[Pan-users] Re: Pan website problems with IE for Windows

[Duncan]

Lenroc posted <address@hidden>, excerpted
below,  on Wed, 01 Oct 2003 01:14:56 -0700:

> Uhm... don't hate me because I use Windows. And don't hate me because I
> use Internet Explorer.
> 
> Anyway: The Pan webpage seems to not work very well with Internet Explorer
> 6.0.<too many numbers>. The Right navigation bar is covered by the main
> content of the page. How much the nav bar is covered depends on the page.
> On the root page, for example, the right nav bar is 100% concealed by the
> content section, leaving only "Screenshots", "download", and "tip jar"
> visible at the top. On the /screenshots/ page, the links to "Screenshots"
> and "download" are clear, but all the others are covered about 40% by the
> content area.
> 
> It works as expected under Netscape 7.

I've a 50% success rate on getting my web page bugs resolved.  <g>  The
one, suggesting that all nav images be accompanied by text links, for the
benefit of the (rather large Linux base, compared to MSWormOS, say) users
that don't surf with images on by default, was rectified quite promptly. 
Alternative text navigation was added in short order.

The other was suggestion that all tags or CSS that includes one of
(?:text|bg)-color, should include BOTH.  This would prevent folks with a
preference for dark backgrounds, for instance, ending up with black text
as specified on the page, on a black background as defaulted to by the
browser as the user preference specified, from ending up with invisible
text.  This one was met with the "patch contributions welcome" response. 
Unfortunately, at the time, I didn't know enough about web page tagging to
be able to appropriately suggest "patches".  Since then, I've installed a
personal proxy (privoxy) to deal with this and other annoyances, and spent
some time customizing its replacement filters to deal appropriately with
the vast majority of such problems, by rewriting the tags or CSS in
question, including a specific text=white attribute in the body tag, and
filters that (perl regexp pseudocode)
s/(?:[cdef].[cdef].[cdef].|[cdef]{3})/(?:[0123].[0123].[0123].|[0123]{3})/
for backgrounds, or the reverse for foreground/text.  Ironically, in doing
so, I now have the knowledge to appropriately rewrite the page code as
necessary to fix the problem, but no longer a real need to do so, as the
filters take care of it for me on all sorts of pages. both those that
ignore the common-sense rule to specify both, and those that observe it
but specify dark on light instead of my preferred light on dark.  However,
now that I'm thinking of it again, I probably should submit proposed
patches to at least correct the error of not doing both when one is done.

Anyway, you mentioned you'd been away from the list for a bit, so you may
not know, but Charles is taking a well deserved vacation right now (the
reason he was so keen to get a stable 0.14.2 out, as he wanted it stable
b4 he left), but it's possible he'll ask for patches to fix it, and
provided they are sensible, will probably take them, even if he would have
fixed it himself, so if you are into that, might as well get a set of
proposed patches worked out...

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin