New FAQ

[dwhitworth]

I didn't want to clog the birthday thread with comments on the new FAQ, so here goes . .

It is now so very easy to get around and read that I went through most of it  . .  and found a few niggly things for review . .

1. Basic Game

• Roads and Thieves/Introduction/bullet #1 - “A road earns 2 point per road tile.” - Should this not be one point?
  
• Cloisters and Monks/First Question/last sentence
  “There are no religious conflicts in the Game of Carcassonne”. I realize that this is a translation but nevertheless suggest:
  “There are no religious conflicts in the Basic Game of Carcassonne” (or a note about heretics!)
  
• Final Scoring/Bullet #3
  “Incomplete cities with a cathedral from Inns and Cathedrals earn no points, irrelevant of their size”
  Perhaps, “no points; their size is irrelevant”, or "no points, regardless of their size”
• Errata at the end
  1. Is this section intended to be in larger font? (Or is that just a problem because I am using IE?) This font variation in FAQ answers happens a lot in all the sections. I gave up noting the places. It seems to be associated with the additional HTML code "<span style="font:13px Verdana, serif;"> " occurring sometimes, but not always in the FAQ answer. Authoring software glitch?)
  2. Might it be also worth mentioning here that the abbey can be played in a final “second Turn” caused by the builder?
  

2. River

• Rivers & Fairies
  “Since a player is allowed to deploy a followers when placing  . . .”
  Should be:
  “Since a player is allowed to deploy a follower when placing . . . “
  

3. Inns & Cathedrals

• Builders, Pigs and Dragons.
  It seems to me that this ruling has been changed in recent correspondence with HiG and that builders, barns and pigs ARE allowed on the volcano tile and the dragon only eats them next time it moves there. This confirmed in footnote 97 below the section on the Volcano in the P&D rules in the CAR. So is this FAQ now outdated?
  The same FAQ appears under P&D section
  

4. Cathars

• Escape/question #2
  Besieged is spelt wrongly throughout this question and answer and also in the question at the top of the page.
  Also
  “The cloister should just allow to escape from a city that cannot be completed anymore, since an incomplete an beseiged city scores no points.”
  Should (??) be"
  “The cloister should just allow a knight to escape from a city that cannot be completed anymore, since an incomplete and besieged city scores no points."
  

5. Princess & Dragon

Same issue as under Builders, pigs and Dragons in I&C above

[mjharper]

1#1—corrected.
1#2—corrected. There used to be a footnote to that effect, but the change is easier.
1#3—changed to 'regardless'.
1#4—corrected that one. Don't know what happened there, but I'll go through and check all the others.
2#1—corrected, as well as the occurrence in The River II.
3#1—actually, this is already correct. It's the footnote in the CAR that needs to be changed. Also, it's in T&B, not I&C ;-)
4#1.1—corrected.
4#1.2—not changed. Wagons and mayors can escape via a cloister, so it's confusing to add 'knight'.

Thanks for that.

[mjharper]

I'm uploading the corrected version as I type… there were quite a lot of the 'wrong font' entries. My guess is that it's sloppy copy and paste on my part (forgot to use Paste and Match Style : )—and as far as I could tell, all the problem entries were the newest stuff from the last two rounds of correspondence.

Anyway, if anyone spots anything else that needs correcting, please let me know!

[dwhitworth]

The "Forum" link at the top of the FAQ leads to an error page. The subdirectory "forum" is missing from the URL.
Nicely handled error though . . .

[mjharper]

Corrected.

You're using IE? What version? Are there any issues you can see? Any chance you could compare it with the look in Firefox or something?

One thing that's different is the cheeky suggestion that you switch, but that's because IE6 totally killed my other sites and I was fuming. Actually, maybe I'll change my signature too…

[dwhitworth]

You're using IE? What version? Are there any issues you can see? Any chance you could compare it with the look in Firefox or something?

Yes, I am using IE basically out of laziness.  :

Downloaded Firefox today. I will email you some comparative pictures. Not a lot of issues.

[Joff]

Well Matt... i'm using IE7

Time to get your gun out 

[mjharper]

Heh heh…

I'm no Microsoft fan (you'd never guess) but the fact that they finally got round to making IE (version standards compliant, but only plan to have that as an optional mode which is off by default, was just too much for me.
 

[Scott]

I'm also using IE7, and will use IE8 when it is released despite the stupidity of the opt-in for standards meta tag. There is still hope that they will change this before the final version is shipped.

To say that IE is not standards-compliant is not entirely truthful. It is compliant with parts of the standards, just not with as many parts of the standards as Firefox. Yes, IE has some non-standard stuff in it, but so does Firefox. (Can you say embed?) Where IE falls sort is in parts of the standard where other browsers support but IE does not yet. That will change with IE8, which can render Acid2.

And even if they don't change the opt-in nonsense, there might still be hope, because somehow they are displaying stuff in IE8's rendering mode that doesn't have that meta tag included in the header.

No offense, but the whole "say no to IE" movement is populated by fanboys who fail to understand that dropping support for IE is not an option for any web developer who wants to continue to have an income. The majority of the world uses IE, and even if another browser managed to reach the #1 spot, IE would still be a major browser. The current version must be supported at minimum, and optionally the previous version. Anything older is usually safe to ignore unless your stats are showing a significant user base still using an older version. I could give an example of this, but we're veering further away from the topic.

[dwhitworth]

As an ex-web developer I have to reluctantly agree with Scott - there is no way to survive without tweaking everything to work well on IE. In fact you end up adopting the entire MS development environment etc. etc. to make your job as "easy" as possible.

However, I say "reluctantly" because now that I am a mere user I delight in the sheer speed and efficiency that Firefox (and Thunderbird) bring to the table. After Matts enquiry above I re-installed both and won't be using IE or Outlook again - until I get another new machine and am too lazy to re-tweak my software  . . . . .

Suffice it to say that the basc look and feel and functionality of Carc Central works superbly in both browsers - Thanks Gantry 

[mjharper]

@Scott: No offence taken.

Obviously, I'm not a professional web designer, and making sites IE compatible is not mission critical for me. I understand that profit-orientated sites have to make sure that they run in IE or they'd be shooting themselves in the foot. On the other hand, there are occasions where sites work with IE and will not work with anything else. The process goes both ways.

However, when I added the 'Say no to IE' badge, I wasn't actually directing that at professional web developers but at users. The little text which appears if you're using IE appeals to users as well (it's taken from a article posted 5 years ago, btw). The thing is, most users of IE are using it by default, rather than through any rationalised choice—which is why IE6 is still the most common web browser, even though IE7 is not (a originally planned) solely available through Vista. IE6 is a decrepit piece of s**t, but people go on using it because it came in the box six or seven years ago. I just feel that people should understand the limitations of their browsers and perhaps explore a little, try out something else, and move on. In that sense, I don't think it's Microsoft who are the problem, but the unthinking masses.

I do think Microsoft are the problem in the sense that full standards compliance should have been included by now—they seem to be stalling on this for some agenda of their own. My guess is that they and to enhance the IE-only features in order to create some kind of lock-in, probably with future web-apps. But that's actually beside the point. The point is that if people started switching to other browsers it would put some pressure on Microsoft to get their act together, and that would be good for everyone, professional web-designers included. Imagine a world in which you only had to develop one site, according to web-standards, and everyone (in a modern browser) could see it perfectly.

Incidentally, I'm quite happy to admit to being a fanboy—but I'm an Apple fanboy, not a Firefox fanboy. I do have Firefox installed, but I only use it for quick site testing and configuring my modem. I used to have a couple of browser links on the old site, to OmniWeb (Mac only, and my fav) and Opera, which are the two most powerful browsers I know of. 'Promoting' those was fandom. My current view—and hence the change—is 'anything but IE'. If I promote Opera, in some ways it's like preaching to the converted, and that's real fandom. Your average IE user isn't going to download Opera from a link like that, because as far as they're aware, it's just another browser—because they don't see anything wrong with IE. So I felt it would be more productive to target the user more directly, and point out—without going into the kind of detail I am here—that IE is only one of many, and there are better choices. Choice is the key word, actually. Choose IE, fine (I'm guessing that Scott has chosen to use IE). But don't use it just because it came in the box.

I'll probably remove my more aggressive forum signature when we've got this topic out of our systems ;-)

[Joff]

I chose IE7 because Microsoft told me too  

[mjharper]

I chose IE7 because Microsoft told me too  

[Scott]

The pressure is already very much on at Microsoft. Hard to pin-point who was to blame, but somebody in the higher-ups decided they didn't want to spend any more money on browser development after they conquered Netscape. Since the IE team has been reactivated, they have been working extremely hard to improve standards support. They worked right down the wire of getting IE7 released to pack as much improvements as possible to the rendering code. Although the focus for IE8 was originally on improving Javascript support, there are tons more rendering improvements for HTML and CSS. As I mentioned before, it passes the Acid2 test. They are definitely not stalling.

The unthinking masses are indeed the problem. Even though IE7 is available, they have automatic updates turned off and never visit Windows Update. I have no problem with people encouraging others to use Firefox or Opera over IE6, but I think we're agreed that there's nothing wrong with choosing to use IE7. Yes I did choose to use IE7. Firefox is great for doing web development, but it's a giant pig to load up. It also doesn't support ActiveX, so I need to use IE for certain things anyway.

When it comes to developers, developing in IE only is a problem. Developing in any other browser only is also a problem. It is essential to test in all major browsers, and a good idea to test in some of the more popular minor browsers too. Some even go so far as to test the same browser on multiple operating systems because sometimes Firefox on Windows renders differently from Firefox on Mac. Rare but it happens.

[mjharper]

Yeah, I know about the freeze in browser development, with the excuse that IE6 couldn't be developed any more under XP. That's lame. And IE7 is better, no question, and I'm sure that IE8 will be much more standards-friendly. I'm just bummed by the 'optional' standards-thing.

I do tend to test my sites on multiple browsers & systems, for the reasons you say. And I'll correct a couple of things to hopefully work better with IE on the FAQ.

I'm thinking that a compromise might be: I remove the 'Say no to IE' button from the site, but leave the IE-only comment up (with the suggestion that the IE user try a different browser). That's less aggressive, but might help point the unthinking masses towards something a little less Y2K.