This is totally evil

[robinturner]

Check out this, yet another Microsoft "innovation", which only lets Internet Explorer 5.* view certain comments. Maybe I'm out of date, though, as I can't be bothered to follow the browser wars any more (as far as I'm concerned, if a site won't display properly in Konqueror - or lynx (!) - it isn't worth looking at).

I've noticed in my attempts to educate myself about Javascript, that there is a way to detect the browser that viewers are using (Konqueror has a nice alias feature to get round this - it can pretend it's Netscape or whatever). Is there any way I could use this to render my pages unviewable in Internet Explorer? OTOH, maybe I should be kinder and use the script to include comments like "I see you're using Internet Explorer. Do you realise what a sap you are?"

Comments

[ex-fauxpas266.livejournal.com]

By the way, my site (http://anna.sloucher.net) was up for about two years before I learned that it wasn't viewable on IE running on a Mac OS.

[solri.livejournal.com]

it wasn't viewable on IE running on a Mac OS.

How typical - MS produce a verison of their browser for the Mac, then make sure it won't work on pages produced by their software!

What do you use to write your pages, by the way?

[ex-fauxpas266.livejournal.com]

WordPad.

I'd use pen and paper if I could. I am remarkably minimalist when it comes to writing HTML.

[solri.livejournal.com]

WordPad

That's pretty cool.

[ex-fauxpas266.livejournal.com]

I'm glad I have your approval! Hehe.

I sometimes used to use the "Save As HTML" option on MS Word. It would insert very few tags into the HTML, which required minimal editing on my part. But the newer versions of MS Word insert an insane amount of IE-exclusive tags into the HTML. Like two-thirds of the code will be totally pointless GARBAGE! *hatred*

[solri.livejournal.com]

Very true. I've had a lot of grief from having to put things on the web that people have written in MS Word - it's not just that the "Save as HTML" function produces garbage, it's that the Word .doc format itself contains a large amount of garbage, plus the fact that word processors in general tend to encourage visual rather than logical layout; in other words, word processor users tend to increase font size and bold something to make a subheading, rather than marking it as a subheading. This means that even when you get a decent HTML conversion (e.g. using wvWare) you still end up with a load of DIV or, worse, FONT tags, instead of, say H3, which was what you wanted.

One thing that kind of works is to open a Word document in OpenOffice, check the overall layout there, save it as HTML, run Tidy on it, then do any other tweaking necessary in a good text/HTML editor (I normally use Bluefish in Linux, and have used EZPad in Windows).