[Wylug-help] firefox and bulletin boards

[Dave Fisher]

On Thu, May 05, 2005 at 03:55:32PM +0100, Dave Roberts wrote:
> Installed the extension in Firefox on his machine and various other bits 
> of advice but to no avail. Looking at it a bit more closely, whether you 
> are in IE or Firefox the same AOL web page is called when posting a 
> board message. ie. http://boards.aol.co.uk (you can only access this if 
> you are logged onto aol).
> 
> However, although the page is the same, when called in IE it has text 
> formatting buttons (bold, centre etc) but in Firefox there is no means 
> of formatting the text.

It probably won't help you solve the problem, but it might help you
avoid too much red herring chasing if I tell you that the AOL content
management system is deeply integrated with AOL's IE-based client.  

In other words, this is not your typical example of lazy web designers
building for IE-only and may not be susceptible to an easy plug-in
solution.

The 'AOL Client' is a bespoke version of the browser and the company's
historic assumption has been that 100% of AOL's user base would be
accessing content via this client rather than via a generic browser.

I believe that AOL has taken the policy decision to enable access to
their content/functionality via standards browsers, but the process of
migrating the data and the content management system will take a very
long time to complete. 

Having worked with some of the designers at AOL UK, I'm sure that they
would be sympathetic and interested to know about the problem.  OTOH,
I've no idea whether it is sufficiently important to fix quickly.

I'm inclined to think this sort of problem is one of the reasons that
web usability experts tend to frown upon the WYSIWYGification of HTML.

Is it difficult/impossible simply to type embedded HTML/CSS into
messages?

Dave