Re: CSS and XHTML

Hello all!

On Monday, November 10, 2003, at 01:46 AM, Andreas Grabmüller wrote:

> You can find some stats at
> http://www.postgresql.org/stats/

Thanks for the stats. I noticed that the Report Magic analysis dates
from March. Is there anything more recent? Or might not it matter?

> I think it would be good to have a XHTML compatible site. But as it
> seems the site structure will change (if we decide to merge the
> sites), it might be better if you wait for this new structure before
> redoing the (X)HTML to avoid double work...

I'm all for avoiding double work. When is a decision to be made on
merging sites? With the merge, will there by a style redesign as well?

On Monday, November 10, 2003, at 04:49 AM, Andreas Grabmüller wrote:
>
> If we decide to do this changes it might be the easiest way if Michael
> takes the current CVS source and applies the changes in test2.htm in a
> XHTML compatible way...


On Monday, November 10, 2003, at 06:05 AM, Josh Berkus wrote:
> Also, re: the XHTML issue, are there potential browser problems?
> Never forget
> the number of people in the world using I.E. 5.0 or Netscape 6.2.
> There's a
> lot.

Netscape 6.2 shouldn't be a problem at all. IE5/Win can be handled
quite easily. As Marc pointed out, XHTML is just HTML defined as XML.
Big differences include closing tags, lowercasing tags (XML is
case-sensitive), and quoting attributes. Nothing really major. As such,
any browser that can handle HTML shouldn't have a problem with XHTML.

Presentation via CSS is another thing. Briefly, really old browsers
just don't do CSS. They'll ignore all of the presentation, but the
content will be just fine. Very basic :) but just fine. And most recent
browsers handle parts or most of CSS just dandy. Speaking to IE5/Win
directly, there are well-documented ways to work around it's particular
CSS bugs without resorting to custom pages or browser detection.

Looking at the list of browsers, the areas I'm a little concerned about
are the ~3% using 4.x browsers, the ~3% identifying as Netscape
compatible, and the ~3% not providing any browser identity. That's six
percent we really don't know about, and 3% we'd probably end up hiding
some of the CSS from.They wouldn't get the full glory of the site, but
it wouldn't be plain Jane either. (I'm currently looking for a place to
get a version of Netscape 4 to test with.)

There are a few identities I'm not familiar with, but they don't
account for much (less than 1.5%). And I'm ignoring the bots and
text-only browsers, since presentation doesn't really matter to them.

The three things on my mind are answering any other questions people
may have, getting my computer wrapped around a more recent version of
the code, and somehow connecting to the database or hosting a sample of
it myself to work on the content section. And a fourth thing. I'd like
to get people's reactions to what I've done so far and to test it with
browsers I don't have access to (mostly the IE/Win versions, Galeon,
and Konqueror).

Michael
grzm myrealbox com