Jason Elliot Benda's Home Page Lab

So, you're probably wondering what is all this. Well, it's fairly simple, really. This page, which is sitting where JEBHP 10 will eventually be, is a place for a little experimentation. This is The Lab, where I will be trying to figure out what works and what doesn't, and how it works.

The general setup goes something like this: Coming up pretty soon, there should be a list of pages here in The Lab. There will be a link to the page, but also I'll have a Lab Notebook section under each link to discuss how each page looks (or doesn't look) and why I think that might happen.

Lab Pages

Unless otherwise specified, the Lab Notebook comments are assumed to be made on my home system, which is running Windows ME on a 19-inch monitor at 1280x1024x32bit. I will try to list other systems as I test them.

Browsers I am testing (as of 12:39 02Mar02) are Internet Explorer 6.0.26 (IE), Netscape Navigator 6.2.1 (NN), Opera 6.0.1 (Opera), and Lynx 2.8.4 (Lynx). While I also have NCSA Mosaic 3.0 installed, I mean really now, I don't think we need to go there.

• colors.html -- a simple table showing 216 color blocks with a header
  • IE renders as expected
  • NN does not recognize the height attribute in the tr tags and renders the blocks at line-height
  • Opera forms font-family: small-caps by also shrinking numbers and parentheses to the size of the small-caps
  • Lynx ignores the table and prints the character codes in rows of 18 (as expected)
• browse.html -- a simple JavaScript display of the browser name
  • IE renders as expected: "You are viewing this page with the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser on a Win32 platform. Isn't that nice?"
  • Opera lies and says it is IE: "You are viewing this page with the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser on a Win32 platform. Isn't that nice?"
  • NN renders as expected: "You are viewing this page with the Netscape browser on a Win32 platform. Isn't that nice?"
  • Lynx honors the noscript tag and bypasses the script altogether: "You are viewing this page. Isn't that nice?"
• date.html -- a simple JavaScript display of the date
• form1.html -- the first shot at a self-grading form
• header.html -- a CSS test for header displays and multiple style cascades
  • IE renders the H3 header slightly wider than the H2 header. The font weight appears bolder in the text that isn't small-caps. The plain text looks larger than either the H4 or H5 headers.
  • NN renders as expected, except the small-caps doesn't appear bold at all. Also, since NN gives a choice of stylesheets, the default one to load is the first one (Purple). In IE, the default was the last one (Default). Including the same style sheet both first and last (as Orange first) satisfies both NN and IE, but then Opera ignores the second inclusion of the Orange sheet and displays the last sheet with that ignore (Teal). (With the final include order of Purple-Orange-Teal-Default, each graphical browser displays a different colorset.)
  • Opera renders small-caps apparently not bolded, and plain text is sized as in IE. The H4 and H5 headers are illegibly small; apparently Opera doesn't like font-size: inherit;.
  • Lynx displays H1 headers centered, H2 headers flush to left margin, and H3-H6 indented two spaces per level below H2. Plain text was indented three spaces, either inside or outside the P tag.
• colchange.html -- a JavaScript test for changing the color of this page!
  • After a SUBSTANTIAL amopunt of debugging and reconfiguration of this page, IE and NN both render as expected. (YAY!)
  • Opera fails the JavaScript execution of user-defined functions. I'm not sure why this is. It processes JavaScript OK in browse.html, so I dunno.
  • Lynx ignores the scripts, but since it doesn't change colors in stylesheets anyway, its behavior is fine.