horrified: how do i fix this?

  • After about two solid weeks redesigning two different sites using WP and Kubrick, i am told that a.) it looks “janky” in Opera and b.) there’s no evidence of css returning in IE5 or NS 4 (and the lower browsers.)
    I posted something about this initially here, and asked how to let the viewer know that it might be a good idea to update their browsers. Nothing elitest, nothing exclusionary, just a suggestion. I mean, in a bright and beautiful world wide web, why on earth would anyone spend time squinting at one of my designs if it’s all default font, text, and displayed in a uni-column?
    well the short answer is: they wouldn’t.
    So i added this text to the head, and went on my merry way…
    Until last night…
    I was at a friend’s office who uses a pc, and for whatever reason prefers older browsers. i looked at the sites myself.
    mine:
    fernando.dubtribe.com
    my gracious hosts:
    dubtribe.com
    sunshine.dubtribe.com
    omg. aside from the tables in the latter site listed, there’s nothing but text, and it’s all grey, black and blue… i turned red, and then beige, and now i am just confused.
    just to be sure, i looked at a few sites i think are beautiful:
    https://www.alexking.org
    alistapart.com
    zeldman.com
    well, they all worked just fine!
    so now i’m just sitting here at my desk hating myself, weeping, and feeling like i have totally wasted my time.
    as i collect myself, i have a couple questions that maybe someone here could help me with:
    1. the huge, and probably unanswerable question:
    why does modern css work on older browsers in some instances and not in others?
    2. more specific and possibly answerable:
    a.) how would a WP user detect the viewer’s browser, and automatically load the correct style sheet for a specific platform?
    b.) what are the essential shortcomings of IE and Opera’s CSS elements? wait, that’s such a massive and impossible to answer question. forget that one…
    what’s wrong with my css? why doesn’t it work?
    i see even fancier gizmos than i am using (like, font tags, link colors and everything [being cynical, feeling bummed, sorry.]) on all these other sites. I come to the conclusion that i’m just an idiot. or naive and willing to follow without consequence.
    has this subject been appropriately tacked before?
    i’d love to set up an auto browser/platform checker, and reload even a bare bones css file what does work.
    really, anything would be better than no css at all.
    *sigh*
    dss

Viewing 12 replies - 1 through 12 (of 12 total)

  • I think you need dedicated support from the Kubrick site. The CSS in Kubrick is very fancy and it is difficult to see what may be going wrong.

    Thread Starter dss

    (@dss)

    I did a refination of a refination of a google search and found this article:

    How to Use Different CSS Style Sheets For Different Browsers (and How to Hide CSS Code from Older Browsers)
    by Christopher Heng, thesitewizard.com
    In an ideal world, you only need one set of CSS style sheets for your website, and those styles will work with every browser currently being used. This, as every webmaster soon finds out when he/she uses CSS, is a pipe dream. The modern browsers all have uneven levels of implementation of the CSS standards. As though this isn’t bad enough, their implementations are often buggy – and they don’t share the same bugs! And when you have solved that tricky bit, you find that your site has certain visitors (often your best customers) who, for various reasons, are using older browsers that have only rudimentary support for CSS.
    What most (if not all) CSS-using webmasters want is a way to specify that a certain style sheet is to be used by such and such a browser and not others, as well as to hide other style sheets from older browsers.”

    for anyone else grappling with this, here’s the rest fo the article:
    https://www.thesitewizard.com/css/excludecss.shtml

    Thread Starter dss

    (@dss)

    Root:
    That may be so. I did speak breifly with Michael about it. He said that it’s not worth it to explore older browsers (which he doesn’t like anyway.) While i share his views about old browsers, i would bail on Kubrick in a blink to allow all people so see even a hint of my design.
    I must have dreamt about this all night, because i poured over the css sheet, and the tag to call it from mine, his, and the “good” examples above. To be honest, they’re really not that different. hardly at all.
    my undisciplined eye may not be seeing what’s wrong.

    This is two different issues. One is what is the range of browsers which you are willing to support. ? The other is what are the techniques available to you to do so. ? Superimposed on both those two is the dimension of what is the state of your knowledge of legacy browsers. I think I am right in saying that in the default NN4 will load the CSS and then choke. Hence we all use the import. That itself is a hack and is designed to prevent NN4 loading a stylesheet at all.
    IE 5 is a different issue. For PCs it is generally possible to get tolerable performance. Macs are a different ball game.
    I do not know Kubrick very well but it does seem to be a *high performance* design and may or may not degrade gracefully in other circumstances. I do not know. What many people here are going to be reluctant to do is to start hacking at Michael’s beautiful design.

    This might be what you need Conditional Stylesheets

    Thread Starter dss

    (@dss)

    Fascinating!
    thank you Root.
    So what i learned from this article immediately, is that @ importing of style sheets is, as you said above, totally an effort to exclude incompatible browsers from even loading the style sheet at all.
    wow, ok, i understand.
    So what i did was grab a little ugly code (so i would be sure an notice it upon load) and just added it to the head file before the @ import tag.
    Huzzah!
    the page loads in IE5 with my hiddeous example, and safari, firefox, mozilla all load the style sheet.
    there is some override, wherein a color set in the style sheet which is contradicted by the hard code is overlooked.
    not that i want to hard code anything… but as a beginning, for the first time since friday afternoon, there has been some degree of motion in my brain.
    wonderful. a fantastic link.
    Thank You!

    While you’re knocking yourself out, you might want to correct the 10px hoizontal shift the https://binarybonsai.com/ exhibits when the navigation menu items are clicked (Opera, and Firefox); and, the misaligned header (IE).

    Thread Starter dss

    (@dss)

    hmmm…
    well, i keep saying i am going to learn css well enough to code a page from scratch without a table in sight. so here’s my big chane, yeah?
    careful what you wish for.

    And why’ll you’re busy banging your head on the CSS wall, take a few minutes to investitage this little gem of a message:
    Bandwidth Limit Exceeded
    The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later.
    ——————————————————————————–
    Apache/1.3.31 Server at https://www.binarybonsai.com Port 80

    Thread Starter dss

    (@dss)

    Michael is moving server.
    should be sorted soon.

    Thread Starter dss

    (@dss)

    I wrote up a little something regarding this (and the previous) subject.
    https://fernando.dubtribe.com/archives/2004/08/15/addressing-browser-versions/
    ‘course you’ll need to get mozilla, safari, or firefox if you wanna read it pretty.
    ??

    Nice job!

Viewing 12 replies - 1 through 12 (of 12 total)
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