www.fffs.be (strange behavior)

Hi all,

I just uploaded a new version (new layout, new structure, new design) of the website for our photography association.

http://www.fffs.be

I fully tested it at home on WinXP, with IE 6.0 and FF 1.0.
Here at work, I have Win2000, and tested it with IE 6.0, FF 1.0 and Opera 7. All seems to work good, no strange behaviors (although I discovered some errors when validating the pages), looks good in all these browsers, with some minimal differences between them (esp. aligning).

But I already got feedback from one of our members: the website was looking ugly, with parts of the old design, some pictures did show messed up (with white lines crossing the pic) or didn't show up at all. My first hint was to press Refresh (F5), I have not yet got an answer back.

He is using IE6.0 with a broadband connection on a system with Win98 (no SE).

Now my question is: is the interpretation and presentation of XHTML/CSS code in some way dependent on the operating system?

You must be new to web design, right?

The answer is "yes". And not only "in some way". The way of rendering completely depends on the browser, -version, OS, -version and user settings. HTML was never designed for consistent display and you can have a hard time if your site layout depends on this.

Anyway, since your code doesn't validate, this should be the first error to be corrected.

But for this specific user, probably "F5" helped. I am getting a lot of such requests too.

M

I'm not new to web design, I've some 3 years of experience (but not as my job). I was just wondering if the OS could be the problem... just for the OS.

Now, on this moment, all my code validates XHTML 1.0 Transitional.
(earlier this day, when I started this topic, only a few pages had minor errors).

This person had also problems on correctly validated pages... but now his problem is solved. He pressed F5 a few times and then he saw the new design.

Thanks anyway.