Mirror sites

[Mr Initial Man]

After some time, I've decided to take the plunge, and set up a mirror site. My Furnation site (http://www.Furnation.com/Mister_Initial_Man) works quite well in IE (thank you BonRouge) but is glitchy in Opera, and even more so in Firefox, because of the CSS layout.

I was thinking of creating a mirror site, each having the exact same HTML pages, but on the second, adjusting the CSS with an attribute ( position:fixed; ) that is not supported in IE.

I'd then have a splash page, directing them to which site they'll want.

(This site works best in Internet Explorer)
(This site works best in anything else)


Anyone have thoughts on that?

[David Harrison]

No need for that. Re-write your site's CSS to work in standards browsers. Then fiddle it to work in IE, use hacks if you have to but DON'T create two separate sites, that's just insane.

[Mr Initial Man]

Why not? I'd simply update one HTML file, and upload it twice, since I do everything with external style sheets anyways.

[David Harrison]

If you're gonna write two stylesheets (ie: doub;e the work load) then I would suggest writing a stylesheet for the standards browsers, then writing another stylesheet that makes any alterations neccessary to get it to display right in IE. Then you can use IE conditional statements so that only IE will load the second stylesheet.

At least that way the user isn't given the choice between which web-site to go to, users are stupid, don't rely on users for anything. ;)

[Mr Initial Man]

Use IE conditional statements? How do I do that?

[David Harrison]

Like this:<!--[if IE]>
<style type="text/css">
@import "stoopid_ie.css";
</style>
<![endif]-->To any other browser it will look like something that's been commented out.

[pawky]

the best is to include it all in one css file. So code the css for firefox and make it look perfect. Then time to worry about IE and make the necessary changes/additions. So lets say you have an element width set to 300 but need it to be 290 for IE then you would add:

* width: 290px; so it would look like for example:

div.box {
width: 300px;
* width: 290px; /* only IE sees this */
}

i dont believe it will validate like this, but that's life ;) you shouldn't need too many.

Other css hacks (http://centricle.com/ref/css/filters/)

Hope this helps ;)

[Robert Wellock]

Yes, let PHP or something do the work it's ridiculous to create a duplicate site purely for browser bug catering.

[Mr Initial Man]

Ummm... you're assuming I know a lick of PHP...

And, Pawky, I've already got 12 CSS files, so a few more won't matter.

[pawky]

Originally posted by Mr Initial Man
Ummm... you're assuming I know a lick of PHP...

And, Pawky, I've already got 12 CSS files, so a few more won't matter.

but it does. specially if you are coding for the same thing just for different versions. That is a lot of extra code that the computer will have to download, most of it being ignored. If you have two different style sheets that read like:
#1:
div.box {
font: bold 1em "courier new", monospace;
width: 300px;
}
#2:
* div.box {
font: bold 1em "courier new", monospace;
width: 290px;
} /* only IE sees this */

it would be less code to do it like:
#3:
div.box {
font: bold 1em "courier new", monospace;
width: 300px;
* width: 290px; /* only IE sees this */
}

With a full style sheet coding twice can be a huge increase. One of the reasons for CSS is that it decreases the amount needed to be download and also speed up the time it takes to deliver the site. The time when multiple style sheets would be 'ok' would be for different medias (print for example) or if you had your style sheet split up to inlude different areas or whatnot. Other than that it isnt too good

[Mr Initial Man]

The reason I have multiple stylesheets is I have different colour schemes and layouts for different areas of my website.

And the problem is I tried to replace frames with a CSS layout, INCLUDING having one frame scroll.

Opera and Firefox support position:fixed. IE completely futzes it up, and the workaround needed is quite complicated. That's why two seperate CSS docs, and ultimately two sites (Besides, it will get me more exposure, being on two servers. ^^ )

[pawky]

Originally posted by Mr Initial Man
And the problem is I tried to replace frames with a CSS layout, INCLUDING having one frame scroll.

have you read http://www.fu2k.org/alex/css/frames/ yet? I haven't read it all yet, but if you haven't it may help you.

[Mr Initial Man]

Well, I've got my mirror site up, at http://www.mr_initial_man.furtopia.org/ :) One of the good things is I'm gonna get people who browse Furtopia rather than Furnation to come to my site, as well as those from Furnation. :)