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I don't know if there is any easy answer to this, but can anyone give me any idea why my site is totally crapping out in IE8? Is there something relatively easy that I can address to make it not become a complete mess?
Or at least any area to start investigating where similar problems tend to crop up in IE8?
Thanks!
http://firewalkcreative.com/2012/
Start by viewing and fixing validation errors. The most critical errors are often structural ones, like an unclosed tag. While it's good practice to fix non-structural errors (such as the one you mentioned in your other post), browsers are forgiving if you get the basic structure right.
The bigger culprit (but don't neglect fixing validation errors) is that you are using HTML 5 tags which IE8 knows nothing about like section and header. Thus, the CSS styles aren't applied to those tags. Modernizr will easily fix this.
I noticed it was using html5, then got a timeout upon refresh. Without being able to access the site I can't tell you exactly, but html5 and ie8 are going to cause problems (most of the time) unless you use a workaround like a .js plugin.
I frequently use Modernizr
i have some ASP.NET pages.
pages does not appear in FireFox4 same IE9.
i want to find my HTML or CSS Design problems.
i hared that this is a tool for finding problems.
but i can't use it because my ASP.NET Page contains some usercontrols.
I am looking for a way to find my design problems(tool , tip , etc).
another note is i am using jQuery UI plugins in my site.
One approach would be to use Chrome Developer Tools / Firebug / IE 8 Developer Tools to take a peek at the HTML being generated to look for any glaring errors. It can also help catch some jQuery issue that might be causing you grief.
Outside of that, HTML Tidy is a nice program that could help diagnose some stuff for you as well.
One thing to realize is that every browser renders a page slightly different, despite the attempts to render them in a "universal" manner. If you're really looking for the small differences, you can check out the SuperPreview tool that comes with Microsoft Expression Web
Is there any problem with using jquery layout plugin (there are several) to layout a page as opposed to using CSS and fixing browser compatibility issues myself?
Another problem is that the page has to fully load and download the javascript, then get rendered. This will slow down the page significantly.
The most obvious problem is that any visitor to the page using a browser with JavaScript turned off will not get the layout. If you're willing to turn away from those people, that may not be a blocking factor for you.
There can also be performance issues, delays on resizing the browser window, that sort of thing.
I'm not saying don't do it; if it's appropriate for your target audience. But look to see if you can avoid it or at least gracefully degrade if JavaScript isn't enabled. (Turn off JavaScript and come here to SO, for instance; still very usable in a read-only way.)
If doing this, continue to be sure to mark up your content in the main page (rather than only adding it dynamically) and use the most semantic markup you can, to improve your search-ability.
When your layout doesn't behave for whatever reason (and that will happen), will you be able to understand the code behind the JQuery plugin to fix it?
Invest in yourself and learn CSS properly, it's not hard, it doesn't take long and it will equip you for the future, don't just rely on plugins. Now I'm not saying never use a plug-in, but this to me seems inappropriate use
I tend to take the academic approach all too often and adhere to strict principles in my development when the reality is that I could have finished the project sooner had I been a little less cautious. I'm looking to find the right amount of practicality.
I want to take the "Zen" approach to designing a site which (in my words) says "Use HTML strictly for content structure, and let the CSS magic do the rest". How practical is this in reality? One of the issues I run into is that I want to develop (make functional) the site first, then come back in and design it later. I know structure-wise how I want the site to flow, but I haven't even begun playing with the CSS layout, graphics, or any of the other designy stuff. What is the right approach here?
It's absolutely practical, and provides infinite benefit. In fact it's exactly what CSS and the separation of content and layout is designed for.
The right approach given the above, is to let different teams get on with the different tasks at hand. That requires (perhaps) an initial graphic design which can be quite rough, and a documented and collaboratively agreed set of naming conventions for things like "#viewport", ".user" etc..
The markup team will usually be backend driven and will usually lead the design team slightly, but they should and must remain flexible enough to change markup where required, or put that in the control of the designers.
This last is just my $.02, but where one person is both roles, again I think you lead yourself with the markup/backend first and then iteratively go to a design stage, then markup, then design, as required.
The approach you want to follow is the right one. Just two things:
If you use a validator for css or html, don't pretend that all your html or css pass the test. Obviously the ideal goal is that everything validates, but at a first stage I think is better not spend a lot of time in validation issues. And remember that no one validator is perfect, and the good way to use it at the beginning is to guide you in the right direction and avoid big mistakes (i.e. put the same id twice in one page, or put block elements inside inline ones...). Then, when the application is at a good stage, you can make your css and html perfect and valid.
Don't design the interface at the end. I think that the interface of the application can give you good directions in how develop your back-end too. So, at your place, I would design the interface first, with html and css, and then I'd start to add functionality to it.
(Sorry for my english, spelling corrections are welcome.)
It can be very practical and you will be suprised how clean your HTML looks. I like using a CSS reset file to help get started, I personally like the YUI reset. Another Zen item to consider is the use of unobtrusive JavaScript. This further separates the different layers of your code. JavaScript libraries, like jquery, prototype and dojo can help with this.
It can be done, and I think your site (and your web design skills, not least) will be much better for it. But it also has a certain learning curve. It requires a more thorough understanding of the XHTML/CSS specs than many people have.
Making sure your HTML can be validated is just the beginning.
Oh, and make sure all browsers run in strict mode when rendering the page.
Of course, you will require workarounds for IE support, but that can be done with several methods.
First, IE supports conditional comments, allowing you to include special CSS stylesheets just to fix IE bugs, which should get you most of the way, without affecting your compliant standard-version of the page.
For some things, you may need a bit of javascript as well, but it shouldn't be necessary for most common functionality.
There are reasons explained in http://www.webdevout.net/articles/beware-of-xhtml against using XHTML today. To summarize, XHTML is not supported unless you serve it as such and if you target older browsers (any IE version is old considering most of its features are implemented when they were still immature and not changed substantially for a while) you have no choice but serve it as HTML.
Unless you don't require features that being XML provides (like SVG, MathML), stick with HTML. You won't have any serious advantage over HTML, be any more semantic, have better CSS support (even less). But you get wider compatibility and your layout will be more predictable (for example table cells can inherit from first cell in the row in HTML, no such thing in XML, not even sure XHTML has any exceptions somewhere).
Validators won't help writing XHTML any more than HTML. Even annoy, if you use a strict one, leaving you wondering what is all the fuss about / in the br tag if you lie and say it is HTML. (Firefox view source shows it bright red if you serve XHTML as HTML). I am sure you can find more examples.
Sure, you can do that, but be prepared that it WILL NOT render under IE. On a recent web project, the majority of our front-end defects were fixing stuff in IE that already worked fine in Firefox. Maybe this will change in IE8, but I doubt it. In some cases we even had to write some javascript that would be executed on IE only to work around things that couldn't be done with just CSS.
while it sounds good in theory you cant create the layout for a site 100% with css. You still need to use some markup so that you have something to apply the css to. That said, you can come fairly close to ideal using this method. I'm constantly amazed at how little markup a true css guru actually requires.
closer the "zen" approach that you are really looking for is xslt. it works by your app generating xml data and then the xslt transforms that xml into html/css. this requires learning xslt and adds another layer of complication to the process of generating a page, but adds the separation you are looking for. In an ideal world the theory is that a programmer only has to worry about generating xml data and then a designer can generate the visuals using that data, however it rarely works that way as xslt is more technical than most designers can handle. Most of the time the programmer ends up generating the xslt which somewhat defeats the purpose.
One approach that works for me is to structure the HTML first, then add some minimal CSS in a tag in the same file (just enough to create the right layout etc). Then once you're happy with the structure, you can pull the CSS out into separate files and / or completely rework the CSS. This strikes the right balance for me - it's still a lightweight process, but it avoids the potential headache of finding and replacing inline CSS.
In theoria yes, in practice, browser differences may force you to add a bit of javascript to deal with the differences.
Now... Benefits of something is different from practicality of doing it. Are you guys forgetting IE or even the pain-in-the-whatever client who wants the impossible done?
I am tempted to say you have to make some exception to the strict DTD that you are using to make it work in a reasonable set of browsers and please your stakeholder for the website/web-app.
I am a standards freak and no one would be more happy than me if it was possible to build a website that doesn't violate even 1 DTD rule. But after 4 years, I just haven't been able to do it for practical purposes.
Sure if I am the one coming up with the requirements for the website I am going to develop, it might be possible, but I have to bend the business rules to accommodate that. Believe me, that's the only way it is possible.
I've noticed a lot of sites, SO included, use XHTML as their mark-up language and then fail to adhere to the spec. Just browsing the source for SO there are missing closing tags for paragraphs, invalid elements, etc.
So should tools (and developers) use the XHTML doctype if they are going to produce invalid mark up? And should browsers be more firm in their acceptance of poor mark-up?
And before anyone shouts hypocrite, my blog has one piece of invalid mark-up involving the captha (or it did the last time I checked) which involves styling the noscript tag.
There are many reasons to use valid markup. My favorite is that it allows you to use validation as a form of regression testing, preventing the markup equivalent of "delta rot" from leading to real rendering problems once the errors reach some critical mass. And really, it's just plain sloppy to allow "lazy" errors like typos and mis-nested/unclosed tags to accumulate. Valid markup is one way to identify passionate programmers.
There's also the issue of debugging: valid markup also gives you a stable baseline from which to work on the inevitable cross-browser compatibility woes. No web developer who values his time should begin debugging browser compatibility problems without first ensuring that the markup is at least syntactically valid—and any other invalid markup should have a good reason for being there.
(Incidentally, stackoverflow.com fails both these tests, and suggestions to fix the problems were declined.)
All of that said, to answer your specific question, it's probably not worthwhile to use one of the XHTML doctypes unless you plan to produce valid (or at least well-formed) markup. XHTML's primary advantages are derived from the fact that XHTML is XML, allowing it to be processed and transformed by tools and technologies that work with XML. If you don't plan to make your XHTML well-formed XML, then there's little point in choosing that doctype. The latest HTML 4 spec will probably do everything you need, and it's much more forgiving.
We should always try to make it validate according to standards. We'll be sure that the website will display and work fine on current browsers AND future browsers.
I don't think that, if you specify a doctype, there is any reason not to adhere to this doctype.
Using XHTML makes automated error detection easy, every change can be automatically checked for invalid markup. This prevents errors, especially when using automatically generated content. It is really easy for a web developer using a templating engine (JSP, ASP.NET StringTemplate, etcetera) to copy/paste one closing tag too little or too many. When this is your only error, it can be detected and fixed immediately. I once worked for a site that had 165 validation errors per page, of which 2 or 3 were actual bugs. These were hard to find in the clutter of other errors. Automatic validation would have prevented these errors at the source.
Needless to say, choosing a standard and sticking to it can never benefit interoperability with other systems (screen scrapers, screen readers, search engines) and I have never come across a situation where a valid semantic XHTML with CSS solution wasn't possible for all major browsers.
Obviously, when working with complex systems, it's not always possible to stick to your doctype, but this is mostly a result of improper communication between the different teams developing different parts of these systems, or, most likely, legacy systems. In the last case it's probably better to isolate these cases and change your doctype accordingly.
It's good to be pragmatic and not adhere to XHTML just because someone said so, regardless of costs, but with current knowledge about CSS and browsers, testing and validation tools, most of the time the benefits are much greater than the costs.
You can say that I have an OCD on XHTML validity. I find that most of the problems with the code not being valid comes from programmers not knowing the difference between HTML and XHTML. I've been writing 100% valid XHTML and CSS or a while now and have never had any major rendering problems with other browsers. If you keep everything valid, and don't try anything too exotic css wise, you will save yourself a ton of time in fixes.
I wouldn't use XHTML at all just to save myself the philosophical stress. It's not like any browsers are treating it like XHTML anyway.
Browsers will reject poor mark-up if the page is sent as application/xhtml+xml, but they rarely are. This is fine.
I would be more concerned about things like inline use of CSS and JavaScript with Stack Overflow, just because they make maintenance harder.
Though I believe in striving for valid XHTML and CSS, it's often hard to do for a number of reasons.
First, some of the content could be loaded via AJAX. Sometimes, fragments are not properly inserted into the existing DOM.
The HTML that you are viewing may not have all been produced in the same document. For example, the page could be made of up components, or templates, and then thrown together right before the browser renders it. This isn't an excuse, but you can't assume that the HTML you're seeing was hand coded all at once.
What if some of the code generated by Markdown is invalid? You can't blame Stack Overflow for not producing valid code.
Lastly, the purpose of the DOCTYPE is not to simply say "Hey, I'm using valid code" but it's also to give the browser a heads up what you're trying to do so that it can at least come close to correctly parsing that information.
I don't think that most developers specify a DOCTYPE and then explicitly fail to adhere to it.
while I agree with the sentiment of "if it renders fine then don't worry about it" statement, however it's good for follow a standard, even though it may not be fully supported right now. you can still use Table for layout, but it's not good for a reason.
No, you should not use XHTML if you can't guarantee well-formedness, and in practice you can't guarantee it if you don't use XML serializer to generate markup. Read about producing XML.
Well-formedness is the thing that differentiates XHTML from HTML. XHTML with "just one" markup error ceases to be XHTML. It has to be perfect every time.
If "XHTML" site appears to work with some errors, it's because browsers ignore the DOCTYPE and interpret page as HTML.
See XHTML proxy that forces interpretation of pages as XHTML. Most of the time they fail miserably. This is one of the reason why future of XHTML is uncertain and why development of HTML has been resumed.
It depends. I had that issue with my blog where a YouTube video caused invalid XHTML, but it rendered fine. On the other hand, I have a "Valid XHTML" link, and a combination of a "Valid XHTML" claim and invalid XHTML is not professional.
As SO does not claim to be valid, I think it's acceptable, but personally if I were Jeff i would be bothered and try to fix it even if it looks good in modern browsers, but some people rather just move on and actually get things done instead of fixing non-existent bugs.
So long as it works in IE, FF, Safari, (insert other browser here) you should be okay. Validation isn't as important as having it render correctly in multiple browsers. Just because it is valid, doesn't mean it'll work in IE properly, for instance.
Run Google Analytics or similar on your site and see what kind of browsers your users are using and then judge which browsers you need to support the most and worry about the less important ones when you have the spare time to do so.
I say, if it renders OK, then it doesn't matter if it's pixel perfect.
It takes a while to get a site up and running the way you want it, going back and making changes is going to change the way the page renders slightly, then you have to fix those problems.
Now, I'm not saying you should built sloppy web pages, but I see no reason to fix what ain't broke. Browsers aren't going to drop support for error correction anytime in the near future.
I don't understand why everyone get caught up trying to make their websites fit the standard when some browsers sill have problems properly rendering standard code. I've been in web design for something like 10 years and I stopped double codding (read: hacking css), and changing stupid stuff just so I could put a button on my site.
I believe that using a < div> will cause you to be invalid regardless, and it get a bit harder to do any major JavaScript/AJAX without it.
There are so many standards and they are so badly "enforced" or supported that I don't think it matters. Don't get me wrong, I think there should be standards but because they are not enforced, nobody follows them and it's a massive downward spiral.
For 99.999% of the sites out there, it really won't matter. The only time I've had it matter, I ran the HTML input through HTMLTidy to XHTML-ize it, and then ran my processing on it.
Pretty much, it's the old programmer's axiom: trust no input.