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.

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.

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.