Two recent developments have created trouble in my surfing life: Upgrading to Mac OS X, and reading blogs. Both events are good (well, my feelings on the X GUI are truly mixed), too good, actually. Reading blogs (Jill's, for example) make me consume a lot more text on the Web than I used to. And a dedicated OSX browser, OmniWeb, uses the powerful Quartz engine in OS X to make the text pleasant to read. Jakob would approve.
OmniWeb is just not the perfect browser. It is slow. Slower than IE, much slower than Opera. I miss some of the shortcuts in IE, but the ad filter is great.
The big problem with OmniWeb is the poor CSS support. StyleSheets has been a W3C recommendation since 1996, and still, only IE 5, Opera 5 and miserable Netscape 6 get it somewhat right. The page you are reading right now used to be table-free. Not any more. Adding the left column forces me to use tables. CSS positioning not only works differently in Opera, Netscape 6 and IE, it is neglected by OmniWeb and crashes Netscape 4.
So, instead of using up-to-date XHTML in this page, I am back to tables-and-workarounds 1998 style HTML. A 5-column table.
A few example pages to check CSS and your browser: David Baron has written some pages that check CSS selectors. Eric A. Meyer demos some really old features of CSS that still look new and amazing. The blog A Jaundiced Eye uses CSS to great effect. Webmonkey has always used CSS cleverly, and still does, although the current front page is not as cool as the 1997 one with the toolbar. And they know browser-detection and workarounds, so the page looks good in any old browser.
Who said the Web is developing so fast?
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