[plug] Web Browser Visualisation

[Bernd Felsche]

On Thursday 08 July 2004 15:10, Craig Ringer wrote:
> Bret Busby wrote:
> > Can't you run IE on top of WINE, on top of Debian?
>
> If you're looking to /reduce/ the hair-pulling-out factor, probably not.

> There's also no guarantee that MSIE/WINE will render pages the
> same as MSIE/WinXP or MSIE/Win9x, as WINE provides its own font
> and graphics services in place of the Windows ones. So it'd only
> be a solid test of MSIE/WINE ... which is probably not a very big
> user base :-P

Just about every different Windows installation has a web pages
appearing differently, even with the same nominal perversion of web
bruiser.

HTML is a language of hints. The browser can represent/ignore those
hints depending on how it "feels".

If you keep to a reasonable, uncluttered layout, then the pages will
"look OK" in AnyBrowser. Browser problems such as not actually
supporting CSS correctly cannot be solved by introducing bugs into
the HTML.

Should you want to know how your web pages look on another machine,
then it's best that it's not a machine that you've set up anyway.
Find several cooperative bod's to review the web pages; and
depending on connectivity, they may even let you use VNC to "see
what they see". Otherwise you're stuck with screen-shots.

Most problems will be evident when you check with all available
"browsers" just from Linux; Mozillae, lynx, links, w3m, Konq,
Galeon, Opera, Nautilus, Epiphany, Arachne, Amaya, Emacs-w3,
HotJava, OpenOffice, ...

Try it at different screen resolutions. A not-insignificant number
of luser have 640x480 screens on 17" monitors. Yet others have
1600x1200 on 17" monitors.

And don't overlook validation. You can ignore some warnings about
trivial problems, but no warnings is best of all.

-- 
/"\ Bernd Felsche - Innovative Reckoning, Perth, Western Australia
\ /  ASCII ribbon campaign | I'm a .signature virus!
 X   against HTML mail     | Copy me into your ~/.signature
/ \  and postings          | to help me spread!