XP SP2 and Your Web Site

By Philip Miseldine | May 29, 2004 | .NET

This doesn’t affect just ASP.NET developers, however the article concentrates on Microsoft technologies.

How to Make Your Web Site Work with Windows XP Service Pack 2 shows what you need to do to be prepared for the changes to Internet Explorer, principally how to design safe pop-ups.

XP SP2 will be pushed to all current XP users, so every web developer should at least give these new guidelines an overview.

Written By:

Philip Miseldine

Philip is a Computer Science PhD student at Liverpool John Moores University. He's still not mastered guitar tabs, never finished Mario, and needs a haircut. He discusses life at http://www.miseldine.com/.

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{ 5 comments }

Renee January 1, 2005 at 6:03 pm: I just started creating sites and stumbled into a problem – sp2 won’t allow Dreamweaver rollovers (maybe all rollovers?) without specifically changing the browser settings to allow it. My visitors aren’t going to do that. Is there a work-around for this?
iaio November 25, 2004 at 5:08 am: mmj.. thank u very much..
pcontour June 10, 2004 at 10:54 am: Big companies with experienced developers will be able to code their way out of these inconveniences. It’s the small website operators who will be in deep doodoo. More browser specific code. “Microsoft – annoying like a mosquito, taking blood from everyone”. I’ll be interested to see the fallout after the new version. I see this being broadly applied instantaneously thanks to Microsoft’s instant updater, so the shockwaves should be unstoppable.
mmj May 30, 2004 at 8:48 pm: Some of those choices are very interesting. For instance, IE will block all popups except for popups created with window.createPopup(), which is a proprietary Microsoft extension since IE 5.5.
Another thing that’s interesting is that IE will block all file downloads that are the result of a web page redirect, but not those that are the result of a mouse click. This would therefore be incompatible with the way sites such as sourceforge.net or download.com currently handle downloads (Your download should begin shortly… etc).
Chroder May 30, 2004 at 2:21 am: Interesting read, thanks for that. I don’t use pop-ups all to often anyway. Everything else I’m pretty much covered :D