Comments on: MPR’s Select a Candidate

By: Scott

Scott — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:09:23 +0000

Ctrl C Ctrl V baby.

By: Grant

Grant — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 16:16:16 +0000

THAT you spell correctly…

By: Scott

Scott — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 12:24:18 +0000

@Mark: Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious……….So is your face.

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 21:12:03 +0000

@Brad: You shouldn’t use such big words for our friend. The biggest word he’s used in the comments on this post is “Alaska.” Also, I just checked MSNBC and I had no problem with the layouts for the first five stories I opened. I’d check your version of Firefox, as well as what add-ons and extensions you have active.

By: Brad

Brad — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 21:09:54 +0000

@Mark: Mostly it is MSNBC news stories. What happens usually is that the text, instead of wrapping like it normally would, continues going to the right and goes behind/underneath an advertisement or other graphic of some sort so that it can’t be seen.

@Scott: Impeccable logic, irrefutable reasoning, and superior argument: I have no reply or rebuttal but to simply yield the floor.

By: Grant

Grant — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 16:14:58 +0000

Excellent point, Scott.

Rebuttal?

By: Scott

Scott — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 16:06:58 +0000

Gay Sex, I just wanted to throw that out there.

By: Joe

Joe — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 15:07:04 +0000

I’ve always just used IE by default, and I actually only tried out Firefox a couple of weeks ago because when on the DePaul wireless network IE7 won’t open gmail for some reason, but Firefox will. I still use IE for everything else, mostly because I’m a creature of habit. I probably should have tried Firefox a long time ago because it seems like a lot of the features that IE7 integrated that I’ve come to love have been in use with Firefox for a long time.

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 13:16:58 +0000

@Brad: More or less, yes, that’s what I mean by “breaking” pages. What sites are you going to to read news stories? I don’t know why Firefox is screwing up the layout of pages you visit, unless the pages were not constructed properly in the first place. When I have to view pages using the IE rendering engine, it is usually because the page uses an ActiveX control (such as a couple of work-related websites I must visit).

Aside: ActiveX is only supported by IE on Windows. This “feature” was designed to allow web developers to access code and data on your computer that resides outside of your browser. That makes it less secure. To contrast that, Java was designed to live inside of a sandbox that lives inside of whatever application calls it, like a web browser.

With IE, my problem is that there were so many hacks required to make some layouts work properly in IE6 because of the lack of standards compliance as compared to the other major browsers. Microsoft wanted IE7 to be more standards compliant than previous versions. So they added a render mode switch, which changes the way IE7 renders a page depending on the code it sees on the page. This breaks pages that were hacked to work with previous versions of IE.

If IE never required the hacks in the first place, site designers would not have had to hack their pages to work with the most dominant browser world-wide. IE7 would not have required a render mode switch, and would not have broken pages because they were not hacked to work with previous versions of IE.

Does that make sense?

By: Brad

Brad — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 12:31:51 +0000

This is all academic anyway…a spell-check certainly would not have told him that my first name has an “e” in it, and it may or may not have contained “horny,” which is slang and also means “consisting of a horn or a hornlike substance; corneous.” We shouldn’t be so reliant on spell-check.

@Mark: Even though I mostly use Firefox, I find that more often it is Firefox that alters or screws up the layout of webpages for me. Sometimes I have to temporarily switch to IE to be able to see something properly. Most often it is text that is not laid out properly in news stories. Is that what you mean by “breaking” web pages, and if not, is there a way to avoid whatever that is?