So much for “look and feel”…
WARNING! This blog entry contains technobabble – people who don’t want to know that “the simple things you see are all complicated” (The Who reference in one of my earlier blog entries below) can stop reading *now*.
I was AIMing with a former-high-tech-coworker-but-still-a-friend of mine, and we noticed that Firefox versions 2.0.0.7 on Mac and Windows (and Firefox 2.0.0.6 on Mac) at the least, have trouble with “behaviors”. That is, Firefox has trouble when a frame or page loads a URL automagically. Firefox may be in need of a little “behavior modification.” 
I had placed guestbook and blog pages in frames to maintain a “look and feel” that was consistent with the rest of my site. To make things work simply for Firefox users, I ripped out the frames and the behaviors, and now there is no problem with Firefox access to my blog and guestbook that I (or my friend) have found.
The requests to my web site from the browser users of Firefox:IE:Safari are in the ratio 1:2:6 (that’s right folks, about 3X as many Safari requests as with IE; I would like to believe that I just have intelligent friends, but I do not have as many friends as the number of ISPs that access this site – don’t get me wrong, I would *like* to! ).
In any case, my goal is to make the site accessible to all browser types, so if anyone has problems accessing any part of this site, please let me know. My normal process has been to use the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!) methodology to accommodate as many browser types as possible, and from the types of browsers that have accessed the site, I have been reasonably successful in this.
While we are on the subject of browser behavior, I read recently that some of the latest versions of IE under Vista will not place the customer’s (your) order for products on a web page that appears in a frame, for security reasons, under the Microsoft®-knows-best philosophy (I have not verified this experimentally). I understand the thinking (those evil masquerading web sites), but would prefer to make the choice myself. Fortunately, I no longer have to use IE for anything other than testing web pages these days. To accommodate customers who might have a problem ordering from my Pro Gallery because of such a browser philosophy, I have placed an alternate URL on the Pro Gallery pages that takes them (you) to an unframed page for ordering.
If anyone accidentally read the technobabble above unintentionally, I sincerely apologize. The discussion *does* touch on some of the many considerations underlying web page access by multiple browser types.
–Bill at Cheshire Cat Photo
