Federico Bianchi

First of all, kudos for your nice site: I especially enjoyed your JS coverage (and CSS too).

A couple of suggestions:

- whenever you have to test for multiple IE, another viable solution is
  the so-called "[brand]" you may find at the URI
  [URL] - it comes with [utility]
  on IE 5.0+, which may be useful at times, and has a plethora of
  different versions; on the bad side, I needed to reinstall IE 8.0 and
  then manually delete the IE version registry key when I used it on an
  Italian NLS box (no pain, no gain...). Nevertheless, I think it may be
  worth a look
[Ed. I will not recommend this brand, not least because of the problems
pointed out here, but also because of the marketing approach the maintainer
of that package used when contacting me. The packages I recommend are
better.]

- if you are concerned with spiders, why don't you make a local-linked ZIP
  file for offline use? If bandwidth is a concern, I'd personally would
  _happily_ host any static content here on our FTP area (we are connected
  via optical fiber)

- an entity/char compatibility chart might be useful at times: living in a
  Latin country, using &entity; syntax for Latin-1 accented chars and
  ' for ' is generally enough for me, but I surprisingly found some
  quirks when using, say, double quote entities

... and a small question:

- we are now starting to concern with mobile users. Choosing XHTML 1.1
  Basic for structural markup is actually fine for most documents (though
  I have to serve them as text/html to avoid quirks with old browsers),
  but it would be useful quite to have different page layouts for desktop
  and mobile: I found a couple of JS scripts doing the job depending on
  the "screen" width, but such a solution looks a bit fragile to me. Any
  smarter idea?

Regards
             Federico Bianchi

> with IE in particular, it depends entirely on what fonts are installed,
> and what font IE is using

True.

> (NetFront is the main exception, but some versions of that support
> handheld media instead)

... I happened to see our sites on my own cell phone (which is running
NetFront...); Opera Mini is dealing fine with it already. I'll try to see
whether the CSS handheld media works.

Thanks a lot for your quick answer (and for sharing all that information)

Regards

             Federico Bianchi

Do you know of any way to get a reasonably cross-platform online rich text
editor ([brand] or [brand] are way too picky, and, having in mind simple
in-content editing, I don't actually need all that design-mode power).

Currently, the ones which suit me most are [brand] and [brand], which can be
found respectively at [URL] and
 - but none of them seems to me truly
satisfactory. JSVI at [URL] is nicely coded,
but still a joke and not very useful so far.

As a side note: if you don't know it already, you may find the command line
browser edbrowse curious. It supports JS (courtesy of SpiderMonkey), and is
quite geeky in nature; I use it sometimes as a robot. You may find it at
[URL]

Regards
             Federico Bianchi

PS: do you know of any way to configure Opera to leave remote timestamps
    when downloading files?

> IE creates *the most hideous markup* that needs to be cleaned up

I am using [brand] as a backend filter. Not as general as [brand], but
it's quite fast and works.

> cover more corner cases that you might bump into

General users won't settle for anything less than a WYSIWYG rich text
editor, and, as you pointed out, there are just too many corner cases. I'll
probably let users choose between [brand] and [brand] when setting their
parameters.

>> edbrowse
>
> In general, when it comes to low capability browsing, I'd
> just recommend to Web developers that they test in Lynx

I tend to agree. It's already a good robot-like platform, though, and has
the potential to become a _very_ good one.