[thelist] Opera/CSS/Quark Xpress

[Timothy J. Luoma]

jv wrote:

 > Anyway, one problem that I'm trying to figure out has to do with
 > Opera's rendering of CSS. My test pages render perfect in IE6, decent
 > in NN4.XX, perfect in Mozilla1.01,

It's not perfect in Moz 1.1 here.  The copyright line cuts through the
bottom of the text.

http://tntluoma.com/temp/ebigman-moz.1.1.jpg

 > but has the most trouble with Opera6. The most glaring problem I'm
 > having is that a graphic in the left hand top of
 > http://www.ebigman.com doesn't show up but a graphic to the left does
 > show up. Any idea of what might cause this?

Whenever you run into a problem with Opera not displaying an image:

1) right click image
2) choose copy image address
3) press F8 to jump to address bar or F2 for 'go to' panel
4) paste copy image address
5) see if Opera loads image then

For some reason, Opera is fussy about GIF formatting that most other
browsers let slide.  I opened your image in IrfanView and saved it
again, and it now works in Opera.

http://tntluoma.com/temp/Text4820.gif
http://tntluoma.com/temp/Text4820_original.gif

Someone smarter than me will have to tell you why this is, but I have
reason to believe that this particular problem (at least for this
particular image) might be fixed in Opera7.


 > Are all the other browsers parsing CSS wrong?

None of the browsers should be parsing the CSS at all, actually.

The external CSS file has

<style type="text/css">
<!--

  -->
</style>

wrapped around the styles.  This is the most clearly wrong thing I've
seen in awhile.

That format would be correct for styles within an HTML document, but not
for an external file where there are no HTML tags allowed.


If I can also make a comment about Quark: the CSS that is created by
Quark is, like almost all current auto-generated CSS, crap.  This is
nothing against you or your design, it's just the overly specific way
that these programs make CSS.... for example:

	font-family:'Arial','Helvetica','sans-serif';

is defined 11 times.

	 text-decoration:none;

9 times

	color:#666666;

7 times.

And of course everything is pixels.

There is an external CSS file and a whole host of internal CSS in the HEAD.

It takes advantage of just about 0 of what CSS has to offer.

And the document is still a mess of tables.

It makes me wonder why they added CSS support, except to be able to say
"Now with CSS support!" on the marketing materials.

The document that it creates works in IE, and probably backwards
compatible enough to look ok in NN4, but that's about it.  The page
still gets stuck up in the top left corner of the screen, and
horizontally scrolls at 800x600.

Blech.  I'll be sticking to hand-coding, thanks :-)


That said, the visual design itself is good, and I bet you could do it
in almost pure CSS  and have a much more flexible document.  But not
with an automatic program.

TjL

--
'Confessions of a browser sniffer' today on Beyond30
OperaBlog: Beyond30                      http://tntluoma.com/beyond30
30 Days to becoming an Opera Lover     http://www.tntluoma.com/switch
Opera Panels / Sidebars                  http://tntluoma.com/sidebars