[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: Haddock version 2.8.0 -> HTML vs. XHTML

[Mark Lentczner]

On Sep 6, 2010, at 2:40 AM, Henning Thielemann wrote:
> ... focusing on a small set of assumed popular browsers ...

I didn't want to assume either. I ran a survey of the Haskell community and got over a 150 responses. The multiple choice browser question yielded:

	Firefox: 59%
	Chrome:  51%
	Safari:  24%
	Other:   11%
	Opera:    7%
	IE 8:     2%
	IE 7:     1%
	IE 6:	  1%

As I did the work on Haddock, I tested the results on five browser/os combinations on my own machines, and about 30 browser/os combinations via browsershots[1].

> and complying to their quirks is the wrong way.

I believe the only sop to browser quirks in the current Haddock output are three lines of CSS that came from YUI 3: CSS Fonts [2] to achieve consistent font sizing in IE. These are well researched and minimal.

There were a few times where I tried something (usually a choice of markup and CSS) that looked nice in WebKit browsers (Safari and Chrome), but didn't work in Firefox or others. In those cases I retreated to other approaches. A notable example is the "Portability" box in the upper right. I wanted that to be a dl list, and could get it to style nicely in all browsers except Firefox on Linux! I retreated to a table in that case. Since both the thing I tried and the result were valid markup and CSS, I'm hoping you won't consider this a major concession to "quirks".

> All these incompatibilities between browsers and common abuse in HTML
> and XHTML make it a nightmare for me to process web documents as in my
> online web-site "enhancement" :-) service:
> 
> http://www.haskell.org.monadtransformer.parallelnetz.de/haskellwiki/Category:Monad

An excellent service! I hope the new, cleaner markup of Haddock works with less pain.

	- Mark


Mark Lentczner
http://www.ozonehouse.com/mark/
IRC: mtnviewmark

[1] http://browsershots.org/
[2] http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/3/cssfonts/