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A webmasters rant about Internet Explorer
8.0
Microsoft has recently released the latest
version of Internet Explorer - version 8.0. This has resulted in
several problems with the way that it displays pages in the Pageant
website. There is now a 'kink' in the menu bar at the top of each
page, the float down menus now overlap the bottom of their boxes and
some other parts of the pages have more space around them than they
should. If this has affected you, please be
patient while we sort things out. The problem might also affect
other websites, so you might like to consider changing to a
different browser, such as Firefox, or reverting to IE7. If you have not yet upgraded to
IE8, then please be warned that you will see all the odd things
mentioned above.
Background
Web pages are written using Hypertext Mark-up
Language (HTML). HTML consists of the text to be displayed, together
with 'tags' which specify how it is displayed. You can see the HTML
code for this page by clicking the right mouse button, and selecting
'view page source'. In the early days, although there was a
'standard' for HTML, browser designers largely ignored it and
introduced new tags to add new features to their browsers. Microsoft
was particularly active in adding new tags. This resulted in several
different versions of HTML, and web designers tried to keep pace by
writing code which would work with any browser. The committee which
looked after the 'standard', known as W3C, has been trying to bring
order to the chaos, and browser designers have slowly been coming
into line. The latest version of the 'standard' is HTML 4.0.
When I first started building this website, I
used Internet Explorer 5.0. This supported numerous tags which no
longer form part of the standard. Successive version of Internet
Explorer - 6.0 and 7.0 - moved closer to the 'standard', but were
also backward compatible, so websites like ours with old coding
(known in the trade as 'deprecated') still continued to function as
they always had done.
Browsers are informed which version of HTML
is used in the web page by a 'doctype' declaration which forms the
first line of code. Although the Pageant website largely conform to
HTML 4.0, there is still some deprecated coding. We therefore used a
declaration: <!doctype HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0
Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"> The
words 'Transitional' and 'loose' indicate that deprecated code
should still be implemented. This worked fine with IE7 and most
other browsers, but with IE8, some of the backward compatibility has
been lost, resulting in the odd appearance of our pages.
The Solutions
There are several ways of tackling the IE8
problem:
Rebuild the website conforming exactly to
HTML 4.0 standards
This isn't going to happen - too much hard work!
Edit the code in all pages to restore a
better appearance in IE8
Only a partial solution, as pages will still look different to their
appearance in other browsers.
Remove or change the doctype declaration
on all pages
If a browser isn't told which version of HTML is used, it will
default to full compatibility with deprecated code. This is the best
solution, but we need to check that it doesn't produce fresh
problems in IE or other browsers. This will take a little time, so
meanwhile users of IE8 will have to put up with the odd effects or
change to a different browser.
The entire Pageant website has been modified
as described in option 3 above. All pages should now appear as
designed in all the common browsers.
Browsers
To get avoid the IE8 problems, you might like
to try another browser, or revert to using IE7.
Internet Explorer 7.0
Internet Explorer 7.0 is still available for
download. If you want to revert to IE7, I suggest you do this soon,
as Microsoft quickly removes old software. (Download
IE7)
Firefox
I personally have used Firefox as my main
browser for many years, and fully recommend it. Try it once and you
will keep on using it. Firefox is open source, with a huge army of
volunteers constantly making improvements and sorting out bugs.
There are a large number of add-ons, menu bars and widgets for it.
Firefox is recommended by IT professionals as being less prone to
security problems than IE - particularly for important things like
online banking. (Download
Firefox)
Safari
Safari is an Apple product, so will be
familiar to Mac users, but PC versions have been available for a
while. It has a very pretty look, and functionality similar to
Firefox. (Download
Safari)
Chrome
Chrome is a relatively new Google browser. It
has a different, reduced, user interface to other browsers, and some
might be put off by the lack of menubars and toolbars. (Download
Chrome)
Opera
The Opera browser is promoted for its speed
and convenience, but the most recent versions do not seem to be
fully backward compatible. Opera has a very small user base - less
than 1%. I don't recommend Opera as it has some problems with the
way it displays Pageant pages - but not as bad as IE8. (Download
Opera)
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