Web Devout tidings

I have a growing list of e-mails I haven’t gotten to addressing yet. I apologize, but school and work have to be top priorities for me above this website, and they haven’t left me with much free time the last few weeks. I just wanted to let you guys know that your feedback hasn’t been forgotten and I hope to sit down and go through all of it as soon as I get a chunk of free time.

Within the feedback is a list of requested changes to the standards support information, as well as a recurring suggestion that I should only test browsers against the latest Candidate Recommendation or higher versions of the specifications rather than attempting to follow regressed drafts. I find myself agreeing with this suggestion and I plan to make the appropriate changes when I can. There is also a requested addition to the Opera Myths page and some things that I want to correct and expand in the Beware of XHTML article.

In the meantime, have fun with this weird but valid HTML page. It plays around with some little-known HTML features that have little or no support in today’s major web browsers.

I have added to the Visitor statistics page information about user agent (web browser) version usage on this site. User agents whose version identifiers weren’t successfully determined by the script aren’t listed, nor are versions that had only one user during the two-week period. Currently, the script doesn’t know exactly where to find the version information for many lesser-used user agents and instead tries to guess based on the user agent string. I plan to improve this over time.

Web Devout has received some big updates, including a touched-up look and several new articles. This is part of a lot of behind-the-scenes development work that has been going on for a month or so. There is a lot more to come, including some full HTML, CSS, and DOM references that are currently being written, but I wanted to get this update through the door in the meantime.

Here are some newly published articles:

About Web Devout

Some background information about Web Devout and its mission, with a timeline of events.

Common issues in web design

Solutions to commonly encountered problems people experience in web design. This article is expected to grow over time.

CSS hacks

CSS hacks can cause problems down the road, but if people are going to use them, they might as well know the options and weigh the potential consequences appropriately. This article describes many known CSS hacks, including Internet Explorer’s conditional comments and plenty of CSS selector hacks.

Escaping style and script data

Lots of people use HTML comments in their inline style and script data without really understanding what’s going on. This article explains the concepts of hiding style and script data from unsupporting browsers and maximizing document compatibility between HTML and XHTML.

URLs

Did you know that //www.w3.org is a valid URL? http:foo.html? This article explains the parsing structure of a URL with examples and additional notes.

For such an important attribute, it’s strange that the title attribute doesn’t have better support than it does in modern web browsers. title is used to provide secondary descriptive text about an element, often rendered as a tooltip on mouse hover. Unfortunately, all major web browsers have bugs with whitespace and/or character reference handling on this attribute, making the feature often unusable for multiple-line texts.

I have constructed a title attribute tooltip test suite which I would like all major browsers to pass. Currently, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Konqueror all fail at least one of the tests.

Internet Explorer allows line breaks in the tooltip value, but in the incorrect manner: it will display a line break if there are newlines or carriage returns in the source HTML. Newlines in the attribute source should be ignored and carriage returns should be converted to spaces, as in other CDATA attribues. The proper way to represent a line break in the attribute value is to use a newline character reference (
), which Internet Explorer also (correctly) converts into a line break. IE also handles tab characters in the source incorrectly.

Firefox has perhaps the most disruptive bug, which limits the tooltip text to a small number of characters on a single line. Progress on fixing that bug is blocked by another bug relating to the calculation of tooltip heights. Firefox also has several problems with newlines, carriage returns, and tabs in the source HTML and doesn’t convert newline character references into line breaks. This is overall the worst implementation of the title attribute of all major browsers.

Opera fares well in the whitespace handling, but it doesn’t convert newline character references into line breaks, making multi-line values impossible.

Safari makes line breaks on newlines and carriage returns in the source and uses tab characters for wide spacing instead of ignoring the newlines and converting carriage returns and tabs into spaces.

Konqueror generally does well, but it handles newline characters in the source like Internet Explorer does. I would say this is the best implementation so far, although still not perfect.

With the growing amount of web-based applications aiming to provide the functionality and feel of traditional desktop applications, proper tooltip display of the title attribute value is becoming increasingly important. Please petition the browser developers for attention to this issue.

Edit: I’ve corrected the link to the Firefox bug report. The previously linked report was specifically for Mozilla/SeaMonkey.

Chris Wilson, group program manager for the Internet Explorer platform team at Microsoft, recently referred in his blog to an e-mail conversation we had when my standards support resource was fairly new and undeveloped. He wrote in his blog post:

Most unfortunately, there are no more details on many of the problems David encountered, or test cases that my team can test against. When I contacted David a year or so ago, he couldn’t give me any further details, so I’m not even sure how we make progress against that site. Solid test cases we can access and bug reporting would help

Back when he first contacted me, I admit that my tables were quite vague and not nearly as useful as I believe they are today. I have since done a lot of work trying to make my wording in the support descriptions accurate and informative enough to easily fashion test cases from them. But I also recognize that having such test cases readily available would definitely help.

Therefore, I have developed a (non-exhaustive) set of tests for many of the most common IE7 CSS bugs described in my support tables. The mass test case is made to be easy to read and the issues are documented in the source.

Some CSS issues, such as with the cursor property, obviously can’t fit into this format very easily, so I left them out of the tests. But overall, I think this test case covers most of the important issues of immediate concern. Once Internet Explorer supports :before and :after (in some version after IE7), there will be many more features to test.

I will send this test suite to Chris Wilson and continue to participate through the Internet Explorer feedback system.