[Ham-Mac] ARRL web server

[Richard Fall]

At 1:14 PM -0500 3/20/02, you wrote:

>At 19:13 -0500 19/03/2002, Chuck Counselman wrote:
>>>
>>>The immediate, technical, problem is that the ARRL website does not work properly with Netscape's (and possibly other non-Microsoft) web browser(s).  It works with Microsoft's web browser, and the ARRL webmaster says that this is enough.  He says, reasonably enough, that it's impractical to make the website compatible with every possible browser, because there are so many.
>
>Chuck et al --
>
>I just tried to go to the ARRL Members-Only webpage and the page wouldn't download. I tried several times from different directions using my Netscape 4.7.9. Then, I tried using Internet Explorer 5.1 and it came right up. Is this the problem you were attempting to bring to the attention of the League and us?

I checked the source HTML for the Members-Only landing page, and
found that there's a serious syntax error, which *could* explain
problems with some browser/OS combinations:

The source HTML for this page has three Javascripts--two are in
the header, and one is in the body code.  The one in the body
code doesn't have a closing </SCRIPT> tag.  This is certainly an
HTML coding error;  it may or may not explain the problems
reported.  IE is often more forgiving of syntax errors than
Netscape.

It would be easy for the ARRL webmaster to fix this problem and
Chuck could then test again to see if the problem went away.
To avoid such problems in the future, any of a number of available
tools could be used to check HTML syntax before putting up a new
page (I use Adobe GoLive, for instance).

Perhaps Chuck or someone would like to follow up on this.

Now for the editorial comments:  I ran the engineering department
for a commercial website for about a year (during the dotcom boom)
and gained much experience in making a website as cross-browser and
platform friendly as possible.  During one period, we even had to
make the site WebTV-compatible--no easy feat, I can tell you!

While we never claimed that our site worked with all browsers (some
of which are badly broken), we would *never* have said that if
it worked with IE, that was good enough.

(Netscape 4.x was the real problem--it's a terribly broken and
unforgiving implementation of the HTML standards, most of which
was fixed in 6.x).

I hope that the ARRL webmaster's statement that "if it works with
IE, that's good enough" was either a joke or a misunderstanding.
It's not terribly hard to make a website work with both IE and
Netscape, though you may have to avoid using some of the fancy
(and non-standard) IE and Netscape features to keep compatibility
(or have extra Javascript to detect the browser type and respond
accordingly).

End of editorial comments.

- Rich

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