Hay wrote:
By Hakon Wium Lie of Opera:
http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2009/wikipedia/infobox/
What is the likelihood of making as much as possible CSS? How to make infoboxes degrade gracefully for non-CSS browsers and IE users?
I don't know if making such an infobox that does not support IE6 and IE7 is a good idea. If you would take out all inline style elements and replace with them classes that are available in a general stylesheet it would already safe a lot of the cruft in the original code.
I agree that graceful degradation for IE6/IE7 users is an issue. The purpose of the case study was first and foremost to explore how Wikipedia's markup can be simplified and improved when CSS 2.1 is fully implemented -- like it is in Opera, Firefox, Safari and IE8. I didn't even test in IE6/IE7.
I think it's possible -- with some careful crafting -- to make things look ok, but not pixel-perfect in legacy browsers. In lynx, the table-free version looks better than the original one, but IE6/IE7 users outnumber lynx by a some magnitudes.
I'll look into tweaking the style sheet to aim for graceful degradation.
However, I also think the web should not be hostage to IE6/IE7 forever. Some designers have declared war on IE6 for this reason:
http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/02/norwegian-websi.html
Cheers,
-h&kon Håkon Wium Lie CTO °þe®ª howcome@opera.com http://people.opera.com/howcome
2009/3/5 Håkon Wium Lie howcome@opera.com:
I think it's possible -- with some careful crafting -- to make things look ok, but not pixel-perfect in legacy browsers. In lynx, the table-free version looks better than the original one, but IE6/IE7 users outnumber lynx by a some magnitudes.
Mmm. If it looks good in Lynx, it's probably readable by screenreaders.
If it can be made to work well enough in IE6/7, and still make simpler and better markup for others, then that'll be a win.
One problem is that editors (who write the templates) can write table markup, but can't write CSS. So (a) all CSS would need to be prewritten (b) it'd need to be loaded on all pages in the wiki. This is a constraint in MediaWiki itself.
It's annoying that we can't presume HTML5-era browsers. But, of course, we can't.
- d.
2009/3/5 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
One problem is that editors (who write the templates) can write table markup, but can't write CSS. So (a) all CSS would need to be prewritten (b) it'd need to be loaded on all pages in the wiki. This is a constraint in MediaWiki itself.
This would basically mean re-writing the parser so that it takes the tablecode and figures out how to translate it into CSS? Hmm.
It looks (he said loftily and without any real knowledge) workable enough from the code snippets there, but how well would it handle some of the more complex tables? After all, we'd have to do all-or-nothing for all our tables...
On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 12:30 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
2009/3/5 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
One problem is that editors (who write the templates) can write table markup, but can't write CSS. So (a) all CSS would need to be prewritten (b) it'd need to be loaded on all pages in the wiki. This is a constraint in MediaWiki itself.
This would basically mean re-writing the parser so that it takes the tablecode and figures out how to translate it into CSS? Hmm.
It looks (he said loftily and without any real knowledge) workable enough from the code snippets there, but how well would it handle some of the more complex tables? After all, we'd have to do all-or-nothing for all our tables...
I wonder how feasible it would be to allow a nerfed sub-set of CSS declarations to be embedded in the wiki-text.
—C.W.