[emacs-wiki-discuss] Re: RFC: verse tag markup and IE

[Michael Olson]

Vadim Nasardinov <address@hidden> writes:

> If the intention is to provide two distinct output markups -- one
> for CSS-enabled and another one for disabled browsers -- then a
> better abstraction would be to give users a single switch that does
> just that.  Toggle it to "css-on" or "css-off" depending on your
> target audience.

Eek, do people actually use browsers that are completely incapable of
reading CSS?  The browsers that I am able to test for compatibility
are IE 6 and Mozilla 1.0-based browsers (like Galeon and FireFox).
Safari (KHTML-based) browsers are sometimes tested as well.  I'm
assuming that Opera is CSS2 and XHTML compliant.  Are there any other
browser versions released within the past 4 years that don't support
CSS1?

Of these, IE is the strange duck that can't handle all CSS elements.
It is able to understand most of them, with the notable exception of
`whitespace: pre'.

> Now, I may have misread Michael's original post, but here's what it
> sounded like to me: You want to publish for a CSS-challenged browser,
> go ahead and toggle these fifty switches over here.  (Because
> special-casing the <br> tag is just the first step down a slippery
> slope.)
>
> So, if you anticipate having to support many corner cases like <br>,
> then providing a single CSS on/off switch might be a good idea.

There are only two instances in the code (that I know of) where CSS is
depended upon.  (1) Underlined text, (2) verse tags.

Thanks for letting me know that <br /> works better than <br/> in some
browsers.  I will space out the closing "/>" in the code from now on.

Thanks also for the link to information about setting the MIME type
for XHTML 1.1 documents.  That's dismal news.  One of the things that
frustrates me most about serving web documents is that the webserver
overwrites MIME type and document encoding.  It makes no sense to me
that the webserver's opinion should be preferred to the information in
the document itself.

-- 
Michael Olson -- FSF Associate Member #652 -- http://www.mwolson.org/
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