Magic Forums

by: Petrarca on Apr 25, 2011

Hi guys,

I wanted to drop a quick note about the website.

This is a very large site (Google has over 11 million pages on record for us) when you include all the pages for photos and forums and so on.

Even ignoring things like forums and photos, each section of the site is individually coded and pieced together from some of 200 different scripts used to generate the content, sidebar info and so on.

Those 200 scripts each have formatting and display information for how to display the info on websites and mobile devices.

Which leads me to the point of this post.

Every now and again I view the site from a browser or device I do not commonly use, and every so often I find a page where the formatting just looks bad. Text is squished to the side, or get written under images, or overflows into the sidebar... it just doesn't look good or right.

The reason this happes is because all webbrowsers interpret the rules to display content slightly differently. When a change to one of the 200 scripts I mentioned is made, I usually test it out on a few common browsers to make sure it looks fine, but I can never get every single case.

For example, IE8 on Windows NT can display different than IE8 on Vista which can be different than IE8 on windows 7. And that is just 1 web broswer out of 5 or 6 popular ones.

So when I come across one of this badlt formatted pages I fix it, but I am sure there are a lot of others that I miss.

So when you come across a page that just looks bad for some reason, send me a message, or post about it in the forums (I do read the forums on occassion) so I know about it. It would help if you left some note about if you are using IE, Firefoc, Chrome, Safari, Opera or whichever browser as well.

Thanks