Forwarding Address: OS X

Monday, March 11, 2002

Reader Dave Hendler chimes in on OmniWeb issues:
OmniWeb is cool.  Being a Cocoa app, you do get the cool anti-aliasing
features of OS X.  And if pages are designed the right way, it probably is
one of the best looking browsers out there.

My major current problem with OmniWeb is its lack of support for Cascading
Style Sheets, one of the more important standards that is doing a lot of
good for the web.  Take a look at my site, http://sollaires.net/, in
OmniWeb, then in IE5, Mozilla, or Opera.  I use CSS for layout that looks
pretty good on most Mac browsers.  Netscape 4 is smart enough to know it
can't do the CSS, so you get a plain page.  OmniWeb, however, tries to do
its own thing which ends up creating a mess you can't read.  It doesn't
admit to not knowing CSS, which creates a problem for us designers and
developers.  So any site that tries to use fairly sophisticated CSS to
control how their site looks end up being terribly munged in OmniWeb even
though they are doing everything in their power, including adhering to
published standards, to make it right.  That's my main beef with OmniWeb.

I do believe it will get better with subsequent releases.  And it does do a
good job with most current sites.  It's real problem is that it isn't yet
forward compatible with where the web _should_ be heading, regardless of
whether it is or not.

So there are my two cents.
Thanks Dave!