Opera compatibility

[Mark Rae]

Hi,

I've just finished upgrading a site for a client to XHTML-compliance. It's
been tested on the latest versions of the following OS / browser
combinations:

WinXP - IE
WinXP - Netscape
WinXP - FireFox
WinXP -Opera
MacOSX - Safari
MacOSX - Netscape
MacOSX - FireFox
MacOSX - Opera
SuSE 10 - Konqueror
SuSE 10 - Netscape
SuSE 10 - FireFox
SuSE 10 - Opera

I'm reasonably confident the the HTML is XHTML-compliant - VS.NET 2005
certainly seems to think so.

However, the site looks terrible on Opera 9. It seems to be specifically
related to tables. On WinXP, it leaves huge gaps between columns, on MacOSX
it repeats rows and columns on the bottom-right of the screen and on SuSE 10
it seems to do a combination of both...

I'd be interested if anyone has seen this phenomenon with Opera before, and
if there's a way to fix it.

The site can be found here: http://www.kcityradio.co.uk, and the problem
exhibits itself specifically on the Home page.

Any assistance gratefully received.

Mark

P.S. I had nothng to do with the design... ;-)

 

[Damien]

Hi,

I've just finished upgrading a site for a client to XHTML-compliance. It's
been tested on the latest versions of the following OS / browser
combinations:

WinXP - IE
WinXP - Netscape
WinXP - FireFox
WinXP -Opera
MacOSX - Safari
MacOSX - Netscape
MacOSX - FireFox
MacOSX - Opera
SuSE 10 - Konqueror
SuSE 10 - Netscape
SuSE 10 - FireFox
SuSE 10 - Opera

I'm reasonably confident the the HTML is XHTML-compliant - VS.NET 2005
certainly seems to think so.

Hi Mark,

A good page to know when working out whether you're compliant or not
is:
http://validator.w3.org/

It'll tell you exactly where they believe that you're not compliant.
Given that this is the body who specify XHTML, they probably know a
thing or two about it.

Now for the bad news...

1) I'm not sure whether VS2005 will let you correct all of the errors,
or whether it'll insist on "fixing" your code back to the broken forms.
I'm still in VS2003 for my everyday work, and it definitely doesn't
like being compliant.

2) Even if you can fix all of the HTML code within your project, I'm
not sure how compliant the ASP.Net controls will be (again, the
versions for 1.1 leave you just accepting that you will not achieve
compliance)

and
3) Even after all that, the problem may not be fixed. Browsers still
use different rendering engines, and unless you specify everything
about position and layout to the nth degree, the browser is still free
to layout your page as it sees fit (and IEs bounding boxes are computed
differently to everyone else)

I think you're first step is to decide whether it's livable with, and
how much time you're going to spend fixing it.

Damien

PS - I avoided commenting on the design

 

[Mark Rae]

Damian,

A good page to know when working out whether you're compliant or not
is:
http://validator.w3.org/

It'll tell you exactly where they believe that you're not compliant.
Given that this is the body who specify XHTML, they probably know a
thing or two about it.

Thanks for that - very curious! Specifically, all of the self-closing
metatags in the header section have had their self-closing element removed,
even though the HTML in the file on the server has them. E.g.

<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 7.1" />

shows in the View Source of the live site as

<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 7.1">

This is causing the validator to fail... Incidentally, this happens on all
browsers on all platforms, so I can only assume it's coming from IIS /
ASP.NET. The site uses MasterPages - I wonder if that's the problem...?

The other issue is the use of an "embedded" object to play a Shockwave
movie, which may be having some impact - I'll be looking at that next...

3) Even after all that, the problem may not be fixed. Browsers still
use different rendering engines, and unless you specify everything
about position and layout to the nth degree, the browser is still free
to layout your page as it sees fit (and IEs bounding boxes are computed
differently to everyone else)

I understand that - IE, FireFox, Netscape, Safari and Konqueror produce
almost identical layout, but Opera is still all over the place...

I think you're first step is to decide whether it's livable with, and
how much time you're going to spend fixing it.

Well, having gone through the exercise of making it XHTML-compliant, I'm
certainly not going to break the compliant markup just to make it display
properly in Opera...

Mark