Our ReVolt Pub

Edit: I've split the first 3 posts from the What Do You Use For Web Development? topic.

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Well, just to say that I have totally updated my website internals and uploaded it yesterday.

As I didn't find the perfect WYSIWYG tool for my need I have finally decided to go for manual HTML editing, with the help of PHP to automate some tasks (and allow file inclusion). So far I'm pretty happy with that, and it was the opportunity to learn a bit of PHP. I just hope it'll be convenient to keep it up to date and to add new content.

To answer my own question, here is the list of tools I used for this task:

• Notepad++, with the following plugins: HTML Tag, Light Explorer, Notepad#, Snippets.
• The Firebug extension for Firefox, for quick and live CSS edit.
• FileZilla to FTP upload the files.
• The W3C on-line validators.

To be exhaustive, I also used Gimp, XnView and Inkscape for the image.
And foobar2000 to listen to good music...

For now there is not much apparent difference on my website except that there's a brand new RSS feed you can use to stay tuned about my tools releases. Also, the size and release date of each downloadable file is now automatically displayed, so it'll make the job a lot simpler for me each time I release a new version.

The structure of the site have been modified so most links have changed, but the old ones should be properly redirected (except for the anchors as it's not possible AFAIK). Old files/links should still be available, at least for a while. Links in the readme files have not been updated yet.

Well, that's it. If you notice any glitch please let me know.

For now there is not much apparent difference on my website except...

Except that all browsers that do not support HTML5 and CSS3 won't display your page properly, jigebren. I understand your desire to use current tech as a developer but being an early adopter as a webmaster has it's risks.

I submitted your site to a browser screenshot test:
http://browsershots.org/http://jigebren.free.fr/

The screenshot results are not perfect, their attempts to scroll pages and combine the shots often make non-scrolling menu bars repeat themselves. Also, the Firefox 2.0 combined shot artificially snips out the content of your page, creating an entirely false image -- I know this because my favorite browser (K-Meleon 1.5.4) uses the same Gecko 1.8.1 as Firefox 2 and SeaMonkey 1.1 (I see what that SeaMonkey sees in those results). I will add that IE9, for which Vista is a minimum requirement, is the first IE to enable HTML5.

The "aside" tag (id="panel") seems to be your biggest problem, with your panel creating a stripe that blocks the center of the page in many instances.
Since I choose to use old tech I frequently fix pages like yours by removing or changing things with customized css code in the browser's "userContent.css", as such... I'm not complaining.

I'l leave you with the following quote from: http://www.itplans.net/en/newsreader.aspx?tabid=62

"In the end, browser market share may be the most significant hurdle for developers interested in making the most of HTML5. Internet Explorer 6, for all its rendering quirks and inept handling of Web standards, is seemingly the browser that cannot die. Older versions of Firefox, IE, Opera, Safari, and others all have large user bases, and none support HTML5."

Hey, tanks for the feedback Wint.

Well, I've been actually wondering about whether or not I should already switch to HTML5. In fact I didn't switch just for the pleasure of using the latest cutting edge technology, but rather because it's looking like a clean standard and seems to target pretty well the KISS principle, and I like it.

I do respect the choice of using old tech, even for a browser but in that case I'm afraid you should regularly have to deal with website way more recalcitrant than mine, haven't you? (I myself use to disable scripts when browsing and I can't tell the number of websites that just can't be browsed without). My website can be browsed without a bit of javascript and even without CSS (though I don't provide a way to disable CSS automatically, maybe I should...).

On the other side I have to admit I don't care at all about eg. IE 6 users. I just hope I don't have a single one of them coming on my website.
Each time you read some documentation about a HTML or CSS, there's a warning about IE compatibility... IMO the issue should now be dealt with the other way around. As long as all pages add tricks to support IE flaws, neither MS nor IE 6 users will ever have a reason to create a more compatible browser or to use another browser. Whereas if most pages were created using only admitted standards, then people would understand that IE sucks.


About the "aside" tag (id="panel"), unfortunately I can't do any test today as the maximum number of request on browsershots.org was already reached. Don't know if the issue comes form the new "aside" tag or from the CSS positioning.
1) Do you know if the site was displaying properly before the last week update?
2) I have currently replaced the "aside" tag with an usual "div" tag, does it change anything for you?

Using the "aside" tag is not my most-wanted feature, so I could do without if needed. Otherwise I'm still pretty sure I can improve the browsers support by updating the CSS a bit. But checking multi-browsers compatibility is not that easy, except for Firefox I can only rely on browsershots.org (when it's available).

Well, it seems that most browsers that don't support the new HTML5 tags should still allow to style them. I've just updated the CSS to force 'display:block;' in this case.

Of course, it does not work for IE <= 8 (hmm, what did I say above...), so I've added a small script (damn!) to enable this support, and a warning message if scripts are not enabled (but is there a single IE user that knows - or even care about - how to disable scripts?).

I still can't test on http://browsershots.org for now. http://browserling.com is currently not usable either. On http://netrenderer.com/ I can see that it works now with IE 8, but still not with earlier version. Too bad...


Oh, and just a word about the article quoted from itplans.net: there's not a single info about the release date of the article, so well, it's not really worth reading it...

I see that you managed to update the http://browsershots.org/ shots. Again, the SeaMonkey one depicts what I see, since it has the same really old Gecko engine that I use most of the time. In fact, it looks like all of the shots that show your gray panel on top of the menu are using a really old Gecko (pre-Firefox2 to put the timeline in perspective).

To be clear, I'm not advocating the support ancient browsers, especially IE, I mainly wished to point out there are still a lot of non-html5 browsers out there (though I did not provide any proof of that, I know it to be true). Had you not asked for a glitch report I probably wouldn't have said anything, but since you did I figured the browser test would be ideal. This was all in the name of science, not criticism or complaint.

You asked if your site displayed properly before the update, I can only say that I don't remember any problems when I was there many months ago.
As for the content? Amazing, great stuff!
You have my respect and gratitude and I wish you all the best.



How to test using an old Gecko based web browser without impacting your system (if you wish):
- Assuming you can handle the (open source) .7z archive format...
- Browse to: http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/download.php
- Grab the 7zip package (without installer) for K-Meleon 1.5.4, extract it to a new folder.
- Open a text editor and save an empty file as profile.ini, put profile.ini into the main K-Meleon folder, this will force the program into portable mode when it's started!

Iif you follow my advice the profile settings, cache and such will be created in the profiles sub-folder. Deleting the main K-Meleon folder will thus remove all traces from your system (except for an empty K-Meleon folder in the appdata directory, a harmless artifact of an unpatched glitch in the portable mode code).

This open souce web browser has been around longer than firefox and has had an amazing history, it's immensely customizable with little technical skill, is quite addictive, and can run like lightning on ancient hardware. It still has a dedicated user base but the problem is there are no longer any active developers who can take it to the next level, although there are some updates and custom versions beyond the latest 'official' one I'm linking to (using newer versions of Gecko).

Thanks again for the constructive feedback, Wint.

I'll surely try K-Meleon in portable mode (it'll be far easier, faster and accurate than browsershots.org), but not before a week, when I'll be back.

BTW I don't remember the exact info I read about it but it seems that the 1.6 beta would handle the new tags more properly than the last official release. But maybe you have reasons not to switch to the beta release....