[Gimp-web] Re: rendering problems

[Raphaël Quinet]

On Fri, 12 Sep 2003 21:57:14 +0200, "Branko Collin" <collin@xs4all.nl> wrote:
> On 8 Sep 2003, at 19:52, Raphaël Quinet wrote:
> > Well, that's a problem.  I explicitely used pixels instead of ems for
> > the default width (which is changed by the script anyway) because some
> > CSS compatibility chart told me that I should avoid ems as a unit
> > because it was causing problems in some browsers (I don't remember
> > which ones, though).  So I decided to use pixels everywhere in order
> > to be as portable as possible.
> 
> IIRC, according to Eric Meyer's CSS compatibility chart, ems cause 
> huge troubles in IE 3.x for Windows, where they are interpreted as 
> pixels. Incidentally, I nicked the idea of using ems from Eric 
> Meyer's stylesheets for http://devedge.netscape.com, so either I am 
> misremembering that it was his compatibility chart, or he does not 
> care anymore about IE 3, or he has found a work-around.

I think that the percentage of IE 3 users is extremely low.  Much
lower than NS 4 and other old browsers.  I just had a quick look at
the logs of www.gimp.org for the last 7 days and I saw only 6 visitors
using IE 3 (none today and yesterday).  Compare this to more than 1500
users of NS 4 over the same period.

Anyway, the style sheet is hidden from IE 3 as well as NS 4, so both
browsers would see the page with the menu at the top instead of having
it on the side.  So we do not have to worry about the width of the
menu for IE 3.  But I think that some other browsers (maybe iCab?) may
be affected.

> I feel width needs to be set. I don't understand why the design works 
> in some browsers without setting the width for the menu div. My 
> understanding of the specs is that if you don't set the width of a 
> DIV, it should stretch to the width of it's containing block. In our 
> case, the containing block is (as wide as) the BODY element.

There is another reason why I would like to adjust the size of the
menu in the script instead of relying only on the width (in ems or
pixels) set by the stylesheet: I would like to be able to use
different versions of the menu on different pages.  This is already
the case for the admin pages, but even without going as far as that, I
would like to be able to expand some sub-sections of the menu on some
pages.  This means that the width of the menu may change depending on
what is shown on some pages.  So setting a width as an absolute number
of ems may not be a good solution.

> Have you implemented this change? My demo works (somewhat--the height 
> of the menu box is still a problem) in IE 5.1 for Mac OS Classic, but 
> not so mmmaybe.gimp.org.

I had implemented some of the changes, but recently drc removed the
automatic adjustment of the width in the script.  This means that the
width of the menu would be incorrect if the text would change.

Anyway, it seems to be difficult to get a correct CSS-based layout
that works in all browsers.  I would like to be able to get a working
site as soon as possible, so I will remove all the code that I added
and switch back to tables for the layout.  This should solve most of
the problems for the moment, even if this is not as elegant as using
CSS.  See also: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=121299

-Raphaël