RIOT page

Kearns, Terry terry.kearns at dha.gov.au
Thu Nov 15 18:33:28 EST 2001


> Same exact problem here with IE 5.5...
> Ben
> 


I have IE5.5 here at work and it has no problem with the page - partially
because it shamelessly runs the JavaScript (in the popup) without blinking
on the HTML comments nested inside each other inside the <script> tags*. I'm
90% sure that this is what K is having issues with.


The page is blank for a while until everything loads. It may take a while on
a modem link since all the PHP nuke stuff is encased in nested tables. This
means the _ALL_ of the contents [of the tables] must be loaded before
_anything_ inside will display. Under some circumstances, some browsers (not
Netscape 4.x) will progressively render tables. The HTML 4.0 has specific
elements (namely COLGROUP and COL) which HTML authors should place near the
top inside their <TABLE> elements  so that the user agent can calculate the
number of columns without having to wait for all the rows to arrive.
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/tables.html#column-calc
Some browsers like IE get around this by potentially changing the amount of
columns to suit on the fly - after having already rendered some content.
Doesn't all that just make you want to go out and write a html user agent ;)
IE has much better post rendering DOM manipulation capabilities than
Netscape (or any other browser I've seen), probably due in no small part to
it having proprietary hooks into the operating system (what's a DOJ?).

* On the issue of parsing (re: K vs. IE), HTML user agents don't parse HTML
for validity. Neither do they parse the HTML for well-formedness because
well-formedness is not a property of HTML or even SGML. XHTML on the other
hand (An implementation of XML which has a vocabulary that remarkably
resembles HTML) _needs to be_ well-formed and OPTIONALLY valid. This is a
requirement that IE 5.5 _does_ satisfy. Although, if you want to do client
side XSLT, I recommend IE6 since it uses standards based XSLT (IE 5.5 is
only 'working draft').




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