Ouch: older windows laptops

I have two windows machines I use for testing: one IE6 and one IE7,
both XP boxes.

When I develop websites I use vi and firefox/linux, but I test
at various screen resolutions, on little silver Mac/Safari, Opera,
Firefox, IE6 and IE7. I thought that covered my bases.

But I just looked at one of my sites, that looks OK on XP 1024/768 IE6
on 17" Dell flatscreen.

But the same site is badly twisted at 1024/768 IE6 on an old Windows
laptop, of which there are still a zillion floating around.
So ok, I can start to test for that too.

But I wonder if there is any insight here. I thought
1024/768 XP IE6 would be the same regardless.
I'm obviously ignorant about something here.

The laptop display is physically smaller, but I thought
the resolution setting normalized that somehow.
And obviously it doesn't.

In article <tOqdnQod-cU2G1TVnZ2dnUVZ_vWdnZ2d (AT) bresnan (DOT) com>,
salmobytes <salmo (AT) byteme (DOT) org> wrote:

I have two windows machines I use for testing: one IE6 and one IE7,
both XP boxes.

When I develop websites I use vi and firefox/linux, but I test
at various screen resolutions, on little silver Mac/Safari, Opera,
Firefox, IE6 and IE7. I thought that covered my bases.

But I just looked at one of my sites, that looks OK on XP 1024/768 IE6
on 17" Dell flatscreen.

But the same site is badly twisted at 1024/768 IE6 on an old Windows
laptop, of which there are still a zillion floating around.
So ok, I can start to test for that too.

But I wonder if there is any insight here. I thought
1024/768 XP IE6 would be the same regardless.
I'm obviously ignorant about something here.

The laptop display is physically smaller, but I thought
the resolution setting normalized that somehow.
And obviously it doesn't.

Check the default fonts and font sizes used in the versions of IE 6
on each computer (if possible); this can make a difference if you are
relying on pixel sizing and positioning. (I guess you might also want
to compare the version numbers, in case that makes a difference to
the way the rendering engine handles things.)

Post a URL if you want more concrete information.

On 2008-09-11, salmobytes wrote:

I have two windows machines I use for testing: one IE6 and one IE7,
both XP boxes.

When I develop websites I use vi and firefox/linux, but I test
at various screen resolutions, on little silver Mac/Safari, Opera,
Firefox, IE6 and IE7. I thought that covered my bases.

But I just looked at one of my sites, that looks OK on XP 1024/768 IE6
on 17" Dell flatscreen.

But the same site is badly twisted at 1024/768 IE6 on an old Windows
laptop, of which there are still a zillion floating around.
So ok, I can start to test for that too.

But I wonder if there is any insight here. I thought
1024/768 XP IE6 would be the same regardless.
I'm obviously ignorant about something here.

The laptop display is physically smaller, but I thought
the resolution setting normalized that somehow.
And obviously it doesn't.

Do your pages vaildate? Check them out at
<http://validator.w3.org>.

Do you use fixed sizes (font-size, width, height, etc.) measured in
pk? (That's a common mistake.)

Do you have a URL for a sample page?

--
Chris F.A. Johnson <http://cfaj.freeshell.org>
================================================== =================
Author:
Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (2005, Apress)

salmobytes wrote:

But the same site is badly twisted at 1024/768 IE6 on an old Windows
laptop, of which there are still a zillion floating around.
So ok, I can start to test for that too.

Maybe automatic image resizing is moving things around on the low res PC?

In article <gac4fo$g9v$1 (AT) registered (DOT) motzarella.org>,
C A Upsdell <cupsdell (AT) upsdell (DOT) invalid> wrote:

salmobytes wrote:
But the same site is badly twisted at 1024/768 IE6 on an old Windows
laptop, of which there are still a zillion floating around.
So ok, I can start to test for that too.

Maybe automatic image resizing is moving things around on the low res PC?

The res on the two screens he is comparing are claimed to be the same.

--
dorayme

David Stone wrote:
...post a url.


This site has some IRB clinical information on it, so I can't post it on
usenet....even thought that part is behind a password barrier,
I just can't do it.

I could make a hacked copy over the weekend, and post that.
I'm out of town tomorrow.

The site validates at 4.01` Transitional. I thought 4.01 transitional
(with DOCTYPE etc) was the most universally portable.

I could make it something else a bit stricter. Wouldn't have to tweak
much to do that.

salmobytes wrote:

David Stone wrote:
...post a url.

Double and now triple ouch.
This particular site has some "pure css" dropdown menus using
code from positioniseverything dot com or net, or what ever it is.

But that stuff requires a javascript hack for IE6 (works fine
in everything else).

That could be the problem. I'll look into that.
.....which would mean, among other things, this doesn't belong
as a discussion in this group.

On 09/11/08 03:25 pm, salmobytes wrote:

The site validates at 4.01` Transitional. I thought 4.01 transitional
(with DOCTYPE etc) was the most universally portable.

No, HTML Strict produces the most uniform experience.

--
jmm (hyphen) list (at) sohnen-moe (dot) com
(Remove .AXSPAMGN for email)

On 11 Sep, 21:59, salmobytes <sa... (AT) byteme (DOT) org> wrote:

But I wonder if there is any insight here. I thought
1024/768 XP IE6 would be the same regardless.

No, there's an IE bug that interacts with Windows.

If you have Windows running on a high resolution / small screen setup,
there's a Winodws Desktop (not IE) setting to use "large fonts" so as
to mkae things readable. Modern machinery (which means "old" for
desktops and "quite new" for laptops) is quite likely to be using this
setting.

IE over-compensates for this setting and applies it twice. So correct
HTML / CSS coding on IE, running on a high-res / small-size screen
with large fonts selected, may give incorrect font sizes, by which I
mean that "1em" on the web is different to the physical size of
default size text on that Windows desktop.