As both a wannabe engineer and a guy who likes Zen, I appreciate iCab. It does some cool things and it's very small and efficient. As a web designer, though, iCab is just slightly better than useless, and it's only going to get worse.
The problem is that the guy is obsessed with making The Perfectly Standards Compliant Browser [tm]. This is great in theory, except that (a) many pages aren't standards compliant and like it or not your browser has to deal with them rather than making a little pukey face, and (b) iCab's designer is apparently ignoring modern standards until he gets HTML 4 absolutely just so perfect. For the most part, he's perfectly spot on now, so in a sense iCab is 100% compliant with the state of the art -- in 1997.
Unfortunately, its CSS support approaches slightly worse then useless. You can see a technical list of its failures here (http://www.macedition.com/cb/resources/icab_notes.shtml#formstyling), but we'll just say that for all the attention its developer has lavished on basic HTML, he's been pretty woeful at lavishing attention on CSS -- iCab is, irony of ironies, only useful these days largely because web developers at big commercial sites are way behind on adapting the standards that iCab is behind at implementing. If you look at nearly any site I've done in the last few years, though, iCab gets it so wrong you'd be better off using Lynx. (Even LiveJournal is utterly broken in its display, lookiog at it just now.)
To be fair, it's arguable that developing a browser from scratch that really does what people expect in 2004 is simply not a one-person, or even two-person, job anymore. Some people swear by iCab, I know, but my experience with it has always led more to "at" than to "by." Supposedly iCab 3 will have full CSS 2 support and things will be much happier when it comes out, though. (At the current rate of development that should be Summer 2008.)
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momijizukamori
no subject
Date: 2004-08-02 10:05 (UTC)The problem is that the guy is obsessed with making The Perfectly Standards Compliant Browser [tm]. This is great in theory, except that (a) many pages aren't standards compliant and like it or not your browser has to deal with them rather than making a little pukey face, and (b) iCab's designer is apparently ignoring modern standards until he gets HTML 4 absolutely just so perfect. For the most part, he's perfectly spot on now, so in a sense iCab is 100% compliant with the state of the art -- in 1997.
Unfortunately, its CSS support approaches slightly worse then useless. You can see a technical list of its failures here (http://www.macedition.com/cb/resources/icab_notes.shtml#formstyling), but we'll just say that for all the attention its developer has lavished on basic HTML, he's been pretty woeful at lavishing attention on CSS -- iCab is, irony of ironies, only useful these days largely because web developers at big commercial sites are way behind on adapting the standards that iCab is behind at implementing. If you look at nearly any site I've done in the last few years, though, iCab gets it so wrong you'd be better off using Lynx. (Even LiveJournal is utterly broken in its display, lookiog at it just now.)
To be fair, it's arguable that developing a browser from scratch that really does what people expect in 2004 is simply not a one-person, or even two-person, job anymore. Some people swear by iCab, I know, but my experience with it has always led more to "at" than to "by." Supposedly iCab 3 will have full CSS 2 support and things will be much happier when it comes out, though. (At the current rate of development that should be Summer 2008.)