MacRaven - Dave Haxton's Weblog

Wed, 13 Sep 2006

Does Everybody Who Comments Here Use a Mozilla based Browser?

Or Opera? Because there was a major flaw in the writeback section, stemming from my use of the <pre> tag, with every other browser on the planet.

It seems as though there's a documented "anomaly" in some browsers, including IE 5+ for Windows, Konqueror for Linux/KDE and Safari for the Mac (which is based on Konqueror code) that forces the width of the entire page to match the longest single line enclosed in the preformatting tag. Moronic doesn't begin to describe that little bit of nonsense - the tag has a "width" attribute, which these browsers cheerfully ignore.

It's fixed now - I went with a textarea [ugly!] and got rid of the offending, yet standard HTML <pre> tag altogether. Should be functionally identical, except for the scroll bars, of course, but ... well, let me know if you see any weirdness, will ya?

/Home | 7 writebacks | permanent link

On 9/14/2006 04:18:49
Bjorngrímnir wrote

Everything seems normal to me, except the comment text areas that you pointed out. I'm using FF 1.5.n - not the 2.0b that's now floating around now - and I also checked things out with IE 7 just for kicks (still looks fine - only difference is the horizontal lines, which is always different with IE). Thanks for going through the effort of trying to keep things cross-platform functional :)

On 9/14/2006 05:47:41
Thud wrote

The PRE tag has always been pretty limited. The "width" attribute, incidentally, was depricated in the HTML 4.01 spec (seven years ago). Browsers didn't support it then, but it's been seven years since they were theoretically required to support it so there you go. Stylesheets, my friend.

On 9/14/2006 06:40:09
Walter Jeffries wrote

I had the lines too long problem since I use Safari. My solution was to put in returns by hand as I wrote. A bother but it helped for the display on my screen. I wasn't sure what the problem was. Interesting to know. Frankly, even though the PRE width attribute is depreciated the browsers should still support it. It would not take much for them to do so and it would keep older pages from breaking. Backward compatibility is important and people are failing to understand just how much data is old. If it worked yesterday, it should work today.

On 9/14/2006 08:44:43
Dave H wrote

Stylesheets, PRE and HTML

Thanks for the comments - one other thnig I discovered was that Safari, Konqueror and insist on ignoring the "border" attribute on a text area, and will put in a vertical scroll bar no matter how long the text is - they either drop the slider or fill the bar with it if there's no need to scroll. And IE recognized the border attribute (set to zero) but still sticks in the bar! Arrgh! And my first solution was CSS - except that didn't work, either, because while it corrected wrapped the text to the desired width, it ignored the line breaks (ASCII 0x10 and 0x1d). And without the formatting seeing those, folks leaving comments would have to put paragraph or line breaks as HTML code in the comment itself. Which quite a few people don't get at all, and which was why I went to this "clever" system using <pre> in the first place. Double arrgh!!! So I guess the alternative to the current system is to parse the line breaks in Perl when the writeback is displayed, and place <p> and <br /> as needed. Which isn't really all that much work, but still... this is a formatting and entry problem, damnit, and should be correctable within it's own context. <sigh> [I wonder when they'll make that a tag?] I was completely unaware that <pre> was deprecated. I use O'Reilly's "HTML and XHTML - The Definitive Guide", 5th ed. as my HTML reference. When I was a rich developer I could buy the new edition every year, but poor farmers can't afford computer books, so this one will have to do for a while. It was updated in 2002, and specifically claims to cover HTML 4.01, and doesn't list <pre> as a deprecated tag. And I guess that this could be considered a whine, because web types have been on this for years, but what I really, really wish for is consistency! If <pre> is deprecated than let's have *all* browsers stop supporting it. At all, in any way. Not kinda, sorta, half-assed maybe doing it sometimes. That would've given me a big hint right off the bat. And while I'm wishing here, I want the sun to rise in the west, and rivers to run uphill ... and here's what that <sigh> tag would be really useful. Thanks for all the comments (correctly, sorta, formatted now) and if anybody has any ideas on how to accomplish this task using pure CSS by all means let me know! Be well, Dave H.

On 9/14/2006 18:34:51
Ash wrote

The scrollbars actually are kinda neat, or at least I think so. :)

On 9/15/2006 14:39:37
Thud wrote

A clarification: PRE is not depricated; the "width" attribute of the PRE element was depricated.

On 9/15/2006 14:49:14
Dave H wrote

Oops

Hey Thud: Yeah, I realized what you'd really said after I'd gone off on <pre> itself being deprecated. Sorry 'bout that - maybe I need new bifocals after all! One other interesting thing I tried was to actually place a DTD for HTML4.01 transitional into my document - because alledgedly 'width" is only deprecated in the "strict" mode. Didn't work. And I also discovered that "hspace" and "vspace" as attributes to the <img> tag are deprecated as well - and I've used those puppies alot when I place images in my posts. Frustrating - but all browsers still seem to support them. I also availed myself of the opportunity to look at comments in your blog, and apparently Wordpress is parsing and placing markup either when posting or before display. So I'm working on a little Perl magick to place the correct HTML markeup into the comment - it a bit more complicated in my modified Blosxom scheme than I'd like, because I'll have to either do it at display time, or write another script to modify existing comments in their respective files. If you have any ideas on how to do this in straight CSS without mucking around in code, I'm all ears! Thanks for the clarification and Be well, Dave H.

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Dave Haxton's Weblog
Musings, Reflections, Rants and Comments from a Hoosier Heathen husband, father, grandfather, farmer and software engineer. There's really only one of me ...

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Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.

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