In our Easter upgrade, we propose to change the default behaviour of WebLearn and deliver all HTML pages which have been authored within WebLearn and are stored in Resources in ‘standards mode’ rather than ‘quirks mode’ as they currently are. (By currently using ‘quirks mode’, we are effectively serving non-standards compliant web pages which . See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quirks_mode for more explanation).
Key comments:
- quirks mode is used for triggering non-standard behaviour in browsers, it came into being so that web pages written before browsers started following W3C and IETF standards (pre-2000) would continue to work as intended
- exploiting non-standard behaviour is not recommended and is highly likely to result in a page that renders differently in different browser
- always serving pages in ‘quirks mode’ means that some standards compliant pages may not display as intended
- it is highly unlikely that quirks will have been exploited unless a ‘hand crafted’ CSS has been used, in other words, if you don’t have any explicit references to CSS then you probably don’t need to worry; even if you do use your own CSS it is still very unlikely that the page will rely on ‘quirks mode’
- all other WebLearn pages use standards mode
- only pages which have the ‘WebLearn styles’ set to ‘Automatic’ are affected
If you think you may have relied on ‘quirks mode’ or simply want to check that your pages will look correct in ‘standards mode’ then you can do so by following this procedure. You may like to do this in more than one browser, for example, Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer.
- in the Resources tool, click on an HTML page so that it opens in a new tab or window, leave the page open in the browser
- back in the Resources tool, alongside the HTML page, select ‘Edit Details (Properties)’ from the ‘Actions’ menu
- towards the bottom of the page, select ‘Always (standards)’ from the ‘Use WebLearn styles’ drop-down menu and then click ‘Update’ to save your changes
- in Resources click on the page again
- compare the two versions of the page to make sure nothing is amiss
- if necessary, set the style back to ‘Automatic’
If you think that this action will cause problems then please contact us: weblearn@it.ox.ac.uk.
