Sunday, 29th June 2003
How's it looking your end?
If you're a less-than-serious web designer, as I am, you may not know how your site renders in other browsers that are inaccessible to you. BrowserCam will take screenshots for you of URLs you specify in a number of browsers, platforms and resolutions.
The catch (yes, there's a small catch) is that you have to pay some money, although it's only $1 per URL or $40 for a month's unlimited use. Or you can sign up for a free trial period of 8 hours, which is what I opted for. My first attempt reminded me to take out the width CSS property for my main content area, and my second set of screenshots showed me that something worrying happens between my site and IE4 (Here's the saved screenshot.) Does anyone know what's wrong? I know my stylesheet isn't exactly the cleanest CSS you've seen - I really should tidy that up, given that I wrote it when I was still very new to CSS.
Anyway, my trial period expires in just under 5 hours (about 00:30BST) so I'm not sure whether my screenshots are all going to vanish then. I suspect they might. Still, it's good while it lasts.
Comments
gah, a similar thing happens to my site with ie4. however, my stats tell me i've never had a visitor using anything less than ie5, so i'll not worry about it. [much.]
IE4 only does absolute positioning from the top left corner, in other words it doesn't understand right which you use. Your options for alternatives are endless, it's more a case of what breaks the least for browsers that old.
Until v recently we had IE4 at work. It was a pain, and just made my site look crappy, and many other people's just render in plain text. It made my phlog look weird, although - just about functional.
ALthough I was an IE 4 user I took the view that it was unreasonable for people to take the antidiluvian practices of my employer into consideration, so my 2p is that I shouldn't worry about IE4 ers as long as it more-or-less works.
Another point I read a while back and I'm afraid I forget where is that whilst it is extremely important for corporate (be it public, private or voluntary sector) sites to be pretty much W3C compliant or cross-browser functional (not quite the same thing!) for individuals doing it as a hobby, there should be, and is, much more leeway. (think of any other hobby and consider the allowance made for the amateur nature).
Is there something in the air tonight? I was just about to google (TM) for just such a tool but (as usual) got waylaid by more interesting things in my blogroll.
Thanks Cathy, will check it out now.
Hang on, 8 hours - I'd better wait until I've got some spare time so that I can fix any problems...
Oh and it's nearly 1 a.m. and BBT looks lovely viewed in IE6.
:-))
1. some of my screenshots are of broswers still booting up. you think they could fix that quite easily.
2. broswercam is also a very easy way to generate dozens of hits for your site. woo!
3. the time limit makes me nervous
i got a couple of 'not complete' screenshots, then noticed there's an option to pause for n seconds before taking the shot, so i set that to 10 seconds and all the screengrabs came out fine.
It took a while for all the screenshots to be loaded, but I just kept hitting their Refresh button until they all appeared.
Re: the IE4 probs - I guess that means I should be specifying all the widths in percentages, and then positioning them from the left?
It's on my To Do list...
pandering to sub-standard browsers impedes progress
ps. i cant see your blogroll (IE6)
Gah... screenshot?
Hopefully it's fixed now...
[crosses fingers]
Well like I said, pick your evil really. I tend to visit blogs using 740x340 and I used to have a slight overlap, but in your tidy up you've solved that, now if you fix your widths to suit that resolution then it'll leave lots of space when I visit at 1005x620. I'm just one visitor and already absolute positioning involves compromises. Float probably handles various resolutions more gracefully.
Of course all of these things are relative. Do you have many people visiting with IE4? Listen to Gert and forget about it, if it really upset anyone they'd have told you by now.
scoots off to check stats
About 0.5% of visitors this month have used IE4 - about the same number as use NS4 or below. I shouldn't worry about it really, it's just my perfectionist instincts kicking in :)
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