Forum OpenACS Q&A: OpenACS home page CRASHES Netscape

When the layout was falling apart in Netscape 4.7, I kinda could live with it. However, today it crashes the browser. This is overboard, guys.

Screenshot (Windows NT 4.0, Netscape 4.7)

Additional rant #1: The forum doesn't let me post <img src="http://www.vad1.com/oacs-20021112-crash-netscape-4_7.gif" width=774 height=402> saying it doesn't fit its notion of allowed tags.

Additional rant #2: Screenshot of posting this comment in IE 5.0. Note layout bugs.

Can't you just stop playing with fancy gadgets and concentrate on REAL usability?

I fixed the reply form rendering bug by removing the
width="690" from the forms/standard.adp (which no
doubt will break other things somewhere else).

Did you change it in the live version? I can't reproduce the bug.

Looking at the page source, I can think that all the problems reside in STYLE="table-layout: fixed" thing. Unfortunately I have zero experience with css and still regard them as a gimmick, so the only suggestion I can offer is to get rid of any style, span, etc. tags.

I regard them as a gimmick solely by the number of bad designs and compatibility problems they produced on the Web. Everything can be mastered and done well, stylesheets including, but I think they are unnecessary complication to the task of HTML coding in 90% cases and they encourage incompatible design. I still do not see why I personally should bother with them and with any fancy layout as well. There are more important issues to site making - namely content, services, functionality. If you are going to ship cross-browser-incompatible solutions with stock install of OpenACS, to me you are focusing on a wrong thing. These can be always added later by the designer if he/she chooses to customize it this way :)

I don't wish to be overly unkind Vadim, but I suspect 'gimmicky' is a something of a minority opinion.

Ok, I'd certainly accept that, as with HTML itself, its not a perfect model, but its rare that anything is. They are extremely useful, particularly when building larger sites, and sites where high level of dynamic, growing content are a feature.

They also offer a much simpler way to apply a certain level of automation/logic to the management of page format.

Having well designed and well managed style sheets as part of the core acs is a highly desirable thing. As ever, I'm sure great care and substantive thought will go into any such addition to the toolkit, as is most often the case here, and therefore I'm sure the benefits will be visible and universal.

Although I'd like to add that its not always the case the the 'lowest common denominator' approach is either wise or implicit, as you continually seem to suggest. Some companies, some indiviudals, some communities may genuinely find that the benefits of not appealing to all possible environments is outweighed by the possible negative aspects.

Take NN4.7. Lets face it... it was a *really* fussy and *really* inconsistent browser. Yes, you can do your best to cater for that browser and limit your resources, profitability and functionality if you want, but lets accept that whatever you do there are going to be thousands of sites that look shite in NN.7. Ultimately the user is going to change browser, rather than wait for a re-development of the entire internet.

It is important to cater for *choice* in terms of what your users can use as a browser, but it is not a question of a kind of moral obligation to support every browser under the sun. You provide the range of choice you feel acceptable to satisfy the majority of the community. I for one don't resent having had a 'push' to get off NN4.7 and discover the delights (and teeney footprint) of opera.

We'd be forgiven for having one or two little glitches on NN4.7, but we'd not get much thanks for a poor website on the most common of browsers...

I don't see that as defeatist, or poor design, its merely common sense and simple economics of organic processes

I wholeheartedly agree with the above arguments when it's applied to any particular site, community or company. Every developer and project is of course free to choose what to support, what compromises to make and how to allocate resources better.

However, a toolkit is used as a base for building hundreds very different sites and comminities, with different decisions behind each of them. This is what makes a difference. A toolkit must follow a reasonable 'lowest common denominator' approach. And, the home page is the face of the toolkit.

I played a bit with the source of home page. The vertical bars are missing either because Netscape doesn't support background GIFs with transparency or because of the file format (I used Photoshop 5.0 to save transparent GIFs). The bars appear if redone with no-transparency GIFs; this one is trivial to fix.

Now, the other layout issues are more difficult. The columns are made through the use of stylesheets. I have little idea how to debug that. Perhaps since older browsers don't support stylesheets, it's beter to make a table layout for the home page. Should I proceed with that?

And yes, the current desing sucks when viewed on WebTV (no support for css). We'd never convince a user of WebTV device that OpenACS is any good 😟

Seriously, it looks like virtually all big sites (e.g. yahoo, shashdot, amazon, cnn) use tables for multi-column layout, not css. It should be possible to replicate our home page design with tables. Does it make sense if I try this, what do you think?

How many users with no access to the web other than WebTV are developing complex database-backed sites?  Zero is my guess.

If the site works for screens 800 pixels wide, I think we're OK.

Developers are not using WebTV, but the users who visit their sites are. I just wanted to point out there are current browsers that don't support css; not a big percent but some. The design from our home page will be copied by developers and is likely to eventually proliferate into packages. It needs be a good example.

It's common to have browser window that's not taking the whole screen. IE spawns non-maximized windows by default, and users may occasionally want to tile two windows side-by-side. We may occasionally have a long_non_breakable_word_in_the_columns (for example, a forum topic with some long variable name in it). Pages really should work gracefully at any window width. Finally, what about possible portable devices with small screens, we don't want to support them? It looks like the layout falling apart at smaller widths is an expected behaviour of this css layout, no? It better be fixed either by changing css or by switching to using a table for column layout. I like tables as they seem to be more robust if a bit inflexible from programmer's standpoint. I can try to make it if you think this won't break some overall concept.

Vadim - Why don't you submit some HTML code that will fix the problem?  It seems like you have access to many browsers and platforms.  Oh and thanks for your email a while back that explained why I should support NS 4.x.  It was filed straight into the trash can without further consideration...

OpenACS team - great job with the new website!