A CSS limitation: it's not supported by lynx

April 21, 2006

That CSS isn't supported by lynx may sound like a peculiar thing to call a limitation of CSS, but it does have one important consequence: If I want lynx to format something right, I can't use CSS.

(Well, I suppose I can use CSS in addition to non-CSS methods. But I have to have the non-CSS methods.)

As strange as it may sound, I still value looking good in lynx (and links, a related text mode browser). (And in Konqueror/Safari. And even in Internet Explorer, although sometimes it's tempting. I have pretty much given up on Netscape 4, though, except to the extent that it's lynx-compatible.)

One case where this comes up in WanderingThoughts is the day marker strings (the centered bold '2006-04-20' and so on) that mark the start of a day's posts. The morally proper way to do these is to put them in <div class="daymarker"> and then apply the centering and bolding via CSS. But that would look crappy in lynx, so instead I use the older, deprecated way:

<p class="daymarker" align=center> <b> 2006-04-20 </b> </p>

(The class is currently unused.)

These days I'm a web design pragmatist; I'm more interested in looking right than in doing something in the currently 'blessed as proper' way (especially as the currently approved way keeps changing). I prefer to do things in the proper way, because I'm geeky enough that it makes me feel good, but if the proper way conflicts with pragmatics the proper way loses. For me, intellectual purity is not worth looking ugly.

Written on 21 April 2006.
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Last modified: Fri Apr 21 00:53:19 2006
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