New home page

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Stephan Soller" <stephan.soller at helionweb.de> wrote in message 
news:i8kmuc$15t$1 at digitalmars.com...
> On 07.10.2010 14:56, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> "Stephan Soller"<stephan.soller at helionweb.de>  wrote in message
>> news:i8k8k9$230n$1 at digitalmars.com...
>>>
>>> [1]: http://arkanis.de/
>>>
>>
>> Not to complain, just FYI, this is what that page looks like for me:
>>
>> http://www.semitwist.com/download/arkanis1.png
>> http://www.semitwist.com/download/arkanis2.png
>> http://www.semitwist.com/download/arkanis3.png
>>
>> Interestingly, if I turn JS on, than it'll look a lot better *until* it
>> finishes loading, at which point it goes back to looking just like those
>> screenshots.
>>
>
> Thanks for the screenshots. May I ask which version of Firefox (if I see 
> that correctly) your're using

v2.0.0.20

Which actually kinda surprises me because I could have sworn I was on a much 
later version of the 2.x line. I *know* there was a period where it kept 
updating itself seemingly all the time (which got quite irritating when I 
just wanted to go to a particular URL). But I guess that must have been the 
only 2.x version I was able to find after giving up on FF3. And IIRC, the 
built-in update won't let me update to anything less than FF3.

And yea, I know FF2 is really old, but I tried 3.0 and 3.5 and the JS was 
only marginally faster, it doesn't seem to fix any of the rendering bugs 
I've come across in FF2 (I have 3.5 on my Linux box, just for site testing), 
and every other change they made I hated and downloaded extentions to 
undo...until I realized there was no extention to un-unify the unified 
forward/back buttons (which I had thought was a good idea when IE7 came 
out -- until I actually used IE7), and realized the only winestripe-like 
things for FF3 weren't nearly as good as the real winestripe. So I figured 
"Why bog it down with even *more* addons just to turn it into a half-baked 
FF2, when I can just use the real FF2?" YouTube bitches to me about it, but 
well, fuck YouTube; never liked having over-compressed videos pre-embedded 
into a web-based player anyway.

> The JS stuff is quite interesting since the page actually does not use JS 
> at all. The only situation where JS should actually be involved is for IE 
> (because you need to introduce unknown elements to IE before using them). 
> I'm not aware that any version of Firefox interprets IE conditional 
> comments (although there was talk about it once) so this behavior is 
> somewhat concerning.
>

Don't worry. Turns out it was just a quirk caused by one of the million 
add-ons I have installed to make the web bearable. When I disabled all of 
them, the behavior and results with JS on were exactly the same as with JS 
off.

> However this page uses quite new and still in progress browser stuff 
> (HTML5, CSS3) so it'll give old browsers a very hard time. It's more like 
> a showcase for the new stuff.

I see, that explains it. Personally, I'll have no interest in CSS3 unless MS 
decides to backport IE9 to XP. I hate Win7 and refuse to let XP die 
(Granted, Win7's not quite as bad as Vista, but it's close).

> Take a look at [this screenshot][1] to see how it's supposed to look like. 
> It was made with font antialiasing on a standard TFT but the text might 
> look a bit awkward on CRTs or TFTs with a different subpixel layout 
> (usually the OS takes care of that when rendering text). There's also the 
> [design prototype][2] which does not use the "new" techniques. It should 
> work on your browser (at least most stuff, I never IEified it nor did 
> extensive cross browser testing since it's only a prototype).
>
> [1]: http://arkanis.de/projects/arkanis-development-v3/ubuntu.png
> [2]: http://arkanis.de/weblog/2008-05-25-modern-ambience-design-prototype/
>
> And finally there's also the [old design][3] which works in IE 5.5, 6 and 
> 7 (ditched 4, 5, and 5.01 and I'm not sure about 8). It took about two 
> weeks to make it work in IE 5.5 and 6 if I remember correctly.
>
> [3]: http://arkanis.de/projects/arkanis-development-v2/photo-ambience/
>

Ahh. Yea, all of those do look better :) Actually, even I've ditched IE6 
(it's *that* old). 'Course, part of that is because having multiple versions 
of IE installed is a PITA - if even possible at all. In fact, that's why I 
haven't upgraded to IE8 - I'd lose the ability to test on IE7 which I think 
is still fairly common.