Wednesday, June 23

Two wrongs don't make a compliant browser

Recondite readers who use standards-compliant browsers rather than, say, IE, may notice that this blog's permalinks and comment tags (at the bottom of every post) don't do the right thing when you click on them. Rather than seeing a formatted page of HTML, you see a page of text containing, well, HTML. This is because, as Eric Rescorla points out, this blog's web server offers those pages as Content-Type: text/plain rather than text/html. Don't blame your faithful correspondent.


To format this blog, I use Blogger. For the webserver, my ISP, Charter provides. Blogger writes permalink (and comment) pages as files named as it chooses, without an extension. Charter runs Apache, apparently configured to serve extension-less files (as opposed to files with the extension .html) as text/plain. The server is also apparently configured to ignore .htaccess files in my directory as well (not that this is unreasonable), so I can't change anything. So the wrong thing happens, unless of course, your browser does the wrong thing itself. Get it?


So run IE. Or don't. But don't blame me.


Update 6/24: I just got a response from Blogger technical support with a suggested fix for my configuration. We'll see this works. If it does, perhaps we should title this post Oh, that's different! Nevermind....

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Recondite readers who use standards-compliant browsers rather than, say, IE..."

Gee, I thought if there was one thing I learned in the last six-or-so years, it was that IE *is* the standard when it comes to browsers (ok, de facto) and therefore a "standards-compliant" browser would be bug-for-bug (uh, I mean feature-for-feature) compatible with IE.

But I can see why you might want to take those brave "non-conforming" browsers into account. After all, I'll bet a sizeable percentage of your current readership (maybe even exceeding 50% on some days, ha ha) use something other than IE.

Frank J.
(IE luser--it pays the bills, or used to anyway)

AMS said...

Recondite's browser share (courtesy of Site Meter) has IE at about 54%. Users of IE are unlikely to have any emotional committment to it whereas non-users have a major emotional stake in proving that they're correct. [Wait! Did I just equate Mozilla with John Kerry?]

46% is pretty significant, so naturally I pander to the anti-IE crowd. The IE users won't take offense, so it's all upside. Recondite's target readership is geekdom, so even with a broader regular readership than the current eight or-so (Site Meter again) the demographics should always skew more towards IE hatred than the population at large.

You may be sure, however, when Recondite makes the big time I'll forget about all the little people.

-Allan