Janelle Clemens wrote:
I have a question about conditional comments. I have heard so much
about them especially in the last discussion about "Set min-width using
DOM" but have never used them. We have always used a javascript style
sniffer to determine which browser the viewer is using. However when
javascript is turned off the site looks pretty nasty. Does conditional
comments still work if js is turned off? And is this a better way to
go than a javascript style sniffer? What do you do for browsers like
mac ie if you don't want it to use the style sheet. With the sniffer I
can tell it to use our nostyle.css file.
Until recently, I worked for the NZ Govt. We have rules about displaying
macrons in Maori using unicode. We also have rules about sites being
usable with JavaScript turned off. Some browser/OS combinations don't do
Unicode at all (notably on Mac pre-OSX), so we knew we'd have to detect
those exceptions and return them a page without macronised characters.
As we couldn't use JavaScript to do the sniffing (plus that would have
made all the pages cumbersome), we set the filter (on the www.govt.nz
site at least) at the server level using mod_perl on an Apache server
and a growing black list as we discovered new browser/OSes that didn't
do Unicode .
Other sites, running on IIS (ptui) use modified dlls to achieve the same
thing (although I think you can now run PERL on IIS (happy to be
corrected on that.
I can't tell you the technical details as I am not that sort of geek ;-)
but Daniel Bar-Even at Signify *is* that sort of geek and has published
a page at http://www.signify.co.nz/macronfilter/ about how he did it.
Surely, the same sort of server level approach could be used to sniff
out the browsers that won't do what you want and serve a different CSS
sheet to them?
James Ellis made an excellent comment the other day that echoes what
I've been telling my business users for years - it won't look the same
in different browsers on different platforms, so get over that and
concentrate on getting pages that work in all browsers and all platforms
to deliver the business need.
cheers
Mark Harris
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