1 January (Part 2) - Technical Topics. Technophobes keep out!
When this website was launched in September 2009 not much thought was given
to its potential for massive growth but if it had been some of the coding
fundamentals may have been different.
Over the years most of the old methods have been changed and refined but
the
introduction of the Mobile mode exactly 18 months ago was a complexity too far in some respects. You
may not have noticed because a few quick fixes were introduced to mask but not
eradicate the problems. Even so, some images didn’t always align with each other
perfectly. As from today an attempt is being made to put things right while
maintaining total compatibility with older parts of the website. In general new
images will be a few pixels larger than before and the border sizes will be
consistent when switching between viewing modes.
Because of the way web browsers cache (remember) old instructions it is possible
that not everything will immediately work correctly. If an image looks wrong
(stretched probably) and doesn’t respond to to a browser refresh (F5 on Windows)
and is still like it next time you visit, I would appreciate
being told about it.
Another thing that is changed is the RSS feed which had accumulated a whole year
of old data. Today it has been given a clean start. All RSS readers should pick
up the new announcements but whether they remember older data will be dependent
on the browser or reader in use.
I may decide to abandon Internet Explorer 6 support, surely no one uses that any
more? On the other hand IE6 support is not difficult. Switching from HTML 4 to
HTML 5 may be more sensible in which case IE 6 support will definitely go.
I know from the statistics reports that about 35% of readers are using the Safari
browser on Apple devices. I have no intention of ever acquiring one and Apple
have abandoned their attempt to get Safari to run on Windows so I can only test
on a very old version of the Safari browser. If Safari becomes in any way
non-compliant with the standards I have no way of
adapting Bonkers to it.