Thread: Eternally Confuzzled

Originally Posted by okinrus

Can you clarify what this means? Like if I use the <em> tag, it's supposed to add emphasis, but each browser defines this differently. For example, lynx might define emphasis as bold text, whereas IE might define emphasis as italics. Is the emphasis part of the presentation? I think so, but it's not about how something is presented, but how the user reacts


OK, but no browser can determine what a font will look like exactly on the screen. For instance, my linux system might not have a true type font server or enabled X server, and my fonts will look jaggy. Another system need not even have the the right font. This is all notwithstanding each system interpreting the font tag the same way. Other visual things could be detailed.

Each browser has it's own default css. If you use em it's up to you to provide the proper formating rules. If not, the browser uses its default. About the fonts, it's the same. The webpage provides info on the font to be used. If there's no font available on the system a default one is used. Good webpages manage all these little issues, and are always well displayed.
Plus, if you want to continue this discussion, please inform yourself a bit.
www.w3.org
www.w3schools.org
http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~mudws/font.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critici...ernet_Explorer

The problem with IE is something like: you say you want the text to be bold and italic. Any browser will render that text that way. IE instead will only render the bold atribute, and add maybe a unwanted underline. This is a small unpractical example. IE doesn't conform to the rules. So you'll end up with garbage. Unfortunatly IE is the most used browser, so most webpages conform to IE and not the standards.
The same applies for C/C++. If you write good clean and portable code, you can be sure it'll almost work on any platform. If you try stunts like fflush(stdin); you'll get a unwanted operation, but any MS compiler will flush stdin, because it doesn't conform to the standards.