Web Authoring Tools - Opinions on Style Master

Author

Opinions on Style Master

Eric Lindsay

2005-12-11, 6:46 pm

I have been looking at http://www.westciv.com/style_master/index.html
Style Master, and so far it seems pretty good to me as a CSS editor. It
also looked very helpful for checking whether I can make IE co-operate
with whatever I do (this is important to me as I don't have IE). Has
anyone had long term experience with Style Master? What do you think of
it?

--
http://www.ericlindsay.com

Spartanicus

2005-12-11, 6:46 pm

Eric Lindsay <NOSPAmar2005@ericlindsay.com> wrote:

>I have been looking at http://www.westciv.com/style_master/index.html
>Style Master, and so far it seems pretty good to me as a CSS editor. It
>also looked very helpful for checking whether I can make IE co-operate
>with whatever I do (this is important to me as I don't have IE). Has
>anyone had long term experience with Style Master? What do you think of
>it?

I've no experience with Style Master, but such tools can at best only
indicate what css properties and values IE "supports". It will not
assist with the huge number of IE bugs.

Authoring non trivial IE compatible sites requires direct access to that
browser. Asking others to check your work in IE and solve the issues is
not a viable strategy.

--
Spartanicus

Eric Lindsay

2005-12-11, 6:46 pm

In article
<nrgop11tv345iij2p6ipfm4on7jvbe2ftf@news.spartanicus.utvinternet.ie>,
Spartanicus <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> I've no experience with Style Master, but such tools can at best only
> indicate what css properties and values IE "supports". It will not
> assist with the huge number of IE bugs.

Even the live indications of which things different browsers support
seems a lot better than trying to recall them myself. StyleMaster flags
a problem on a bunch of browsers, as you use each style. So I then at
least have the option of not using that feature. Or, I can deliberately
decide to use a feature IE6 (or NS4 or IE5 or IE5.5 or IE5Mac or
whatever) do not have available, and either hide it or just let it fail
if it doesn't seem a big deal. For example, shadowed text only seems to
work in Safari, but doesn't seem to cause problems elsewhere, so that
seems safe to use.

I realise it won't help much with the actual bugs, but it does seem
better than my present situation of having no indication of IE problems.

> Authoring non trivial IE compatible sites requires direct access to that
> browser. Asking others to check your work in IE and solve the issues is
> not a viable strategy.

Yes, that is the real rub, and one I was trying to avoid facing, at
least until you pointed out that it wasn't viable.

I could stick with virtually no styling and no graphics (present
situation on my own site). However people wanting new web sites want
graphics. Plus this town finally has real bandwidth, unlike the 7 dialup
modems that was the total ISP connectivity when we moved here 7 years
ago.

Use tables (workable, but I hate the idea) and drop liquid layouts. I'm
going to treat that as a last resort.

It isn't cost effective to buy a Windows PC for web development.
Especially since it seems difficult to run IE version 5, 5.5 and 6 on
the one computer, and all seem to have different bugs. I'm only
planning on doing a few sites for friends in local small businesses, to
help cover the cost of my own site - I found I could run 10 domains at
only a small increment over the cost of one. So there is absolutely no
margin for anything I can't treat as part of my hobby.

Thanks for pushing that problem to the top of the queue.

--
http://www.ericlindsay.com

Spartanicus

2005-12-11, 10:33 pm

Eric Lindsay <NOSPAmar2005@ericlindsay.com> wrote:

>It isn't cost effective to buy a Windows PC for web development.

A second hand PII/233Mhz with 32Mb Ram will do fine for running W98
+IE6, these cost virtually nothing.

>Especially since it seems difficult to run IE version 5, 5.5 and 6 on
>the one computer

All it takes is a multi boot setup with multiple partitions. There are
also (less reliable) ways to "install" multiple versions on a single
Windows installation.

>, and all seem to have different bugs.

5.0: few enough people use that nowadays, ignoring it is viable.
5.5: kicking IE6 into quirks mode gives a good emulation of IE5.5, again
ignoring it is viable due to it's very limited use.

--
Spartanicus

Eric Lindsay

2005-12-12, 7:19 pm

In article
<5fjpp15d7t4abp8tl95r18ccd14evr688i@news.spartanicus.utvinternet.ie>,
Spartanicus <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> Eric Lindsay <NOSPAmar2005@ericlindsay.com> wrote:
>
>
> A second hand PII/233Mhz with 32Mb Ram will do fine for running W98
> +IE6, these cost virtually nothing.

Just last year I gave away several of these, so any working parts could
be salvaged. The climate here is such that older desktop systems were
totally unreliable. Come to think of it, many new desktop systems were
also. One system went inland to Canberra, where it has now been
thoroughly reliable for 18 months (it was almost unusable here). But
even without the reliability issue, space constraints (my Macintosh is
in a closet, for instance) mean I really need to look at laptops. I
shipped off a nice IBM laptop to a friend in Sydney last year, where it
now runs BSD. Getting another laptop probably means it has to wait
until I am visiting some rather larger town.

However thanks to your suggestion, I managed to obtain a loan of a
spare laptop from time to time for testing pages.

>
> All it takes is a multi boot setup with multiple partitions. There are
> also (less reliable) ways to "install" multiple versions on a single
> Windows installation.

I remember that! I used to have W98 and some alternative on most of my
PCs. Trying to multi-partition the above mentioned IBM R31 Thinkpad was
what led me to dump Windows XP and start using Macintosh. Don't think
I'd try multi-partition on a loan PC.

>
> 5.0: few enough people use that nowadays, ignoring it is viable.
> 5.5: kicking IE6 into quirks mode gives a good emulation of IE5.5, again
> ignoring it is viable due to it's very limited use.

That is a very handy tip. Thanks Spartanicus. My own site statistics
were not much use initially for determining browser use, as almost 60%
of them are unidentified and in numbers too small to get included in the
top 40 browsers summary. I don't know what they might be. The common
search robots show up in my regular lists, so it isn't them. Plus I
have some unusual ones in my top browsers - EPOC32-WTL/2.0
STNC-WTL/2.0(222) is in twice as high as IE5.5, for example. IE6 is
top, as you suggest.

Even the operating system figures are unhelpful. Varieties of Windows
occupy 70%, but then there is a great chunk of unknowns making close to
20%, followed by Macintosh, Unix and known robots. The summaries
identify things like OS/2 and Amiga being used, so I can't think what
would make such a large chunk of unknowns. Epoc PDAs and Symbian phones
maybe?

I guess I'll see about grabbing the raw logs (which currently won't
download) and trying to work out why the summaries are so unhelpful.

Thanks for the helpful suggestions.

--
http://www.ericlindsay.com