Why can't I read the reviews?

[Liquide]

No... It's the fact that Netscape 4.x is pickier about bugs in the HTML code. Like not closing table tags.

Any chance this will get fixed?

Short answer NO, since all other browsers show it correctly including Netscape 6.x and 7.x and I cannot possibly code so every browser is capable of showing the site.

It is not just to change the table tags you see, that whole page is dynamically generated and therefore I have to change the whole core of it.

It does work on the following browsers:


Internet Explorer 4.x (some issues with formatting due to CSS)
Internet Explorer 5.x (some issues in 5.0)
Internet Explorer 6.x (some issues with formatting when running on MacOS)

Opera 4.x (some issues with formatting)
Opera 5.x (minor formatting issues)
Opera 6.x

Netscape 6.x
Netscape 7.x

Mozilla 0.9.1 Beta
Mozilla 1.0


I cannot code for every browsers sice that is impossible, so the choice I made is to only support browsers that aren't more then 5 years old (NS 4.x is up to 7 years old), so my suggestion is to update since I will not recode the page for NS 4.x when there is a newer browsers out there that are free (see above for the list) .

I do not say or do this since I 'm mean to NS 4.x users, it is just that it isn't easy nor feasable to make a site NS 4.x compatible any more.

Sure it used the standard when it came and still uses a standard, but when no other browser will show formatting correctly if the site is optimized for the formatting NS 4.x uses.

This and the fact it is and old and quite outdated browser made me choose NOT to support it any more on the d20reviews, I did recode it to support NS 4.x for 2 years ago but then all other browsers showed formattig funny instead.

So the choice here is not to exclude NS 4.x, it is instead to allow the greater amount of browsers access to the site with nice formatting.

Hope this explains it, I did not meant to exlude from the site but please download Mozilla 1.0 ( http://www.mozilla.org ) since it has good support for Linux/Windows, is a fairly small download and it is the browsers I use when I'm not compability checking stuff.

-Liquide (the misunderstood coder)

 

[Liquide]

Ay, Liquide! Where the h*ll have you been lately?

Alive I hope, well here and there at least.
I'm here isn't that enough?

Nice to be back though.

-Liquide

 

[Conaill]

Liquide, I appreciate all the work you've done and are doing for ENworld, but this is NOT an issue of supporting an old browser!

This is an issue of having a BUG in the HTML code. One that most likely can be fixed by adding a single closing table tag in a single location in the script. No "recoding" involved.

If you feel it's not worth your effort (and I'm guessing you could probably have fixed it in the time it took you to reply to this thread), feel free to send me the code. I'll figure out where the bug is and let you know.

99.99% of the websites I visit run correctly under 4.X... except for the ENworld reviews pages. I am NOT planning on changing my browser because of that. But I'll happily help you clean up the code to generate the reviews pages.

 

[Liquide]

Liquide, I appreciate all the work you've done and are doing for ENworld, but this is NOT an issue of supporting an old browser!

This is an issue of having a BUG in the HTML code. One that most likely can be fixed by adding a single closing table tag in a single location in the script. No "recoding" involved.

If you feel it's not worth your effort (and I'm guessing you could probably have fixed it in the time it took you to reply to this thread), feel free to send me the code. I'll figure out where the bug is and let you know.

99.99% of the websites I visit run correctly under 4.X... except for the ENworld reviews pages. I am NOT planning on changing my browser because of that. But I'll happily help you clean up the code to generate the reviews pages.

Just downloaded NS 4.08 and looked at the page for myself, it does show for me Windows 2000/NS 4.08, but looks as I expected horrible formatting-wise.

So I don't really understand what it is you refer to that might be erronous in the html code, and I have worked with html syntax for almost 9 years now so I know how to close tags properly and I had done that in the asp file (just checked) so I don't know what error might cause this on your computer.

And for the record, please turn javascript on and let the site allow cookies otherwise the d20reviews doesn't work properly (e.g. wont allow you to post reviews, comments etc . . .).

-Liquide

 

[Conaill]

Hmm...

Do you mean to say you haven't changed *anything* in the source code since my post? Because now all of a sudden, I *can* read the reviews... for the first time ever. If you (or maybe Morrus?) have fixed it, many thanks!. It's like a whole new (piece of EN)world has opened up to me!

If you haven't changed anything, I would be somewhat worried about what's going on. Unfortunately, I didn't save an old copy of the page, so I can't check what has changed.

By the way the unbalanced table tags are still present in many of the other reviews subpages (d20Intro.asp, publishers.asp, reviewers.asp, recent30.asp, upcoming.asp and top20.asp).

 

[Renshai]

99.99% of the websites I visit run correctly under 4.X... except for the ENworld reviews pages. I am NOT planning on changing my browser because of that. But I'll happily help you clean up the code to generate the reviews pages.

I'm sorry, but I find it hard to believe that you are seeing 99.9% of your websites in the way they meant to be presented. Netscape 4.x is a sub-standard out of date browser. The day it was released it was non-compliant. I'm not sure if you have ever heard of the W3C, but it sets the standard that most browsers "try" to follow. At that time Netscape didn't even try to follow it. Now IE had it's problems too but all the browsers have been working hard towards becoming compliant. Netscape has finally taken strides to be compliant with Version 6.

It becomes very hard for web developers to program compliant sites when they have to worry about browsers that are either A) Non-Compiant, or B) more than 2 or 3 years old.

If you would like some education on the subject, I suggest you visit this site: http://www.webstandards.org/about/

Hope I could help,
Ren
Ren

 

[Conaill]

Renshai: Yes, I know.

However, this is/was a problem of the d20reviews pages being non-compliant with W3C (not closing table tags properly), NOT a problem with my browser. The only browser "problem" I have is that it's less forgiving of such errors.

As a sanity check, I've checked the pages on a different machine running IE5 under Windows, and the unbalanced table tags are still there (not in d20reviews.asp, but in the other pages).