[thelist] Page check - Mac users, please

Gary McPherson lists at ingenyus.net
Wed Jan 28 15:41:45 CST 2004


Kath wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm working on a site for an artist, who uses a Mac - OSX 10.2.6  She 
> says that on this page - 
> http://www.symmetricalproductions.com/test/contact.html - the side 
> links and the vertical logo are covering the form and she can't use 
> the form.  Both the code and the style sheets validate, so I'm at a 
> loss where to go from here to get it to work.  It works on a PC in 
> both Mozilla and IE 5.5 and I've had several PC users test it.
>
> I think she has tried accessing it in both IE 5.2.2. and Safari.
>
> She said that this page -  
> http://www.symmetricalproductions.com/test/about.html
> does the same thing, but other pages are fine.
>
I was able to reproduce the error in Mac/IE 5.1 and the solution is very 
simple - remove the TD { text-align: center; } rule from main.css and 
contact.css and it will work just fine.

However, while digging through your stylesheets, I realised that you've 
set up a number of  files which essentially replicate each other, 
barring a few rules here and there. Within the test directory you 
provided, I examined three CSS files being called from four pages - this 
completely negates two of the major advantages of using stylesheets in 
the first place - maintainability and bandwidth. There's no benefit in 
using one sheet per page, because any sitewide change then has to be 
manually added to each CSS file - e.g., the simple fix I provided above 
requires two files to be edited and uploaded. It certainly took me a lot 
longer to find as I had to compare and rearrange buggy and non-buggy 
stylesheets (main.css/contact.css vs. index.css) - and this was only for 
one bug in one directory! Imagine trying to trying to track down 
multiple bugs across an entire site...

I noticed discrepancies already present between certain aspects such as 
font definitions and margins/padding between files and I'd strongly 
suggest you re-structure your files to use a shared stylesheet and 
simply create additional stylesheets if necessary for specific 
additions, although I saw no practical reason not to use a single file 
in your case.

Hope that helps,

Gary




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