Andrew Gray wrote:
2009/3/3 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
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?
Youch, that's messy in IE7. Lovely though it may be, that 30-50% of our audience would not be happy...
Right. 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
On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 9:01 AM, Håkon Wium Lie howcome@opera.com wrote:
Andrew Gray wrote:
However, I also think the web should not be hostage to IE6/IE7 forever. Some designers have declared war on IE6 for this reason:
There has been a debate about this recently at wikitech-l:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2009-February/041587.html
And I think I remember that there were proposals earlier to add at least a infobox on wikipedia sites with text like
"It looks like you are using an Microsoft Internet Explorer. You can get better results when you use a web browser instead, here are some suggestions [link-ff], [link-op], [link-chr]"
There were many objections to this, including the question how to deal with browsers that pretend to be the MSIE in order to access pages that otherwise wouldn't let them visit the page and the omnipresent neutrality mantra.
Mathias
Mathias Schindler wrote:
On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 9:01 AM, Håkon Wium Lie wrote:
Andrew Gray wrote:
However, I also think the web should not be hostage to IE6/IE7 forever. Some designers have declared war on IE6 for this reason:
There has been a debate about this recently at wikitech-l:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2009-February/041587.html
And I think I remember that there were proposals earlier to add at least a infobox on wikipedia sites with text like
"It looks like you are using an Microsoft Internet Explorer. You can get better results when you use a web browser instead, here are some suggestions [link-ff], [link-op], [link-chr]"
I would find such a notice insulting, and so would a lot of users with minimal net sophistication. Sure, there's a problem with off-the-shelf computer systems that come with IE prepackaged, but many of those users approach this problem with the phobia that changing browsers will cause a complete system crash.
I can understand how the nationalistic and marketing interests of Opera's home country would want to wage war on Internet Explorer, but that doesn't change the fact that some form of IE retains a plurality of users. I'm using Firefox myself (meaning that I would not receive the message), and have no technical arguments in support of IE, but we still need to distinguish between serving Microsoft and serving Microsoft's users. It's not for us to suggest that there is something inferior about someone who uses IE.
Ec
I wrote:
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?
Youch, that's messy in IE7. Lovely though it may be, that 30-50% of our audience would not be happy...
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've updated the document to better support IE6/IE7. To ensure graceful degradation for these browsers, an additional style sheet is added by way of IE's proprietary "comment" syntax. The resulting rendering leaves dt and dd elements on separate lines, and the infobox is therefore somewhat longer. I believe this rendering to be acceptable and it will serve a subtle hint to upgrade to a more standards-compliant browser. (IE8 was officially released last week, and there are other offerings, too :)
http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2009/wikipedia/infobox/
The main benefit of this approach is vastly cleaner markup and reduced size of the resulting HTML code.
Cheers,
-h&kon Håkon Wium Lie CTO °þe®ª howcome@opera.com http://people.opera.com/howcome
I've spent the last few days analyzing Wikipedia's HTML code for images and captions. The current code is quite good, but verbose and it has redundancies. Here is a proposal that describes how to simplify and improve the code:
http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2009/wikipedia/image/
The proposed solution reduces the number of elements from 10 to 6 and the code size is reduced by more than 50%.
Cheers,
-h&kon Håkon Wium Lie CTO °þe®ª howcome@opera.com http://people.opera.com/howcome
Great stuff, all of this. Seriously, thanks.
2009/4/3 Håkon Wium Lie howcome@opera.com
I've spent the last few days analyzing Wikipedia's HTML code for images and captions. The current code is quite good, but verbose and it has redundancies. Here is a proposal that describes how to simplify and improve the code:
http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2009/wikipedia/image/
The proposed solution reduces the number of elements from 10 to 6 and the code size is reduced by more than 50%.
Cheers,
-h&kon Håkon Wium Lie CTO °þe®ª howcome@opera.com http://people.opera.com/howcome
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l