Browser compatibility

We generally aim for full XHTML and CSS compliance here... Thus any question of browser compatibility should be pointless. But in reality, there seem to be some browsers that have a slightly different understanding of the so-called standards (or sometimes even none at all), which may lead to incorrect display of the one or the other page element. In such a case, please consult your browser vendor to correct these issues. Normally the latest Mozilla and derivates seems to do a good job with this, Internet Explorer 6 and Opera 7 should also get the main point to the screen, where Opera 8 seems to do considerably better than version 7.

There are some points in the code where browser-specific decisions are made. The most important is the content-type that the generated pages will be tagged with. Normally, XHTML pages should be published with the application/xhtml+xml content-type, but at least one major browser cannot handle this type and will be served text/html pages instead. There are also different understandings of the CSS standard so that the CSS definition files can be generated depending on the browser requesting it. Mozilla browsers, including Firefox and Camino, have implemented some CSS3 features that are currently accessible with proprietary names. There are also different JavaScript implementations for some functions. The code is generally designed to be compatible with any major browser, JavaScript code sections for example are designed in an “Internet Explorer compatible” and at the same time XHTML compliant way (which bloats the code a little but then makes further code branches unnecessary). Features like a browser’s supported content types or special JavaScript capabilities are mostly determined by the appropriate mechanisms instead of the generic browser name, i.e. the HTTP Accept-Type header or the existance of special JavaScript objects like style.filter.

The board uses the UTF-8 Unicode character encoding by default. Depending on the selected language and user-posted content, your system may lack some fonts to display all characters correctly. Installing special language packs from your system maintainer or Unicode fonts may help. All Mozillas, Internet Explorer since version 6 and Opera 7.2 or newer are known to sufficiently support Unicode. Windows users may have installed the font “Arial Unicode” on their system, which comes with Microsoft Office and seems to contain any character you’ve (n)ever seen.