January, 9, 2003 archives
ah, mark has stumbled into what-if-you-can't-hide-css problem as it relates to safari. in a perfect world, all browsers (and other clients) would implement the css standard (and others) perfectly, and the same. in the real world, they all have little quirks. i consider it a pretty big flaw in css (and similar standards) that there's no sanctioned way to accomodate the real world. instead we have a grotty mess of bugs to exploit, javascript trickery, or server-side sniffing.
of course, then you go down the rabbit-hole of tricking out the user-agent to kind-of claim to be who you're not.
it's great that david hyatt, of the safari team, is addressing this stuff publically. it's too bad there's not just a real public face for the safari team like a shared weblog.
can you hear me now?
my little aim bot written with Net::AIM stops being able to send messages after some number of hours of operation, and there's no indication why. the bot is still connected, still gets (and responds to) keep-alive requests from the server, can receive messages, and doesn't get error messages when sending messages, but the messages don't go through. very annoying. i fixed the Net::AIM code to roll over sequence ids properly, but that doesn't appear to be the problem (and i don't think that event has ever even been reached).
the yahoo and icq bots don't appear to have this problem.
working around browser quirks
i'm not sure which would be more useful—a method to tell a particular browser that it is the only one who can use a rule, or a method to tell a particular browser that it should ignore a rule. i think you need both. with the former, you can apply additional rules to work around a bug triggered by earlier rules. with the latter, you can prevent a rule from triggering a bug.