I wonder if I may comment on the details of the problems with the Quanta
Web Page on Page 4 or the latest QL Today. (I have extreme difficulty
typing "Today" rather than "Toady"!)
The statement that "Internet Explorer correctly, displays the menu items
on the left hand side, but the rest of the screen appears blank until
the user scrolls down to below the menu." amuses me somewhat.
I know exactly about this problem because my own web site at
http://qdosmsg.dunbar-it.co.uk has the same problem with IE but not with
anything else. (IE 9 does manage to display the pages properly I have to
add.)
Equally, my old website page for QStripper used to have a comment at the
top that said something about the "big blank space" and the fact that
the menu "scrolled off the top" when you scrolled the page. Only IE gave
these problems.
The cause is simple, Microsoft don't do standards. End of story. They
think that they are too big and important for standards and ignore them,
or change them as they see fit.
The affected web sites are using CSS and versions of IE that I have
tested on my old web site failed miserably, up as far as IE 8 Beta, to
render the page correctly according to the CSS rules.
At work I use the same Wiki system (DocuWiki) as I do for the above web
site. Because the Government's chosen browser is IE 6.0 (the one with
the most security holes and bugs in - go figure) we have to work with that.
If I use a decent template for our work wiki, it's horrible under IE, so
I have to use one that make the system look like a late 70's web page
rather than something a tad more modern.
My own web page doesn't display correctly using IE 6 and neither does
the Quanta web page.
Gone are the days, thankfully, when you used to see web sites with signs
on them saying "best views in Internet Explorer", now you see "Using IE?
Shame. Why not get a proper browser that follows standards and you will
enjoy this site all the more." (Or words to that effect!)
I decided with my own web site to use a template that I liked and if IE
didn't work, then sorry, that's just tough. The properly written
browsers do display the site correctly, so the solution is to get a
proper browser. Harsh, possibly, but fair.
The world no longer cow-tows to Microsoft. Moving on ....
Also on Page 4, it mentions that I created a test PDF of Volume 5 issue
1, this was Volume 15 in actual fact, but no worries - I'm hardly one to
criticise others for making typos am I! Not with the state of some of my
articles. :-)
The PD I produced was in the full defaults for Open Office 3 and as
such, the font size may have been bigger than usual. I also produced it
with white space between paragraphs - something not often done in QL
Today - and my biggest bugbear with the magazine.
As Geoff mentions, I created a single column layout at first as this is
easiest to read on screen - you don't want to scroll down the page to
read the first column, then back up and then down again to read the
second column. In addition, where two articles share a page, you read
down, up, down again to finish the first article, then down up and down
to read the start of the second!
It's excellent on paper where your eyes do the moving, but not on screen
- unless you have one of those monitors that displays a full A4 page in
portrait format!
Cheers,
Norman.
--
Norman Dunbar
Dunbar IT Consultants Ltd
Registered address:
Thorpe House
61 Richardshaw Lane
Pudsey
West Yorkshire
United Kingdom
LS28 7EL
Company Number: 05132767
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