j’s scratchpad

Here we go again with the differences of how the Weblogs at Harvard Law blogs with themes by Bryan Bell appear on different computers and in different browsers.

Poor Vernica. She read my post yesterday and worked on her blog so that it would work better in Netscape on a Mac. And, well, it still doesn’t really work. It looks good in Internet Explorer 5, though.

When I was first setting up my blog, I ran into all sorts of problems getting it to appear in Netscape 4.76 on a Mac. (For more details, read I hate sites that only work in Internet Explorer, No luck in Netscape, Still no real luck with themes in Netscape and Breakthrough!.) For some stupid reason, it didn’t dawn on me that I wouldn’t be able to read other people’s blogs in Netscape 4.76 on a Mac, either. The Redhead Wore Crimson works, but I’m sure plenty of others won’t work. Since this usability issue is bigger than just my site, maybe I’ll bug Dave about covering it at the next blog meeting. It might be as easy to fix as changing a code in the style sheet.

And it’s so frustrating for both people. For the user because the blogs either don’t appear at all or you see portions of them, but not the entire thing, or they just look plain awful, or some combiation of all of the above. And as the blogger, it’s frustrating because you have to redesign your site and pick colors and if you aren’t that familiar with HTML or style sheets or how the appearance features work with Manila, half of your time is just spent figuring out what different codes change and what style sheet you’re using where and all that.

And let’s not talk about how browsers render colors right now. My blog is a beautiful, rich purple in Netscape 4.76. In Internet Explorer 5 and Netscape 6, it’s pale blue and all the link colors and whatnot look awful to me. I swear I used Web safe colors.

Oh, the importance of looking at sites on other platforms and browsers!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2003 at 2:10 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.