CADTutor falls foul of Firefox uptake

[David]

I recently received an email from a rather afronted user of the CADTutor website. She demanded to know why this page (http://www.cadtutor.net/acad/2004/draw/draw.html) loaded in Firefox and then promptly vanished from the browser window.

Works fine in IE :">

I haven't yet had time to investigate but it strikes me as rather unusual behaviour for a web browser, irrespective of the fact that the code is not standards compliant.

[francis]

Looking at the JS console in FF, there's an error in the IEmenu.js file ('rimPath is not defined'). I'm guessing that that's causing the problem rather than anything else - I'd be gobsmacked if it was an X/HTML issue. A quick look on Google shows this (http://software.xfx.net/utilities/dmbuilder/content/faq/win.htm?faq=L2hvbWUvc2l0ZXMvc29mdHdhcmUueGZ4Lm5ldC 93ZWIvL3V0aWxpdGllcy9kbWJ1aWxkZXIvY29udGVudC9mYXEv c2NyaXB0ZXJyb3JzL3EyLmh0bQ==). It looks likely that if you upgrade your menus to version 4.9 (http://software.xfx.net/utilities/dmbuilder/download.htm), it will sort out the problem. FF/Moz are quite picky on JS stuff: Shu's PowerPoint > HTML project won't load for me because there is so much proprietary MS JS in there. By the looks of it, most of the issues could be fixed if they'd just swapped their code for the equivalent W3C standards that they also support...

[David]

Thanks for that Francis - I'll investigate. It doesn't quite explain why the other pages using the same code load fine but it makes sense that JS is to blame rather than the sloppy X/HTML.

[francis]

No, it doesn't, but it might be one of those things where that combined with something else on the page is throwing it out. It is very strange behaviour - Opera is far more forgiving and places nice with the page.

[francis]

In a related issue, I was looking at my amazon.com recommendations and saw The Design Of Sites (http://www.designofsites.com/) listed with favourable reviews. It looked like an interesting book, so I checked out the website - what a disaster!

For authors preaching usability, they certainly don't walk it like they talk it and haven't bothered to test the site in anything but IE. By the looks it it, their server is misconfigured and is serving all content bar the Home and Purchase pages as 'text/plain'. IE ignores this and, when it sees HTML on a page, decides that the author and server are wrong and the page should be displayed as properly rendered HTML. All other browsers honour the MIME type and render raw HTML on the page. In case they fix this and the site starts working properly, you can see an example in my Web Standards presentation (http://www.websitearchitecture.co.uk/storr/webstandards/) (search for the 'The “text/plain” MIME type' heading).

That's one sale they've lost.

[David]

Yes, you'd have thought they'd have that sorted. The sample chapter (pdf) (http://www.designofsites.com/about_the_book/ch01.pdf) is not entirely bad. I particularly like their "Top 10 Signs that Things are going Badly" on page 11 or page 9 of the PDF document.

Actually, now that you mention it, doesn't it annoy you when printed page numbers are not synchronous with document page numbers :rolleyes: ?

[francis]

Yes, especially when it's so easy to fix. The 'top ten things' list is good - I'm tempted to read the rest of the chapter now.

Something else that annoys me is, now that someone pointed it out the other day, Amazon's (et al) 'pre-order this item' button. I'm not pre-ordering it, I am ordering it before it has been released. Thinking about it, I'm not sure how something can actually be pre-ordered. Time to re-start the grammar thread?!