One small step ...

[AlanH]

Having been given the keys to the HTML treasure chest that is the gotm.civfanatics.net website, I have made one small template change that results in a lot of the pages now displaying correctly in my Mac browsers. I know this has been a small source of irritation for us minority-Mac players for a while.

The pages I have changed are the home page, plus the results and calculator pages which use a common template. If this works OK for everyone then I'll try to fix the pages relating to individual games. They are all separately coded, so I will not change them until I am confident that I haven't broken anything for any players.

Aeson tells me this change has not had an adverse effect on the modified pages in his PC browser, but I would obviously like to know if anyone sees any problems, on any platform, on any popular browser.

Please post your feedback here.

 

[Dianthus]

They look fine to me (apart from the blurriness due to the tiredness of my eyes ) using Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 on XP Pro and Win2K.

 

[zagnut]

When I visit the Calculator and Main Index Page I get a series of thick lines at the top, all in the brown color of the background. I don't think the page is supposed to display that way, but I might be wrong.

I am accessing it with Netscape 7.1 with a Windows ME operating system on a Pentium 4 computer with a good video card.

 

[tao]

Just before I hit this page, I was happy to see that the pages you changed now display correctly w Safari 1.1 and MacOS X 10.3.2.

 

[leif erikson]

I just submitted GOTM 26 and found that the main page and the submission page has a series of heavy lines, the same as zagnut experienced, at the top under the main header. I seem to remember that it has displayed like this since I started visiting the GOTM pages last February.

My browser is Mozilla 1.4 on a windows 98 system.

 

[tao]

Originally posted by leif erikson
I just submitted GOTM 26 and found that the main page and the submission page has a series of heavy lines,

It is the same on Macintosh w Mozilla 1.6b.

 

[Aeson]

The lines at the top are due to the header images no longer showing. Not sure why they were taken out.

 

[AlanH]

OK, thanks for your feedback, I'll investigate this evening. If it is repeatable in Mozilla for Mac I can find and fix the problem.

 

[AlanH]

Originally posted by Aeson
The lines at the top are due to the header images no longer showing. Not sure why they were taken out.

Nope! The header images are showing up fine. I've just looked at the effect in a Gecko browser, Camino. The root problem is that tables within tables are not actually permitted in W3C HTML. Most browsers allow you to get away with them most of the time, but we seem to have picked a bad combination.

So far, the modified pages seem to work OK in IE for Mac and Windows and in Safari on Mac. They don't work properly on Gecko/Mozilla on either platform. The Mozilla probems are actually less severe that the Mac ones were before - Mac browsers previously compressed the whole content part of the pages into less than half the available width.

The brown horizontal lines only show up in Mozilla when the window size reaches a certain width. They are repeated copies of the bottom edge of the banner area. I'm investigating.

 

[AlanH]

I've tweaked the main page template to display correctly on my Mac in IE, Camino, Mozilla, Netscape, Safari and Omniweb. If this works OK on Windows browsers then I'll go ahead and template the Game pages and give them the same treatment.

 

[leif erikson]

Hi AlanH

On my windows machine, I just checked the main page and there are still two wide lines appearing just under the header. I checked some of the other pages out of curiousity. The FAQ page and the Articles page are correct. The submission pages still show seven thick lines under the header.

I hope this helped in the diagnosis. Again, I am running a win98 machine using Mozilla.

 

[AlanH]

Thanks leif. It looks as if the display is affected by the text size your browser is set to. I'll have to do some more work on it.

 

[AlanH]

Is it looking any better on your PeeCee Mozillas now?

 

[zagnut]

It looks fine now on my computer. Thanks.

 

[leif erikson]

Great Job AlanH. It looks so good I didn't recognize where I was!!

Someday I really hope to go back to Mac, but for now, ......

Thanks!!

 

[AlanH]

Thanks guys. I'm going to start rationalising the Game pages now. Watch this space for my further requests for PC browser tests