Error with the MeFi scholarship link in Opera.

April 16, 2001 12:13 AM

Opera5 shows the "MetaFilter college scholarship" as an off yellow link but it's not clickable. After a quick glance at the HTML it seems Opera doesn't like the negative value, "margin-top:-20px". It looks like there's an unclosed DIV tag around that area too, well, maybe.
posted by holloway to Bugs at 12:13 AM (7 comments total)

Get a real browser, holloway. :)

I'll wrap an if/then around it so opera users won't see it.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 8:28 AM on April 16, 2001

For fellow Opera users, the scholarship page is here.
posted by y6y6y6 at 10:05 AM on April 16, 2001

Thanks Mathowie.

Actually, this is the perfect example of why WaSP/ALA's 'death to bad browsers' campaign is just plain silly. All browsers have exploitable faults. Ignoring them does screw users.
posted by holloway at 9:09 PM on April 16, 2001

Ignoring them does screw users.

It also brings those faults to the attention of the browser vendor. Requiring web designers to do extra work so that browser vendors don't have to fix problems seems kinda backwards.
posted by daveadams at 7:52 AM on April 17, 2001

Requiring web designers to do extra work so that browser vendors don't have to fix problems seems kinda backwards.

So ignore them and code to standards? Opera are a good company who will fix the problem in future releases (I trust them). It's a bug. All software will have exploitable bugs (always). The bugs aren't the users' fault and (IMO) it's the web designer's job to shield problems from the user. There-in lies the skill. But you all know my opinion... so... how about dem mets, eh?

posted by holloway at 8:15 PM on April 17, 2001

Requiring web designers to do extra work so that browser vendors don't have to fix problems seems kinda backwards.

Yeah, but who's going to magically upgrade all the faulty browsers out there? Users won't.
posted by kindall at 9:31 PM on April 17, 2001

In Dave's Perfect World(tm) Browsers would have long ago integrated the capability to upgrade their rendering engines automagically (occasional 30-100k diff patches to the binaries (with user approval, of course)) without requiring the users to download a ridiculous 16-30MB re-install. (Has the Mozilla project attempted anything similar to this? I think Netscape did something similar, but in my experience it never worked very well.)

But this isn't a perfect world. Sure, you should code so your site looks nice on every user's browser. I wasn't really suggesting that you shouldn't, I was just suggesting that it seems backwards to make web developers labor over browser vendors' mistakes.

Sorry if I seemed uncaring, I really didn't mean it that way. Whatever. :)

But here's what browser vendors should do: provide an email address (or better yet, an XML-RPC or SOAP interface) that can be called from a webpage very simply (i.e. build in a simple, single function call into Javascript, CF, ASP, PHP, etc) that sends a message to the vendor saying, essentially, "A user just hit a page that had to implement a workaround for your broken browser."

But even if you ignore the potential for abuse inherent in such a system, that's not going to happen in the Real World either, anyway.
posted by daveadams at 8:29 AM on April 18, 2001