How Firefox unfriendly is this layout

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Feb 02, 2006, Ronnie Gauthier wrote:
>On Thu, 2 Feb 2006 18:04:45 +1100 (EST)
>james at jamesmcdonald.id.au wrote:
>
>> A few weeks ago I remember logging on here
>> http://www.commbank.com.au/default.asp and getting an ok webpage.
>> 
>> Is anyone else that uses ff getting a bad layout?
>> 
>> They must have got a new web developer who doesn't have firefox installed
>> because the layout on this truly suckeths... I can't believe there are
>> still developers out there that don't cross test.
>> 

>Guess the designer does not understand how text size is a matter of viewer
>choice.

The very idea of web ``designers'' is foreign to the original
intent of HTML where the pages were supposed to adapt well to the
browser's capabilities.

I wrote a python script that I use do de-Microsoft HTML by removing all
metatags, font declarations, etc. -- it also works well on OpenPKG.org
generated HTML to produce clean HTML.

Just for fun, and to learn my way around the Readiris OCR (Optical
Character Recognition) software for Mac OS X, I tried converting a PDF file
from Groklaw to HTML.  Readiris will do OCR on entire PDF documents (with
50 page limit on the version I have), producing RTF (Rich Text Format).  I
loaded the RTF, and saved it as HTML with Microsoft Office 2004 and
OpenOffice.org 2.0 on the Mac.  The link below shows the HTML from Word,
OpenOffice.org, and the clean version with formatting garbage removed.

	http://www.celestial.com/Members/bill/Drafts/pdf2html/

In addition, it was far easier to join paragraphs split across pages in the
PDF document with vim on the clean HTML than to try do do the same thing in
either Word or OpenOffice.org.  Either of the GUI word processors did very
strange things when deleting the extra paragraph ender to join the pages.

Bill
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