Pat Murphy's Rantings about Web Standards

[sound] Hello There!
[?] Who Am I?
[?] Twisty Welcome
[?] Important Stuff
[?] Good Causes
[?] Murphy's Musings
[?] Science
[?] Computers, Linux
[?] Irish & Celtic
[?] Music
[?] Books
[?] Doggy
[?] Miscellaneous
[?] Net People
[?] Net Goodies
[?] Professional
[?] Happy to Meet...

[Pat Murphy's Maze of Twisty Little Passages]

Web Standards?

The image on the right is a PNG, size 175 by 120, generated with the GIMP on a Linux system. It (the image) should be transparent, allowing the background to peek through the letters and flag.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] You seem to be using a microsoft (IE?) browser that identifies itself as:

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)

so most likely the transparency in the image is not working. You would do well to download a browser like Mozilla or Firefox, if only to see what a real, secure, and Standards compliant web browser experience can be like. (If you're using Linux or OS/X with Firefox's User Agent Switcher, never mind!)

proper rendering of 'my vote didn't count' image

The table on the right shows how Firefox renders the image on this page. As you can see, the transparency works!

If all this didn't convince you that IE is a problematic web browser, consider this. Unless you are a computer and/or security professional, and have the "local" zone battened down really hard, you probably have no idea how dangerous using your current browser can be!

How'd you do this?

This page uses the server side include technology to figure out the HTTP_USER_AGENT string that your browser feeds to the web server. If the string MSIE is found in this, it shows one thing, and quite another otherwise.

Patrick P. Murphy
National Radio Astronomy Observatory
Charlottesville, Virginia, USA
Feedback