[CLUE-Talk] JSP and browsers?

[David Anselmi]

Crawford Rainwater wrote:
> An odd occurance happened today.  A vendor of
> ours referred us to their web site for a potential
> invoice from a recent expo (Boulder Chamber Of
> Commerce one), and I noticed on the URL that the
> site was JSP (I presume Java Server Pages?), yet
> the site was only oriented for M$ Internet Explorer
> 5.0 (noted on the bottom of the page)?!?  

JSP doesn't have anything to do with .NET.  Contrary to what Matt said, 
.NET is for developing all sorts of apps.  They have web forms for asp, 
windows forms to get the same thing in a Windows app, and so on.  Web 
services is just another UI, so to speak.  .NET is all about pushing 
programmers into a controlled environment so they can't blue screen the 
OS anymore.  (Well, really it's all about money, but that's one aspect 
of it.)

Write an html page sometime, put a text box on it and define a font 
(face and type size).  Then look at it in both Mozilla/NS and IE. 
You'll see that things like a 10 char text box are very different sizes, 
and the fonts are too.  So when you make a complex page, it takes a lot 
of effort to make it look good in both.  One answer is to detect the 
browser type and scale everything appropriately.  That isn't too bad 
with good tools.  My answer tends to be to keep things simple so 
differences don't matter as much (take the CLUE site, which wasn't my 
doing).

Another answer is to tell non-IE people to get bent.

BTW, sites that rely on javascript are even worse because of the browser 
differences in language implementation.

I did hear at one point that MS was porting IE to Unix for a large 
client that demanded the same browser on all platforms.  I don't know if 
that died or is just hush-hush to minimize demand for it.

Dave