David Madore's WebLog: Browser woes

Yesterday I reworked the way spam-free email adresses are written on this site (as in: my email address is davidwwwmadoreorg; if you don't see anything remarkable about that link, it's proof that the system works as it should! the whole point is to make it as transparent as possible to bona fide users, as much as JavaScript and CSS permit it, while making it very difficult for crawlers to harvest such email addresses for spamming purposes). It should now function more or less on any browser: for once I did allow myself to go through a certain amount of bugware, although of course you should remember to read this warning. Only Mozilla and Opera version 7 give me full satisfaction (and even then, not really: Opera, for example, does not recognize data: URIs, such as this, which I intended to use as an indirect link to email addreses when JavaScript is not available). Konqueror has catastrophic reflow bugs when the DOM is used to modify the document's content; and it also has the weirdest bugs in interpreting the CSS content property. IE simply does not understand the latter property, and has other irritating limitations in the DOM (such as not understanding Node.TEXT_NODE); by the way, did I mention that IE ignores the HTML <q> element, which means that half of the quotation marks on this site will be mysteriously gone? Even the Amaya Web browser, the testbed of the W3 Consortium, has a limitation which causes it to ignore the CSS content property. And of course, text browsers are inherently limited. What a mess! How many hours wasted in pursuit of the combination that will work around every browser bug I can find. Well, I'm not doing this a second time: so from now on I'll stick to the policy of referring browser non-conformance to my general disclaimer on the subject.