IE 4 Linux

For cross-browser testing you can thankfully run IE6 (and 5/4) on Linux with the handy IE4Linux package.

• IE 4 Linux

Assuming you’ve got WINE you’ll also need cabextract, so add a repository to your distro,

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt hardy main

sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude install cabextract

Installing IE6 on Linux is a little tricky, the best way i’ve found to get it working is doing;

su root
wget http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/downloads/ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
tar zxvf ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
cd ies4linux-*
./ies4linux

Click to create icon on Desktop, it’ll run thru downloading packages and prefixes for Wine after which you should have IE on your Linux distro, which will be accessible (if you lose the desktop shortcut) from,

/root/bin/ie6

Safari / WebKit

Apple’s Safari browser is powered by the WebKit rendering engine, which thankfully is an opensource project and can be installed and tested against on your Linux machine via a few steps (yep, i’ve run thru this and it does work).

First get the dependencies,

sudo aptitude install autoconf automake libtool bison flex 
gperf libicu-dev build-essential libxt-dev libsqlite3-dev 
libjpeg62-dev libpng12-dev libglibmm-2.4-dev libgtk2.0-dev 
libcurl4-openssl-dev libxslt1-dev

Now goto http://nightly.webkit.org/ and grab the latest nightly build.

Unzip and Terminal into the archive dir and build the source,

./autogen.sh
./configure --enable-svg-experimental
make

Once that’s all done (which will take a while) you should now have a mini-WebKit browser in which to test against via…

./Programs/GtkLauncher

Navigate to the ACID3 website to test for standards compliance here http://acid3.acidtests.org/.

You should get 100/100, WebKit is pretty on when it comes to standards.

Quick Note. Unlike Firefox, Internet Explorer handles password fields a little differently, blanking out whatever value you pass it within a ‘value’ tag.

So…

<input name="mypass" value="********"/>

Will have a password box in Firefox starred out, but in IE it’ll appear blank.

To get around this you can use Prototype to inject a value into the password field, so the user see’s it as starred out.

$('mypass').value='********';

Note, if you’re generating the form dynamically with…

var innerhtml='<input ';
innerhtml+='name="mypass"/>';
document.write(innerhtml);

Only fire your $(‘mypass’) code after the form has been written to the page otherwise you won’t be able to get a handle on it (most cases you won’t ever have this problem).

It’s hard to do but these might help,

• X-Ray, a bookmarklet to examine elements within the document model, similar to firebug’s ‘inspect’.

• Fiddler, an http debugger for ie 6/7

• IE Developer Toolbar, similar in power to firebug but in no way as comprehensive.

• IETester, full-blown IE6 standalone browser, finally you can test against IE6 on Vista!

This stuff is really cool… after doing some more research into writing rails code the right way I managed to bump into a rocking thing called HAML via the Railscasts & Peepcode video tutorial sites.

Introduction

Before I continue, may I say thank you to Geoffery Grosenbach for his TopFunky Ruby on Rails Field Guide, an excellent piece of work and has really helped to answer the questions that some books leave un-checked; well done!

You can get this by purchasing one of Geoffrey’s Peepcode videos at link also suggest you watch his blog at Nuby on Rails

HAML, SASS & IE Conditionals

Now if you’ve got your feet wet with Rails development you’ll have coded .RHTML files and know what they’re about, they’re programmatically generated content pages the user sees, along with the div tags, css and generated Javascript. But like everything else, .NET, ASP, etc they don’t give you some help when coding the opening & closing tags.

Thankfully HAML is at hand, it’s a plugin to Ruby which basically allows you to create the generated view pages and essentially not have to worry about closing any tags you’ve left open or remembering how to write P-aragraph tags correctly, try it out and you’ll be amazed at how fast and small you’re development time gets.

./script/plugin install http://svn.hamptoncatlin.com/haml/tags/stable

Now along with this there’s SASS which does what HAML does to CSS generation, damn cool!

Along with this there’s IE Conditionals, which are essentially pieces of code you can put in your .RHTML / .HAML files so to do things particular to IE browser users.

IE Conditionals

Have a look, HAML also supports these quick & easy link

With all the cool new things and well thought out processes, you know, things done right, Ruby on Rails really shines as something not to miss out on, and at the very least may force a change in other languages much like Firefox did to IE.

...but in a good way, ;-)