Best viewed with Mozilla Firefox
This site is designed in a browser-independant way, using the latest standards such as HTML 4.1, XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.1. This means small, tidy code, and a flexible layout design. It also means that the site can be viewed virtually everywhere, from common PC's to text-only browsers (Lynx) to pocket devices such as the to-be One-Chip-MSX ;p. Fudebrowser will not have much trouble with it either.
Nevertheless, the site is designed on the Mozilla Firefox browser, and therefore mainly oriented towards that browser. I like going through the documentation of CSS to make the MAP look subtly better, and discover new web site properties, such as page break codes so that pages are printed better. Or more informative, such as adding a shitload of annoying abbr and acronym tags for all abbreviations and acronyms on this page :). Quite some of those features in the deeper chasms of CSS are only supported by Mozilla, or at least not by IE6. Such as the <abbr> tag, similar to <acronym> and supposed to be used in conjuncion with it, but IE6 only supports the latter one. Now that Firefox 0.8 has arrived, including a Windows installer, plus the proper showing of embedded text files, I thought the time was right to officially endorse Firefox as 'the best MAP browser' ;p.
Why Mozilla Firefox is better suited for viewing the MAP than Internet Explorer 6:
- Tabbed browsing is very useful when keeping several documents open for reference.
- Firefox supports the 'pre-wrap' style, which makes text files such as the IDE system docs a lot more readable (p.s. found IE tag too).
- The transscribed v9938 application manual uses page break CSS tags, and prints better in Firefox.
- Firefox offers a style selector in the status bar, with which you can select an alternate style sheet for the site. For now, you can alternatively select the 'MAP Modern' style ;), but in the future also expect MSX-oriented styles.
And, ofcourse, not to forget the other more general advantages of Firefox which make life easier:
- Mozilla Firefox is a very fast browser, and doesn't look awkward like Mozilla does.
- Firefox has good CSS support, and less bugs than IE6, giving web developers much more flexibility and less headaches.
- It also has a 'Quirks mode' in which it emulates the bugs in IE5.5, so you can browse almost every page without problems.
- Firefox is an opensource browser still in development, continuously adding support for the latest web standards (the CSS2.1 pre-wrap tag is a good example of this - it isn't supported in IE6 and wasn't in Firebird 0.7 either). If you encounter a bug you can always submit it to the developers, or even make a fix yourself.
- The new Firefox has pretty logo's ^_^. Oh, and good PNG support too.
Some examples of what I have to go through to get things working on IE6, even when designing just this simple site... If you look at the page without styles for example ('Basic Theme'), the menu looks kinda sucky. I would have implemented it as an unordered list (ul), were it not that IE6 doesn't support fully customizing those styles. And now it looks bad on every device not supporting styles, including Fudebrowser. Another one, in the page source you can read that I had to omit the (fortunately optional) XML declaration tag in all documents, because if I put *anything* before the !DOCTYPE declaration, even just a mere comment, IE6 will drop out of 'Standards Compliance' mode and start emulating the IE5.5 bugs. That caused me a lot of additional work with today's site redesign, when I tried it in IE6 I got an unpleasant reminder of this bug.
Now let's hope everyone will start to use Firefox ^_^, because that will make my web designing job a lot easier and enable me to implement new stuff which I currently can't because of IE6 compatibility. Though I must say IE6 is still pretty decent, and at least way better than its predecessors.
p.s. in IE6, you can drag this stylesheet toggle favelet to your bookmarks toolbar, or bookmark it, in order to toggle between a page's stylesheets. It doesn't work exactly as it should, and the alternates might not work in IE6, but it's better than nothing :).
