Hi everybody, I hope some of you know the answer. For some reason, some MAC users cannot see our express menu, located in every page of our website on the top left hand side. Our website is www.cairnsunlimited.com I don't know if we have to include some piece of code to allow MAC users to see the express menu or what to do. We have checked with one of our friends using a MAC and he doesn't have any problem but other MAC users are unable to even see the orange express menu button. It is an integral part of our site navigation, so we really need for all readers to be able to use it. Your help is very much appreciated.
I assume by MAC you mean Macintosh/Apple computer users? I just loaded your page in my old FirefoxF 1.5 and, I'm on ADSL (high speed) here, your site loads very slowly.... I know there's a lot of images... whoa, almost a megabyte! Anyways, I checked your site on Safari for Windows. Safari is the most popular browser for Apple computers (if they're new enough; you can't run Safari on I think anything older than OSX?) and yup, your PNG doesn't show up at all. Now, your menu DOES show up if I set the mouse where the image was, so that's good news. If you have a Windows machine, you can also download Safari for Windows which is a good idea to check your site in multiple browsers anyway. The second most used browser for Mac users is FireFox. So I'm not sure how many Mac users are browsing with Safari as opposed to Firefox (or some other browser). I think (THINK) it may have something to do with your PNG script. Not sure what you're using it for-- if it's for Internet Exploder, you only need it for when there's a transparency. I see no need for transparency on that orange square. <script src="pngfix.js" type="text/javascript"></script> Since it's only the image that's affected and NOT the menu itself, I blame the script. Everything else in the menu seems to work including the images after DESTINATION. You have a lot of scripts here and I suspect you don't need most of them. For instance, if you're using Javascript to change images on hover, CSS can do that easier : ) I'd only use the Javascript for when you need images to change regularly, which I think I saw somewhere but I don't actually see any changing images on your site-- not without me doing something first, which means CSS can likely do it for you. What I would do is either: change the .png to some other image type OR leave it and simply remove the pngfix.js (unless it's there for some other .png which does have transparency...) AND I would not use images to replace text. Meaning, when your Mac visitors can't see the image, that shouldn't be a big deal cause there should be text hidden behind that image anyway. You may not be the web person at your work but anyone building websites should look at this page about image-replacement, as it's really great for accessibility (many people also surf with images off because image-heavy sites load slowly if you don't have high-speed Internet): http://www.mezzoblue.com/tests/revised-image-replacement/ Lastly, Australia is awesome and I hope someday to be able to visit the Lucky Land.
different browser versions have different capabilities to correct existing code errors or NOT. a good point to start solving such problems is to create vlaid code / correct ALL existing errors see http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http://cairnsunlimited.com/ then look again at your sites using mac or other OS/browsers TML 4.01 is easy to clean up and always should create a correct output/display in all browsers as long as you refrain from proprietary code used. just plain standard HTML401 according to W3.org should do the job. btw there is no need to have the 3 meta tags <META NAME="robots" CONTENT="index, follow"> <META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="INDEX, FOLLOW"> <meta name="ROBOTS" content="ALL"> since to follow links is default nowadays. these tags were used/recommended early this decade.
More like last decade even : ) But I still think this particular problem is the script. I did find out that old Safari (2.0) had some bug where it wouldn't run an inline Script, though this was supposedly fixed in 2.0.2. Still, I think Safari might be trying to run this script and puking on it. So either replacing the png with a gif or removing the script should show it. And yeah, it's easier to find most problems if the page is well-written etc.
A site that cannot display for one User Agent or another isn't a properly-built site. Mac users DO have a real computer-- and they have an especially-compliant browser (passes the acid test, which microsoft internet exploder has yet to do).