Ye' old general discussion board. Basically, for everything that isn't covered elsewhere. Come here to shoot the breeze, shoot your mouth off, or whatever suits your fancy. This forum is not for asking programming related questions.
astions wrote:By "render everything correctly", what I mean is be standards compliant. Are you saying this is not possible?
Not possible *may* be incorrect, but its close.
There are sections of various standards that conflict with each other (so short of errata, you can't comply with both), and there are sections that can be interpreted two different ways (Mozilla and KHTML seem to run into this case quite often, and in most cases, go opposite directions).
The net result is that even being "100% standards compliant" is rather tricky for browsers.
I assume all browser makers except IE are doing their best to render everything correctly and pass the acid test. So if all those teams of smart people have trouble getting everything right, it must be difficult. Wouldn't it?
Almost sounds like a bunch of kids fighting. There should only be one standard, but if there are 2, or different variations of multiple standards, there should be a clear cut and dry format that can be parsed by the browser which would tell the browser exactly how to render each element. I'd assume this is the point of the whole DTD bit, but that apparently hasn't solved much.
If there was a mechanism in place to do what I just mentioned, the browser could say, OK, this is Version X which formats the box model this way and these attributes will cause this object to be positioned here etc..
I really don't see what the big problem is. I think everyone is too busy arguing to come up with a solution. I'd rather let them all fight and create a damn plugin. That way, all developers would know that if they write code a certain way, it will render a certain way. Like I said before, it wouldn't be like a "Your browser can't display frames" error. It would just degrade nicely and default to the browsers rendering engine if the plugin wasn't installed.
The Phoenix wrote:On the contrary I did. There are *hundreds* of popular ad sites. The filterset G list is almost 200 lines long, and contains multiple regexes that catch dozens of sites.
Install two addons (adblock and filtersetG updater), and you get those 200+ sites blocked instantly, and it updates with new additions regularly as well.
Or, manually type in 200+ sites in Opera. And add a new line every time you discover a new one. Or right click and manually do it on a site-by-site basis.
Seems like an obvious choice to me.
Or just cut from a list of ad site urls and paste it into the urlfilter.ini file in Opera.
Opera Preferences version 2.1
; Do not edit this file while Opera is running
; This file is stored in UTF-8 encoding
[prefs]
prioritize excludelist=1
[include]
*
[exclude]
http://ad.doubleclick.net/*
http://banners.pennyweb.com/E1/*
http://campaigns.interclick.com/iccached/*
http://cdn.fastclick.net/fastclick.net/*
http://cdn2.precisionclick.com/c/*
http://dingo.care2.com/blocks/*
http://imagec08.247realmedia.com/RealMedia/*
http://img-cdn.mediaplex.com/0/*
http://pages.etology.com/gtbimg/*
http://spe.atdmt.com/ds/*
http://worldbe.com/banners/*
Opera made is exceedingly simple and easy to filter sites and specific content. There are many ways you can go about it. I like it because the less extra crap I have to install on my computer the better I feel.
astions wrote:Almost sounds like a bunch of kids fighting. There should only be one standard, but if there are 2, or different variations of multiple standards, there should be a clear cut and dry format that can be parsed by the browser which would tell the browser exactly how to render each element.
There is at http://www.w3.org/ and Opera uses the web standards there for how their browser renders content. Opera is usually the most standards compliant browser out there. The problem is too many web sites are NOT standards compliant. Since the non-compliant web sites display properly in IE everyone assumes any browser that will not display the non-compliant sites is the problem.
This is why Opera is having to add in a non-strict compliant mode so it can render BROKEN web sites like IE. The fact Opera is so strict on compliance turned some people off because they thought the browser was broken when it was the web sites that were broken.
The crap web site coders are basically winning with the help of all those IE users. Sigh...
astions, no offense, but I think you underestimate the issue. Like Phoenix said, portions of the standard are ambiguous. Also. like APJ said, IE makes everything difficult because irresponsible/misinformed/lazy web developers build a web site, test it on IE and call it a day. This means that when Wally the Windows user, after hearing so many good things about this Opera browser comes along, they see that web sites don't render properly and assume the browser is broken.
It's a very complex issue. I think that if was as easy as you are implying to create a plugin like that, it would be written already.
The fact that modern browsers like opera and safari render more strict is good but has indeed the drawback of being less forgiving for errors. Just yesterday I checked a site of mine in safari and it was so broken (floats below each other instead of lined up etc) I couldn't believe it. My css was good so I couldn't figure it out. Turned out the problem was one extra </p> tag, generated by wordpress. Didn't occur to me the html could be invalid. Well, thanks to some strange behavior of wordpress it was. So lesson: always validate first. But I understand that all those developers out there who don't know or care about standards and validating, will look at other browsers (other then IE) and blame those.
About the browsers and standards. As Ninja/phoenix points out the specs of the standards aren't very clear. That's what all the discussion around HTML5 is about. To get everything done correctly this time.