From: Thomas Hurst <tom.hurst@...>
Date: 2002-03-21T04:16:11+09:00
Subject: Re: [OT] web standars (was: web templating for static sites?)

* Jason Voegele (jason@jvoegele.com) wrote:

> I apologize for continuing an off-topic thread, but I've heard several
> people mention this @import trick and I'd like to know what it is.

It's just an extension of modularising your CSS;

@import url(layout-stuff-that-breaks-ns4.css);

Alternatively you do what the W3C Core Styles
(http://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/Core/); generate them dynamically based
on the user agent (and hope the ua isn't spoofed; something Opera does
by default (which badly skews usage stats, *grumble*)).

To do this, you need to remember not just to stick with the default
headers (especially not PHP's, which disables caching entirely; not nice
for stylesheets); check out the HTTP spec and the headers the core
styles put out.

It's possible to do some more advanced browser fingerprinting, actually;
Opera, for instance, has a fairly unique Accept-Encoding: header no
matter what it spoofs as (by default it pretends to be IE5 pretending to
be Mozilla 4 iirc, heh), which makes it easy to seperate from IE.

Maybe a little project for someone; something like phpSniff
(http://phpsniff.sourceforge.net/) which uses browser fingerprinting and
parses out Accept-(Language|Content|Encoding).

> Could someone please explain this to me, preferably with examples?  At
> least one page on my site does not render correctly in Netscape or
> Mozilla due to its heavy reliance on CSS, and I'd like to fix this.

Er, if it doesn't render correctly in Mozilla it's either a bug you need
to fix or a bug they need to fix.  The only workaround I'm aware of for
Mozilla is to generate CSS dynamically.

-- 
Thomas 'Freaky' Hurst  -  freaky@aagh.net  -  http://www.aagh.net/
-
Mommy, what happens to your files when you die?