[Pmwiki-users] a plea to all custom skin makers

H. Fox haganfox
Tue Jan 11 16:35:02 CST 2005


I'll chime in on this one since I've been spending some hours lately 
creating a simple skin for PmWiki 2.  Creating the Lean skin was a much 
more ambitious undertaking that I expected it to be.

Spam Account Speedxs wrote:
> A good skin is simple enough to work on all browsers.

It's almost impossible to have a universal description of what 
constitutes a "good skin", but that's part of the point of skins in the 
first place.

Any skin that works on all browsers will not work well -- or maybe it 
just won't look appealing -- on some of them.  For example, there's 
(almost) no reason for a skin to require compatibility with Netscape 3 
or IE 3 because they lack support for some important and useful web 
standards and nobody should be using those browsers anyway.

What about text based browsers?  Lynx doesn't do well with tables...

http://qdig.sourceforge.net/wiki-skins/LeanSkinWithLynxBrowser.png

...but Links does.

http://qdig.sourceforge.net/wiki-skins/LeanSkinWithLinksBrowser.png

Most of the skins in the Cookbook don't render very well in Konqueror 
2.2.2.  In Netscape 4 most of the skins in the cookbook are missing 
content; one produces nothing but a "not found" error (because NS4 can't 
find the missing stdlayout.css); another crashes the browser completely.

What about the browsers that run on Palm Pilots and little tiny cellular 
telephones?  What about screen readers for the blind or browsers that 
convert web pages to Braille?

Rather than require a skin to work in all browsers it's probably best to 
use some system for knowing each skin's limitations as Neil Herber suggests.

Giving the skin author some feedback will allow the skin to improve over 
time and it will let WikiAdministrators know what to expect.

> Contains javascript code that uses the UserAgent data to call the proper 
> routine to work with the browser that a user uses.

If you want to support all browsers then you cannot require JavaScript 
because some browsers don't support it and others have it disabled for 
security reasons.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

> Skins designed merely for MSIE usually contain code mozilla / opera 
> browsers don't handle.
> Don't design skins with special MSIE tricks,

I agree that this is undesirable.

The same could be said about requiring JavaScript (for menus, etc).  At 
least a skin should "degrade gracefully", so any feature that uses "IE 
tricks" or JavaScript is not necessary for the site to be functional.

> half the world is being 
> advised to use anything but MSIE already.

Only half?  :)

Hagan

> 
> Neil Herber wrote:
> 
>> Well, at least all of you who are kind enough to post your skins on 
>> PmWiki.org ...
>>
>> First of all, thanks for posting the skins. They are a godsend to 
>> those of us who don't have the knowledge or patience to create our own 
>> skin.
>>
>> I do find it frustrating to see a skin I like, download it and install 
>> it, only to find out that it does not render "properly" in IE 6. Many 
>> would argue that this is an IE 6 problem, and I agree. But telling 
>> that to my clients working in government agencies where the IT 
>> department has locked down all of the PCs, preventing the installation 
>> of even so much as a browser plugin doesn't do me any good.
>>
>> I am not about to ask that all skins work on all browsers, but what 
>> would really help me (and possibly others) is a statement in each 
>> Cookbook/Skin description something like this:
>>
>> !! Browser Compatibility
>> * Works with Firefox and Safari
>> * Does not work with IE 6 (WIn or Mac)
>> * Not tested with  Opera
>>
>> That would save me getting all excited about a skin, downloading it, 
>> and then finding my clients can see the edit box any more.
>>
>>
>> Neil
>>
>> Neil Herber
>> Corporate info at http://www.eton.ca/
>> Eton Systems, 15 Pinepoint Drive, Nepean, ON, Canada K2H 6B1
>> Tel: (613) 829-4668
>>
> 
> 



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