Poor Netscape/Mozilla Support in .NET 70
An anonymous reader submits: "I use Microsoft's .NET Framework at my place of employment to create website applications for the general public. I have noticed a number of issues that can make web applications developed in .NET incompatible with Netscape and Mozilla." Read on below for his specific complaints; have you encountered the same incompatibilities, and can you suggest any workarounds?
"The most egregious issue I have run into is this bug in .NET framework, that can prevent posts (the facility for the web browser to send information to the server) in Netscape and Mozilla (all versions) because MS used Internet Explorer specific Javascript. Microsoft buried a mention of a hotfix addressing the bug shortly after the first Framework Service Pack. However, the latest Service Pack (SP2) came out several months later and it still does not contain the fix. The only way to obtain the hotfix is to contact Microsoft's paid support. ("In special cases, charges that are ordinarily incurred for support calls may be canceled if a Microsoft Support Professional determines that a specific update will resolve your problem" -- from the knowledgebase article). Keeping the patch as a hotfix that is not freely downloadable ensures that hosting providers will not have it installed.
A Unicode encoding issue in .NET can cause all fonts to display as squares instead of letters in Netscape 4. I am not saying that MS has to support NS4. I think the decision of whether or not to support Netscape 4 should be up to the developer, not Microsoft. MS describes a workaround in the knowledgebase article. (Anecdotally) all other web development environments I have seen allow proper code to work in Netscape without a workaround.
Standards-compliant websites utilizing most web-development platforms usually work fine in Netscape and Mozilla, even if the developer did not to test or develop for Netscape and/or Mozilla. However, Microsoft's .NET Framework inserts code and encodings into web applications that categorically break these browsers."
Of course... (Score:1, Insightful)
Now I understand! (Score:4, Funny)
(By the way, I have inserted HTML code into this post such that anyone who has not added me to his "friends" list cannot reply to this post.)
(By the way, if you decide to add me to your "friends" list, HTML code will be added to all of your posts such that only I and my "friends" can read or respond to your posts.)
(Why? Because I believe in the Free Marketplace of Ideas, so long as all of those ideas are mine.)
Re:Now I understand! (Score:2)
Re:Now I understand! (Score:1)
Re:Now I understand! (Score:1)
Sure, just credit me --orthogonal.
Two explanations (Score:5, Funny)
"Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run." --Microsoft Windows developers (circa early 1990s; quoted anecdotally)
Re:Two explanations (Score:3, Funny)
Microsoft picked up Malice as a subsidiary when they acquired Evil [bbspot.com] a couple of years ago.
quick correction (Score:1)
Re:Two explanations (Score:2)
Try google for many references to it.
Yes (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure. Force everyone to use IE. Microsoft products are generally fairly intercompatible -- they just interoperate little or not at all with other products, particularly if it's inconvenient. If you're going to go partly MS (.NET), it's very painful to not go entirely MS.
The other alternative, of course, is to entirely ditch MS, but that's a much more controversial sort of decision, and could cost the decision-maker his job. Much safer and more reasonable to just throw a little extra company money at Microsoft and keep things working together.
[end sarcasm]
Re:Yes (Score:1, Troll)
Intercompatiable? Which one of Dubaya's handlers let him out of his cage and onto the internet?
There's a reason my bookmark is set to http://slashdot.org/
Re:Yes (Score:2, Funny)
P.S. The grandparent's spelling of "intercompatible" is the correct spelling. So is the usage of the word.
.Net (Score:5, Insightful)
Suppose I wnat it to do something else?
I imagine that you could write your own control, but that would sort of defeeat the purpose of the elaborate architecture that MS touts as saving considerable development time.
Its a real honeypot and bear trap.
Re:.Net (Score:4, Insightful)
It does it in a per-browser way. Its intention is understand and exploit advanced features of your browser.
Yes, MS can do this better for IE than anything else because they control it. It'd be irresponsible of them to start making assumptions about what Mozilla does / doesn't support without talking to the Mozilla folks and some heavy QA.
Presumably this isn't (yet) in their commerical interests.
Even if you ignore the
Re:.Net (Score:1)
It does it in a per-browser way. Its intention is understand and exploit advanced features of your browser.
They do quite a bad job at exploiting advanced features of Mozilla if they generate javascript statements that aren't according to the standard and are known not to be supported by it.
Some people has asked (Score:5, Interesting)
Frankly I don't see MS has that in their mind in the past when dealing with same issue.
Can Mono help with this? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Can Mono help with this? (Score:3, Interesting)
But, doesn't that mean that you are no longer using .net, you're using .mono. Also, if .net specifies that the html + javascript is written in one fashion, and .mono deviates from that, .mono is no longer considered .net compatible.
If anything, this may be the first real indication that Miguel and the .mono group is wasting their time by trying to implement a "standard" that is created and controlled by MS
Re:Can Mono help with this? (Score:2, Insightful)
No, it only loses full compatibility with that particular web control, and not
Hmmm.... (Score:1)
But for the choice to be left to the developer then Microsoft must provide support. Your statement is saying that Microsoft must support NS4.
I have just as little love (maybe less?) for Microsoft as anyone else but requiring them to support NS4 just doesn't seem right. As an ISV we have chosen not to support NS4 and Microsoft should have the same choice. Of course they should also document that choice and not just flatly say 'We support everything!
Lack of Vision (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft is always trying to force us into using their own software for everything, even when they do not have a good solution and they make it very difficult to effectively use the products of other companies. Microsoft only makes people angry when they do things like this.
Microsoft does not have a solution for everything, nor does Sun, Apple, Novell, Oracle, or any other company. Interoperability and compatibility are essential and the easier it is for us to integrate one company's products with those of other companies, the more we like and will use those products.
If Microsoft would make their products more compatible, accept responsibility for security, and provide more flexible and less extortive licensing, it would go a long way toward making Microsoft the company many of us want it to be.
Just get new controls (Score:5, Interesting)
This makes no sense (Score:2, Interesting)
If everyone in the world stops using MSIE and uses a different browser, the loss in revenue for Microsoft is exactly zero. If everyone in the world abandons Netscape and other broswers in favor of MSIE, the increase in revenue for Microsoft is exactly zero.
Why would a company work to create a monopoly in an area that provides them absolutely no benefit?
Re:This makes no sense (Score:1)
Re:This makes no sense (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This makes no sense (Score:1)
Anyway, that's about as coherant of a justification for this behavior as you'll get out of me.
since nobody else can answer your question (Score:4, Informative)
Never use the built in validators. they're poorly written and don't work well.
In general, the asp controls work ok if they're simple controls. Never depend on
Avoid the DataGrid control like the plague. Use repeater if you need to write a grid.
the built in ASP.NET controls work well if you use ie 6 on XP as a client, and degrade from there.
Re:since nobody else can answer your question (Score:1)
This all makes me think back of the times when I hadn't decided yet that I would no longer help people having problems with MS platforms. How can you possibly get any work done (let alone faster, as they claim), if you have to worry all the time about what you should and should not do, because otherwise all kind of strange things happen?
Supporting Netscape 4 (Score:5, Insightful)
Let it go. It has done more harm than even Microsoft to Web Standards.
Re:Supporting Netscape 4 (Score:1)
Robert
Re:Supporting Netscape 4 (Score:2)
If you write a webpage in standards-compliant html or xhtml with CSS stylesheets, it will work fine in IE (with some quirks), Netscape 6 and 7, Mozilla, Konq, Safari, Opera (though I don't recall whether they implement a true DOM yet), links, and hell, even lynx.
Only Netscape 4 and IE 4.x browsers screw things up quite so royally, and they've been doing so for half a decade now!
So, if you're still running one of those crawling horrors, switch to Something Else. You've been holding back the web quite long enough.
http://www.webstandards.org/act/campaign/buc/ [webstandards.org]
Re:Supporting Netscape 4 (Score:1)
WebStandards.org use CSS to hide an upgrade message and break standards by doing so. If you want to embrace standards listen to the w3c - not the shallow organisation that is webstandards.org.
Re:Supporting Netscape 4 (Score:1)
That said, I use server-side scripts to avoid that unpleasantry. If Netscape 4 or IE 3/4 are detected, instead of the main page, the server will generate a page telling you to upgrade, (or downgrade), or go to a different site. For a commercial site I'd probably do differently, but as it's not, I'm in a position to stand up for myself, and for those who are not in such a position themselves.
And, yes, the "go upgrade" stub page also uses valid xhtml 1.0 and CSS, but without any element/property combinations that are broken on older browsers.
If you want to use CSS Positioning, and/or CSS 2 properties, you're basically SOL with older browsers. (Something will display, typically a sickening mockery of what your page is supposed to look like.) Plain text browsers are infinitely better, because they can still show the logical structure of the page without garbling the results.
So, if you wish, continue bending over backwards to support deprecated browsers that by rights should have died off completely by now; I, for one, will kindly inform webgoers that there are alternatives to pursue, and holding on to their dinosaurian browsers is inadvertant rudeness to everyone on the web.
Re:Supporting Netscape 4 (Score:1)
It would be nice if every user was able to choose their browser, but to most people installing software is as foreign as installing an operating system. People use IE because it ships with their desktop - not because they've evaluated all the options. There are numerous technical reasons why a new browser isn't suitable.
The "go upgrade" stub treats the page like a pick-a-path adventure book, making CSS a requirement to reveal or hide the correct elements so the page exposes the correct parts to the correct people. A plain text browser, or a browser without CSS, won't get a logical structure - they'll see an upgrade message that doesn't apply to them.
Standards-wise, browsers (such as text-only) are under no obligation to use CSS. The upgrade stub hiding itself with CSS muddies the separation of content from style.
The standard's based approach would be to inform all users, regardless of whether they have CSS.
I don't have to bend over backwards. I put positioning relating CSS in it's own sheet and @import it. This takes a few more minutes. It's about doing a proper job.
I understand your point of view for the private sector who wants to balance audience and extra cost, but for those who want the widest audience or the government sector who have to reach the widest audience it's not an option.
Re:Supporting Netscape 4 (Score:1)
You seem to have missed my original point. I've tested my site with lynx and links, and both work fine. Any IE 5.x or later also works fine. Mozilla works like a dream. Konq, safari, Netscape 6 and higher, all work wonderfully.
My gripe is not against CSS-Free browsers (which will load the page just fine). My gripe is against the transitional generation of browsers (NS 4, IE 3/4), that partly supported a broken, kludgy, half-assed "I-can't-believe-it's-not-CSS", which did nasty things like break support for tables (NS 4), or just shear and uglify the page (IE 3/4).
The types of people who haven't heard of the modern generation of browsers are also probably the types who wouldn't know the distinction between a page that's broken by their browser, and a page that's broken by crappy design.
I feel duty-bound to inform them that their pre-millennial browsers are broken, and that there are plenty of freely-available modern browsers.
It's not like I'm telling them "Don't use Netscape; Don't use IE"; just to upgrade to a less ancient version.
I understand your point of view for the private sector who wants to balance audience and extra cost, but for those who want the widest audience or the government sector who have to reach the widest audience it's not an option.
For a commercial site, I'd probably do things differently (e.g., based on the user-agent, exclude certain stylesheets and insert HTML4 transitional code to indicate graphical markup). It's entirely possible, and not too terribly difficult, but I'd rather have more people upgrade their browsers than get a few extra visitors to my site.
If anything, I think it's important to do what one can to hasten the day when making fully modern, one-code-fits-all-browsers, standards-compliant web pages is an option for anyone.
Re:Supporting Netscape 4 (Score:1)
Re:Supporting Netscape 4 (Score:1)
- that it works in browsers is beside the point when one is talking about compliance
Agreed.
Any idea why this breaks? (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's the code in question from MSDN:
before: var theform = document.WebUserControl1_Form1;
after: var theform = document.forms["WebUserControl1:Form1"];
So there's two different form syntaxes, but that shouldn't be a problem. Is it because they are generating a form name with a colon (:) in it and then expecting it to be escaped out to a underscore (_)?
Re:Any idea why this breaks? (Score:2, Insightful)
The "id" attribute must be unique for each page, but the "name" attribute doesn't. Since the "id" is unique later versions of MS DOM (not sure bout moz/netscape etc) allow you to access the html element from the root document object using dot notation. NS4 doesn't support this.
The work around dereferences the object as being part of the forms collection. The forms collection is always available to the root document object and is hashed by the elements name (and sometimes also id) attributes.
Hope that cleared it up for ya.
Re:Any idea why this breaks? (Score:3)
Nescape 4 docs (pretty much the "DOM0" spec):
The value of each element in the forms array is , where nameAttribute is the NAME attribute of the form
But that obviously doesn't handle duplicate form names.
W3C HTML DOM1:
+ Doesn't say what's exactly in the document.forms collection.
+ Does define interface HTMLCollection.namedItem() as:
This method retrieves a Node using a name. It first searches for a Node with a matching id attribute. If it doesn't find one, it then searches for a Node with a matching name attribute
So my guess is that this is a issue of interpretation, with IE erring on the side of W3C DOM1, and Mozilla erring on the side of Netscape4-back-compat
Moz's behavior sorta makes sense with this old-style syntax, but I'd expect it to handle this, since they are so keen on modern standards.
Learn to write your own .Net webcontrols (Score:4, Informative)
This is because of Netscape 4's faulty handling of UTF-8 characters not a
The default encoding in ASP.Net is UTF-8.
You can change the default in your globally in web.config or per response in your aspx page.
Re:Learn to write your own .Net webcontrols (Score:1)
One Microsoft product has defaults that make it easier to use other Microsoft products. Isn't that just bizarre!?!?
Re:Learn to write your own .Net webcontrols (Score:1)
Too bad... (Score:3, Funny)
with Lynx, you know, but since I'm at a box with
IE at the moment...) and saw an ad for...
guess what...
Microsoft Visual Studio
Btw, did you ever notice
There must be a hidden reason behind that *hint*
Re:Too bad... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Too bad... (Score:1)
play with words if you want (I don't know the
English expression for that).
It should make you start thinking...
Re:Too bad... (Score:2)
Microsoft Is Rarely Part of the Solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Obligitory troll... (Score:1, Funny)
You own Microsoft.
Netscape 4 (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes, but... (Score:5, Informative)
High time I learned .NET! (Score:2)
Am I right?
WTF is the problem then? I deal with web-application controls creating invalid or mal-formed HTML and scripting all the time from open-source development platforms. If you don't like the way a library does its output, use a different library.
I see nothing to complain about here.
So let me look at this list from my perspective (Score:2, Interesting)
I started developing for Windows when Windows 3.0 was in beta and I didn't stop until mid 2000. In that time I developed software on Windows 3.0, 3.1, 3.1 Multimedia Edition, 95, 98, NT, and 2000. I used Visual Basic from 1.0 on. I developed in C++ using Borland and Microsoft tools. I've developed using libraries and APIs that Microsoft put together from COM and DCOM to TAPI and DirectX. I can go on and on about this but the point is that I've used Microsoft tools, software, and development kits up one side and down the other and because I worked for a long time at Tandy (now RadioShack) and Tandy worked closely with Microsoft I did a lot of it with beta stuff that the public never saw.
On the other hand, I only started using Java tentatively in 2000 and really went full bore with it when I moved to a
So let me look at this list from my perspective as: Lots of reasons I want
It's benefits a criminal organization. Not one that's been found guilty of crimes once or maybe twice, but lots and lots of times. Those crimes are many and varied, but here's just a few of them: Stac Electronics v. Microsoft, DOJ v. Microsoft, Sun v. Microsoft.
P.S. If you want to split hairs, Stac v. Microsoft isn't a criminal action, it's doesn't stem from a criminal abuse of their monopoly like the other two cases. Instead it was just a case of a small company being driven out of business by willful patent infringement, theft of trade secrets, etc.
Microsoft isn't just one thing anymore. It's too damn big for that. I'm sure even Bill himself knows better than to think that he truly controls the whole ship because it's become big enough that he can't possibly know all the projects, people, etc. anymore. But even a really large company still has a kind of collective personality that it exudes and a large part of the personality both internal and external to Microsoft for many years now is that of a total control freak.
If they don't own it, if they don't control it, if they didn't create it, if it doesn't have a broad stamp from Microsoft on it, then they don't want it. Sometimes it's sufficient for the thing to merely exist and they'll refuse to acknowledge it, other times they need to actively stamp it out because they can't control it.
When was the last time you can remember Microsoft saying they supported a standard? That is, not something they invented and submitted a RFC for, an actual, take it off the shelf and re-implement it without renaming it or "improving" it so it doesn't work with anybody else standard. C++? Basic? HTML? A video or audio codec? Java? Anything?
I'm sure there's something, somebody will point out their excellent support for TCP/IP or something and I'm sure that's true. But if you were to look at Microsoft as a person in your life, you'd wonder what was wrong with him or her such that so much had to be controlled by that person.
When your business is selling the operating systems that 90+% of everybody uses, software development tools should not be a profit center.
Why should I have to plunk down a couple of thousand dollars for a "universal subscription" in order to have access to compilers and basic development information? Sun doesn't have to do that? On this point I'll quote from the
Marketing. Have you been "lucky" enough to catch one of the
So they are going to pull a page out of Intel's bum-bum-buh-bum "Intel Inside" playbook and try to sell the brand like it's sneakers and cola. Trust us, you'll look cool if you use it, and we'll keep hammering the brand on TV so somebody who doesn't have much tech savvy in your organization will ask you if you are using it, or have plans to port to it, or whatever, even if he hasn't got a clue what "it" is in this case.
They don't trust you. They don't like what they can't control and they can't control you. They can try and they always will keep trying but ultimately you are going to see them keep trying to do things and always keep a step towards the door just so they can bolt if they have to. Want to see what I mean? Go visit GotDotNet sometime if you haven't already been there. It's the grassroots community website that Microsoft put up to support
Ever been to SourceForge? Of course you have, everybody has because that's one of the hubs of all open source projects. You can go there and get the source of thousands of cool open source projects and it really serves the community well. There's even hundreds of projects now that list C# among their programming languages. So why did Microsoft feel compelled to create their own GotDotNet Workspaces that is clearly just a ripoff of SourceForge?
A few reasons are fairly clear: First, at many of their workspaces you don't get in unless they know who you are. Ever been stopped at SourceForge and asked for a name and password to look at a project? What about download binaries or source? No? At GotDotNet you will, lots of projects are marked with a lock. Second, forget about all those messy licenses that Microsoft might not approve of, you don't need to worry your little head about BSD vs. GPL vs. LGPL. You've got the one true workspace license that you have to agree to, or else you won't be putting your project there. Lastly, well it's kind of obvious, but it's really all about control isn't it. After all, if you aren't under their thumb, that has to be a bad thing. So a SourceForge that they control is pretty much a requirement, isn't it?
It's a really sad way for a lot of people to waste a whole lot of time rebuilding that which already exists. Wouldn't the whole computing world be a lot better if there wasn't a team of people, maybe a couple of teams of people building complete copies of
In the end, we'll all just be left with another way to do the exact same thing only in a different language. Lord knows the world benefits now from being unable to share media between France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the US, and Japan because we can't all speak the same language. I benefit every day from the fact that I can't read a Japanese manga I might enjoy or understand a TV show from Europe. Once you are done building this tower, go build a few more right beside it using Perl, Python, and Ruby too. They're all trailing behind in certain areas, we need to make sure the same set of stuff is reinvented and rewritten for all of them too.
I'm tired now and I'm sure I can probably come up with some more stuff to add to rant but it's not really going to change anything anyway.
embrace, EXTEND, extinguish (Score:1, Informative)
What morons adopted.NET? How many times are people going to fall for the same trick?
A workaround (Score:1)
We use .NET and it supports Mozilla beautifully (Score:1)
It was easy to get ASP.NET's controls to all emit HTML 4.0 regardless of the browser it thought it was seeing. We just turned off the down-level rendering.
All the Web Controls we've tried work flawlessly with Mozilla. We use the DataList and DataGrid extensively, and they're great. Postback processing is no problem. Some controls are too quirky for me (like getting the Calendar to output without a ton of "style=" splashed all around), and we ended up building controls that weren't there (wizards, tabs, tree controls, etc.).
The control architecture in
I can't speak to the pain you'll have trying to ASP.NET for Netscape 4. But I can reassure you that it's not only simple but pleasant to use when developing against the standards (HTML 4.0/CSS).