Web and WebWorks Development

[dinik11]

Hi, we have developed a self provisioning application download portal using html,jsp, and servlet technology.This works fine across all the major BB models so far i.e. 8700,9100,8310 however our users are being upgraded to the BOLD soon and the portal needs to be amended to display well on this device. Due to the enhanced browser shipped on the BOLD some minor .css changes are required however a ticker control (MARQUEE tag) does not seem to be working, has this been removed from the BOLD browser. Trying to stay away from writting a DOM JS function to accomplish this.

[Xandrex]

Hello,

the MARQUEE element is part of the specifications of Internet Explorer. It is not part of the official HTML 4.01 recommendation :

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/index/elements.html

I suggest you to validate your webpage on the W3 (X)HTML validator :

http://validator.w3.org/

So basically, you end up with doing some javascript (not necessarily DOM), or designing an animated GIF that does what you want. Please remember that many users won't have javascript allowed on their Blackberry.

[Xandrex]

On a more personal point of view, I hate websites where the webmaster designs things to test if I am epileptic like this one :

http://www.goer.org/HTML/examples/htmlhorror1.html

I thing that using moving or blinking things is really annoying, a way of confessing "I'm a bad designer and I can't adjust the page for you to focus on the important things, so I make Las Vegas marching ants and Knight Rider stuffs".

Honestly, as far as I can remember I have never seen a marquee that was useful. If you want to alert the viewer, use big red fonts, use a red border around a div, but don't use moving things.

[dinik11]

Xandrex,

Thanks for your reply.  The main portel page is written in jsp, which obviously dynamically creates a page customised for the end users BlackBerry device by querying SQL (where pin is sent via http header to servlet).  As part of the data that we get back, we need to display a news ticker.  Marquee works perfectly for this, an animated gif would as well I guess but the gif would need to be generated on the fly with data from SQL and displayed on the screen. I was just wondering why this has worked on all BB devices to date except for the BOLD. On the 8310 the BlackBerry browser is able to display the ticker perfectly on both the BB Browser and IE emulation modes.  This could well be a glitch in the BOLD we have as its a pre-release. Also I did hear that RIM are in the process of releasing a new firmware update to fix certain browser glitches.  I'm more of a Java developer than a web designer but as were under resourced in this department, I've been tasked to also create the web pages.. to the best of my ability, hence I probably don't use best practices in terms of an end-users experience.  My moto is simply.. they want it.. they get it!.

[Xandrex]

hello,

I still think the ticker thing is not a bad idea, but I agree with you : "the user knows better".

About the gif, it's not hard to take a text and use a java library to create an animated gif. The problem will be the configuration of the user : on the Blackberry Browser, you can choose how you want to display the gif :

• only the first frame
• 1 time
• 10 times
• 100 times
• non-stop

About the "Internet Explorer emulation", I hope you know that you can't force that on clientside, so you'll have to tell your users to do it manually.