Post #3443003

2026-06-22 02:11 UTC

I actually already looked into doing this: Contribute was a fascinating chimera that radically altered its core function depending on what you connected it to: It could act as a WYSIWYG static web page editor similar to Frontpage for normal websites, *or* it act as a client editor for blogs that supported the MetaWeblog API, *or* it could be a managed hybrid of a static web page editor and version control client when connected to a specific type of proprietary intranet server. And the user experience of all three was largely identical. If I were gonna mess with it, it'd be via that MetaWeblog API integration, probably on a private subdomain. And that intrigues me as a project! ...But the whole idea fell at the first hurdle because the version of Contribute I have seems unable to understand my site's CSS, so *nothing* was in the right place, and that kinda defeats the purpose of a WYSIWYG editor :-P

Replies (1)

@lupinia@infosec.exchange 2026-06-22 07:48

Ok, let's check the user agent to see if I can figure out what Contribute CS5's internal browser engine is, and then try to get it to understand my CSS: `Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E)` ...Um. Ok, so, I'm all for backward compatibility in my web designs - I supported and *tested on* Internet Explorer 6 in my day-to-day work longer than pretty much anyone else. And I can't say I'm definitely *not* gonna backport my current theme to make this work, because I know myself :-P But I really don't wanna go back *that* far. Especially since this user agent string makes it extremely unclear how far back I'd have to go: Right at the top, we've got "MSIE 8.0". Internet Explorer 8. I hated that version and so did pretty much everyone else, which is partly why 6 lived on for so long. So that's going all the way back to CSS 2.1; that's actually where I did the most CSS coding work, so I do tend to think in those terms a lot. EXCEPT, this user agent string *also* says "Trident/7.0". Probably been a while since anyone's thought about that one, but Trident was what Microsoft called their rendering engine underpinning Internet Explorer, as opposed to Gecko or Webkit. And like embedded Chrome, it was always *possible* to use their rendering engine in other things, it was just miserable to do. So, Contribute's using Trident under the hood. I can work with that. Here's where this gets weird though: Trident 7.0 was *Internet Explorer 11*, and Internet Explorer 8 used Trident *4.0*. Why are these different numbers? Because Microsoft. But I *have* IE 11, it's one of my routine test browsers, and while my site doesn't look perfect in it, I make sure it *works*. Contribute, on the other hand, doesn't seem to even understand list styling. So, given the huge version discrepancy, and the fact that the site works fine on IE 11 (for acceptable margins on the definition of "fine"), MSIE 8.0 is clearly the important version number here. Not sure why it thinks it has a much newer version of Trident, other than maybe it's pulling that part from the system I'm running this on. And IE 8 compatibility is a big project that I don't especially *want* to do - I may end up doing it anyway just to prove that I *can*, but the current layout is based on concept sketches I wireframed as far back as 2006, but it took *years* to get widespread browser support for the CSS capabilities I needed to pull it off. So this may be the end of this little retro-software detour, but I do need to redo my CSS, and I've been wanting to dabble in more "retro" aesthetics, so maybe I'll poke at this a bit more someday. Contribute was a cool idea and I wish it had stuck around, but I could never make it work right even when it was in active development, and that was a long time ago. We'll see what the future holds I guess <3

Open ##3443002