Recently I blogged some random thoughts on running ASP.NET apps in the firefox browser. I am really beginnning to like FireFox. To mention my top feauture: + increases font size (and - decreases it). And this really works very well, far better than increase text size in IE. My eyes are getting old and this really helps. So I've done some more systematic research on asp.net apps in ff. Let me share some more results with you.
The problem: Take a huge ASP.NET intranet app which is browsed with IE. How difficult will it be be to run the app using FireFox ? Are there any cross-issues when porting the app to VS 2005 ?
- Appearance : as reported before an asp.net app does by default not look to good at all in FireFox. After introducing FireFox to asp.net in the web.config the app looks a whole lot better.
- Input validation : The app uses validation controls and smart-navigation. Validation works but not on the client side. The nice thing about the validation controls is that the validation is also performed on the server. Validation does take an extra roundtrip in firefox, but the the app does not break.
- Smart navigation. This just does not work in FireFox. My users like the browser's back-button. That would need a work-around.
When moving to VS 2005 the appearance is a quite interesting issue. The good thing about VS 2005 is that it is FireFox aware by default. The bad thing is that some of my alignment tricks no longer work in VS 2005. I can no longer create labels of fixed width. I can still create textboxes, dropdown, listboxes and panels of fixed with, but a label always get truncated at the end of the text contained. The reason for this is the document type used by asp.net web forms. You can find the document type in the top of the mark up of a webform.
In VS 2003, apps this reads:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" >
In VS 2005 this reads
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
When you import a VS 2003 app in VS 2005 the doctype is not converted and the fixed width labels still work. You can also change the doctype in the markup of a 2005 page, which will lead to fixed width labels. The other way round does not work, changing the doctype in a 2003 form does not influence actual label width.
So far most incompatibilities between Asp.net apps and firefox don't look that bad. Importing an VS 2003 app in VS 2005 has larger problems. The app still works but there are quite a lot of things to pay extra attention to. That's for my next post.
Peter
Posted
09-27-2004 11:25 AM
by
pvanooijen