I hate to bring this up but it must be said.
The PerlMonks site breaks in IE5.

By breaks I mean it's side scrolling at 1024x768.
Now, this brings up the thorny HTML issue of building for different client browsers.
Do you build to the W3 strict standard, or do what works in the most browsers?
Has anyone come up with a reasonable solution for this?

For commercial sites it's often the lowest common denominator (not dynamic, one version). Even though at my work there are many big brains of PERL/PHP/Apache, no one has come up with a decent way to handle this.

You thoughts?

BTW: If you need help debugging the site html I would be happy to help.
ahsoul@netscape.net

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
RE: Browser compatability
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Jun 15, 2000 at 19:36 UTC
    The Monastery Gates often needs to scroll for me too, using Netscape buggy.72 under Linux. What's going on there is that a post has embedded code that's too wide for the display.

    Code, marked by the <CODE> tags, displays in a slightly larger than normal, monospaced font. It's not subject to automatic line wrapping, either.

    The solution is to edit the offending post, if possible, or for petitioners to be careful about line widths. There may be something specific that offends IE5, but I notice the same thing on many writeups, so it's not just affecting you.

      Ahh, of course!
      It's a lot like the pre tag.
      That still leaves the question of how one could use Perl to format text for different clients.
      For this site, I think it makes most sense to leave the code blocks as they are, but maybe there could be a different behaviour for the display in cases beyond a certain width.