This comment is from the Library Discussion Forum discussion.
2006 Aug 17
Comment by Nathan (Staff)
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Comment edited by the author, 2006 Aug 17.

I have now tested in the following browsers:
* Firefox 1.5.0.4 (but all versions should work)
* Opera 9.01
* Konqueror 3.4.3
* MSIE 6.0.3790.1830 (with some limitations)

The chief limitation with MSIE is that styles do not come through on dynamically-fetched information. For this reason, the Read More link on MSIE links to a separate page; whereas, on other browsers it loads the content dynamically. (This is accomplished by sniffing for "msie", case-insensitive, in the user-agent string, so if your other browser is spoofing IE, you may get sent to a separate page unnecessarily. This seems to me like less of a mishap than missing the styles altogether if you really are using IE. At some point I will test with IE7 and see if it can handle this better than IE6.)

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2006 Aug 21
Comment by Jonadab
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Comment edited by the author, 2006 Aug 22.

With regard to inserting dynamically-retrieved content, IE7 needs to be treated the same as IE6, i.e., styles are not re-applied when the class transfers.

As for other browsers, anything Gecko-based (Netscape, Flock, SeaMonkey, K-Meleon, Camino, Epiphany, ...) should all work the same as Firefox, and I wouldn't worry about testing them all individually.

Theoretically Safari should work the same as Konqueror, but Safari is worth testing separately, if someone has access to a Mac.

Minor or specialty browsers, such as Lynx, will probably not work, and there isn't much to be done about that without doing a lot of sniffing and serving out legacy versions of everything with no client-side scripting. If this were the library's main website that would probably be worth doing, but for a discussion forum perhaps not.

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2006 Aug 25
Comment by Nathan (Staff)
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Comment edited by the author, 2009 Feb 26.

As it turns out, the "Read More" links will be plain vanilla links for MSIE as well as most robots (e.g., search-engine indexers). This at least allows the content to be accessed. Additionally, you can now force _all_ of the links to be plain old links via a setting in your preferences, so that the forum is useable (albeit somewhat less convenient and a little rough around the edges in places) without Javascript.

Update: MSIE became a first-class citizen sometime in late 2006 or early 2007.

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