[anearfull]

The Ottawa Citizen newspaper has run a truly excellent series of articles covering topics of interest to music lovers and audiophiles. They are gathered together here:
http://www.enchantedear.com/ (the articles are a bit slow to load so be patient)

I just read today’s installment:
http://ww.enchantedear.com/page31.html
It gives a good summary of points brought up in the series and should lead you to explore the whole site.

The author (Paul Mckay) invites suggestions for new articles so I'm going to invite him to the next Head-Fi meeting here in Ottawa. Hopefully he'll see that we headphone freaks inhabit a little-known corner of the audio spectrum that deserves more coverage.

 

[Zanth]

I think I may actually invite this guy over on a one to one basis to inform him on what our aspirations are...our needs and desires as head-fiers etc.

 

[Calanctus]

Bah! That link crashes my browser EACH AND EVERY TIME I try to open the page.

 

[Zanth]

Use Mozilla.

 

[anearfull]

Quote:

Originally posted by Zanth Use Mozilla.

Zanth:
Congrats on hitting 500 posts ... you chatty fellow!

I don't think the use of Mozilla is required to get those pages to load properly. I use explorer 6.0 and it just takes a long time for them to load (it looks like the pages are treated as large images rather than text).

 

[Zanth]

Yeah, but if he is having problems, Mozilla will clear that up. Load time for IE where I am (Ottawa and the server is in Ottawa) is 30 seconds. Load time for Mozilla...2 seconds.

 

[Calanctus]

Load time for me on IE is less than 2 seconds. But the page still screws up my browser.

"Use Mozillah", hah! If they can't be bothered to make a compliant page, I can't be bothered to run Mozilla (even though it's sitting right in my task bar).

 

[ai0tron]

You might tyr Opera, its very fast, although the java support is not as extensive as explorers.

 

[Calanctus]

Here's the results of the validation:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...ntedear.com%2F

Quoth the W3C: "This page is not Valid HTML 2.0!" 148 errors on one page...impressive.

 

[anearfull]

Quote:

Originally posted by Calanctus Here's the results of the validation: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...ntedear.com%2F Quoth the W3C: "This page is not Valid HTML 2.0!" 148 errors on one page...impressive.

Thanks Calanctus, this browser thing is almost as interesting as the music site itself.

At first glance, the "validator" service you posted looked like a cool discovery. Then I tried using it on other sites ... ones that should definitely be "OK".

Try it on:
www.CNN.com
www.GOOGLE.com
www.ANYOTHERSITE.com
They ALSO give fatal errors

Try using the validator on www.microsoft.com and you'll see that, despite automatic pagetype detection, there's no valid doctype declaration. When I override auto-detection and choose pagetypes that sound like they should work, I get between 400 and 600 errors on the Microsoft’s homepage.

When you try accessing www.enchantedear.com, what are the symptoms? Do you get a "not responding" on the task list? Can you simply press on the "stop" button and then go on to access other sites? Is anyone else out there seeing the same problem as Calanctus?

Clearly, any browser must be robust enough to withstand even the worst HTML encoding. The worst that should happen is strange page display. I agree that there’s something a bit weird on enchantedear.com … all the graphics and text show up fuzzy at first and then clarify as the rest of the page loads. I have a cable modem and it takes a good 10 seconds to fully load those articles. Is it possible that your IE browser settings are non-standard? If you’ve already got Mozilla handy on your taskbar, it would be interesting to see if it works for you on that site. If indeed that particular site crashes your configuration of IE then it's a bug that Microsoft should be made aware of.

It’s rare to find good journalism directed at the history and psychology of music ... I think you’d be rewarded for persisting in finding a way to access www.enchantedear.com.

 

[anearfull]

Calanctus:
Here's another possibility:
for some reason the URL of that site only has TWO "w"s (not "www")

try this URL:

http://ww.enchantedear.com/page2.html

 

[Calanctus]

anearfull,
You point out something very interesting about major sites that don't validate properly. If there is any authority on html standards (that's an 'if' there, please note) then it is the W3C. But obviously they don't have the last word on what actually works, since Google, CNN and Microsoft work fine for me and always have.

That said, a 'fatal error' for me is a site that CRASHES my browser--damned rude. How well do you think Google, or CNN, or Microsoft, would be doing if their sites forced users to close their browsers as soon as they hit the first page?

You state "Clearly, any browser must be robust enough to withstand even the worst HTML coding." But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm using a STANDARD setup of IE6. Sure, if there are HTML problems that cause browsers to choke, then browser developers should address them; but WEBSITES that cause problems like this for standard browsers should, if they care about accessibility or responding to user needs, take reasonable care to ensure they don't occur. I've never had this problem on ANY other site I have browsed in the last few years. Of course, site maintainers are not actually obligated to do anything; but I just won't bother visiting their sites.

Part of the problem may be the HTML 2.0 spec used on the site in question. HTML 2.0 does not support tables! Yet the page is full of...guess what...tables. How much effort would it take to change the doctype? Not a lot.

I'll take your word on the quality of the content, and maybe I'll get around to browsing it later. But maybe not; there's lots of other audio stuff, and other stuff, available to me both here on Head Fi and elsewhere--in fact more than I'll ever have time to read.

 

[elipsis]

The vast, vast majority of users use IE. From a marketing perspective, making a page that is not 100% compliant with IE is unbelievably stupid.

 

[anearfull]

Quote:

Originally posted by elipsis The vast, vast majority of users use IE. From a marketing perspective, making a page that is not 100% compliant with IE is unbelievably stupid.

I'm baffled by this. Did you experience the same problem as Calanctus? Did your browser crash?

Anything on any website that can repeatably crash something as tested and widely used as IE is a bug that Microsoft would definitely want to know about.

RIght click any page and you can view its HTLM source code. I viewed the source for that page and don't see anything too strange. It's no more or less compliant than anyone else's pages (show me a page that WILL pass that w3w checker)

What IS somewhat unusual about that page is that the whole article is treated as a giant image. It's quite possible that the large image size is overwhelming the hardware resources on Calanctus' computer.

 

[Calanctus]

Quote:

Originally posted by anearfull Anything on any website that can repeatably crash something as tested and widely used as IE is a bug that Microsoft would definitely want to know about.

So you are suggesting that the onus is on users and on Microsoft, rather than on the publishers of the site. Interesting point of view...out of thousands of sites I've visited, only 1 causes this problem, but it's not appropriate for the site publishers to conform to what thousands of others are already doing...it's Microsoft that must change.

Quote:

Originally posted by anearfull RIght click any page and you can view its HTLM source code. I viewed the source for that page and don't see anything too strange. It's no more or less compliant than anyone else's pages (show me a page that WILL pass that w3w checker)[/B]

Like I said: HTML 2 does not support tables, and the page in question uses lots of them--yet declares itself to be HTML 2.0.

Quote:

Originally posted by anearfull What IS somewhat unusual about that page is that the whole article is treated as a giant image. It's quite possible that the large image size is overwhelming the hardware resources on Calanctus' computer.[/B]

Yes you must be right. I've only got 512 MB of RAM...that must be it.