| Monday, November 27, 2006 |
12:01 - Ah don't care who y'are, that's funny raht there
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Check this out. If you have a non-standard browser, such as Camino, go to Zune.net, and notice that the whole page is rendered without any CSS, as one big long retro-1995 unformatted mess.
Then view it in a "standard" browser, like Safari or Firefox. It looks quite nice.
Then check out the source. For "recognized" browsers, it's spitting out the following:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/xweb/lib/css/Argo_default_UpLevel_en.css?ver=1420" /><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://www.zune.net/en-us/z_singlesource/fl-toplevelskin-coachella.css" /><noscript><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/xweb/lib/css/Noscript.css" /></noscript><script type="text/javascript" src="/xweb/lib/javascript/general.js?rev=1420"></script><script type="text/javascript">
Or something similar, presumably a browser-specific set of CSS files. But on non-recognized browsers, it doesn't print out those lines at all.
What's especially funny is that the conditional block above also contains the <script type="text/javascript"> that opens the big chunk of JavaScript that follows; so the JavaScript doesn't work in a browser that doesn't trigger the block to be emitted—it's interpreted as a big comment. But it also has a <noscript> tag. So they tried to do traditional browser backward-compatibility, and only succeeded in screwing up actual browser backward-compatibility.
This is just as much fun as back when they released IE 4.0 (I believe it was), and their site contained a whole big long list of features explaining why it was better than Netscape—but it was missing the </TABLE> tag, which made the entire page not render in Netscape.
Or back when they released IE 3.0, and put up a page at the old IE 1.0 default URL to push users to the new browser's download page; but it had a broken include in it that printed out an error that said something like: "Error #88022: Type mismatch." So hapless users signing up for Internet accounts would fire up their browser for the first time, see this page and this error message, and start uncertainly typing "m-i-s-m-a-t-c-h"...
Via Chris.
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Brian Tiemann
