I happen to like hearing other people's experience in using the web. That's
how I learn what does and does not work since I don't have every platform or
browser available to me. I do have more than most because I have both PCs
and a Mac available but I do not have a Linux/Unix machine. I have both
PocketPC and Palm but no good way to connect the Palm to the internet. I
also have an internet capable cellphone but am limited to what the Nokia
3360 supports, other who have newer phones with color screens see something
different. While I try to test on as many of those as possible I still can't
cover every combination so I rely on reports of people who use
systems/browsers I don't have. So I want to hear other's experiences when
using the web.
You off course may feel differently and are entitled to your own opinion.
If anyone has a way that is not a maintanance nightmare of creating separate
pages for the multitude of browser/platform combinations out there I would
love to hear it. Every method I've seen of using browser sniffing server
side is a mantainance nightmare.
Browsers change frequently. In the past 2 years I've gone from using IE 5 to
5.5 to 6. There are rendering differences between them (box model is one)
and the same page can look differently in each of them. Opera has gone from
5 to 6 to 7 with improved standards support in each one. Netscape has gone
from 4.x to 6 (lots of problems) to 6.2 (okay browser) to 7 (good standards
support). Mozilla came out as point 0 beta release and but is up to 1.4
already again there are definite rendering differences between .1 and 1.4.
MS has discontinued support of IE for the Mac stopping it at 5.2 but you
can't sniff just for IE 5 because IE 5-5.2 for the Mac renders very
differently than any of the PC version. Safari for the Mac was only
introduced a few months ago as a beta and only released as 'gold' in the
last couple of months. It is based on the KHTML rendering engine but has
display differences from other KHTML based browsers.
Then you have PocketPCs, Palm browsers, cellphone, and other mobile devices
but you might get away with serving those browsers whatever you server Lynx-
text based browser.
Trying to keep a server side browser sniffer compatible with all of the
above not to mention other browsers like Konqueror for Linux or any of the
dozens of minor browsers would not be an easy task. Even assuming you were
able to do so then you'd have to create the pages with the same content for
each of those browsers. Now several of those browsers would render basically
the same so you won't have to create separate pages for each of them but you
would need at a guess 4-6.
It is possible to do a low level form of browser sniffing with CSS that
doesn't have as many problems associated with it from a maintanance point of
view as server side sniffing by using a basic stylesheet that NN 4.x will
understand attached to the page using <link rel ...> adding a more advanced
stylesheet using the @import method that NN 4.x and other less complaint
browsers don't recognize and making sure your page 'degrades' gracefully for
browser that do not support CSS or who have CSS support turned off. NN 4.x
uses javascript to implement CSS so if javascript is turned off there will
be no CSS applied either.
--
Cheryl D. Wise
www.wiserways.com
Microsoft MVP-FrontPage
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