DHTML tolerance

[tigrrboxer]

I'm using a few snippets of DHTML on one of my clients' sites, namely for rollovers, as I haven't found a javaScript rollover that fully satisfies me. So, what's the bad news? How many browsers will be deprived of the blazing beauy of my rollovers, and what will they see instead?

[Khalid Ali]

DHTML essentially is the combination of (JaavaScript + CSS),
To answer your question every browser that does not support avaScript or CSS will not render your DHTML properly...I hope this helps

[DaveSW]

For an exact figure:

Javascript removes 13% of people

CSS is more difficult. With javascript it's either on or off. With CSS there are varying levels of support, so I'd guess you're looking at about 2-3%. However, there may be some overlap between the two groups.

[tigrrboxer]

Oh I love you all. Why is it that no-one else provides simple, lucid replies?
Anyway, more dumb questions: I thought that JavaScript was the default language for all browsers?? (Okay, so that was a confused statement rather than a question; I cheated by appending a question mark)

And... Oh dear... Now you're going to wonder how the hell I dare to call myself a web designer (actually I'm an art director but I use WD to bluff my way into jobs)... But... What are the pros and cons, or functional differences, of internal and external style sheets?? And do the differences include browser compatibility?

Finally, a question for seasoned gurus who can conjure up works of art with humble NotePad: which do you REALLY recommend, Front Page or Dreamweaver? I abandoned the latter when I realized it was making me lazy and preventing me from learning HTML/ JavaScript etc. Now I wonder...

And is it worth delving into XML? Is it really The Future, or merely hype, a sad minority?

[tigrrboxer]

Khalid, the center section of webapplikations is a bit obscured by the right-hand section - to be precise, the word "treating" is partially swallowed. Hope it doesn't bug you that I'm mentioning this - and I hope that you'll report back to me when I finally have my next site up and running!!

[DaveSW]

Well, I'd say the default language of browsers is HTML, but maybe not.

Basically, most modern browsers support javascript, but because of the abuse of javascript (annoying pointer trails, and more importantly Popups etc) many have disabled it. There may also be a small percentage of people whose browsers don't support it.

Internal and external stylesheets? As far as I'm aware there's only one difference. An external stylesheet can be common to as many pages as you want. So it only gets downloaded once when someone visits your site. An internal stylesheet has to be downloaded every time you change page. So external is better.

I suppose there are two other secondary differences:
1) Using the @import rule you can hide CSS from browsers which don't support it.
2) Search engines won't have to crawl through 40 lines of css before getting to your content with an external stylesheet...


Dreamweaver. Actually I haven't used the latest version, but it's a lot better than frontpage... Personally I use html-kit from www.chami.com - it's a free text editor, but once you know what you're doing in HTML then it's easy. And free.

XML, well, I don't really know. It looks promising at the moment, but we'll have to wait and see.

[spufi]

RE: XML

I would personally get into XML because of the fact that even HTML has started to adapt to it, hence XHTML, and as XML develops it will only get more and more powerful. Plus, there are a number of different languages that can interact with it, JavaScript, Java, etc. The biggest thing about XML is that it basically gives the person using it the ability to create a user defined markup for what they need in their situation. This has already lead to a number of different flavors of XML and it will only continue to grow. Once you get the concepts down for XML, it will be rather easy to understand any of it's different flavors.

[tigrrboxer]

thanks for the pointer, Spufi. By the way, your www.hotdesign.com link is plastered with a tiled background that renders the text utterly unreadable :mad: Gobbled up the other material you linked to - excellent.

Actually you all provide brilliant URLs. I'm addicted to link saving - my favourites menu has 53 folders and I've no idea how many links!!

Now can any of you genii explain a few CSS terms, namely: box and page break (for starters)? Plus, Dreamweaver's CSS menu includes a "list" option which I can't seem to apply to my lists. Do I really, really have to write everything manually? :( Oh, okay then...

[DaveSW]

Time to start throwing in the w3 links I link LOL.

http://www.w3.org

If you click CSS on the left menu bar, then on 2.1 on the right menu bar, we can find

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/propidx.html - a full property listing.

If you scroll down you will find the page-break (before and after), but no sign of 'box'. Do you have any other code from around it?

[tigrrboxer]

"Box" is one of the categories in DW's CSS dialogue. It includes options like float, clear, width, etc.

I've just realized - DUH - that there's a CSS forum here, so I'm taking this there... Come and join me!

[spufi]

Originally posted by tigrrboxer
By the way, your www.hotdesign.com link is plastered with a tiled background that renders the text utterly unreadable :mad:

Well it looks fine when I looked at it, so I'm not sure why it looks funky for you.