ‘vacant’ but return suspicious whois queries.

One tool that I found very useful whilst testing these changes is wannaBrowser, which fakes HTTP user agent strings and referrers.

If I have any reason to believe that I’m blocking legitimate users with these measures I will change the redirection to a page that allows you to contact me and say that you feel hard done by. Otherwise I’ll just leave them in limbo and not waste another precious kilobyte on all this suspect traffic.

Microsoft Listens; But to Whom?

Andrew — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 06:52:35 +0000

From an interview with Steve Vamos, Microsoft Australia’s managing director:

I don’t believe it is a true statement that IE doesn’t have the features that our customers want. We take user feedback very seriously. If you have that feedback, then you should feed it back to us because we will feed it to the product team.

Hmmm, I thought we already had. The interview contains some hilarious quotes, especially this one:

There are plenty of products out there with features we don’t have. We have plenty of features that our customers don’t use.

Sounds like a winning combo to me.

Then there’s this fine piece of marketing from the IE team. Wow, it’s just like watching Fox news during the US election — fair and unbiased.