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"I hope the introduction of AOL gecko clients, especially for windows, will put a damper on the attitude of many web authors that "IE is all that matters," and "mozilla sucks because it doesn't support industry standards.""

Unfortunately not. Remember it boils down to end profits. Suppose 99% of your customer base is win+IE. And you have to spend a lot to redesign your web site, would you do it.. well no.
The owner would be considering the end results. Is the ire of a minority community making a dent in his/her sales. If no then there is no reason for migration
Of course, if the mozilla user base is significantly large only then people will migrate.
And there are many such sites which have the attitude that win + Ie is all that matters. They dont simply care and they wont because they will get a steady stream of visitors on Ie_Win
But Neverthless, this is a step in the right direction and one can olnly hope that common sense prevails
Meanwhile you could check out Any Browser.org, another site dedicated to browser independent WWW

The Any Browser Campaign has been around for a while to help with this. Read their stuff, it's sane and helpful. Follow their guidelines and write polite, informative email messages to the webmasters of non-conformant web sites. Include a link to the W3C's Validator along with a comment on how many HTML DTD violations their page has.

Follow through on your own site and add an AnyBrowser button and a W3C Valid HTML button to the footer of all of your pages.

Finally, here's a web page that I found this weekend that really does seem to be "yearning for the bad old days" is MenuScape. All you get from their site is a notice that you should be using IE! Although I wasn't as polite to them as the Any Browser Campaign suggested, I did point out that if they meet their customers expectations, the customers will be happy, but probably won't tell anyone. If they do stupid things like make their page IE only, then some disgruntled customer (no names mentioned) will probably out them on slashdot ;). Don't be too mean to them because, now that I've tested my link on the preview of this post, I've discovered that this message only appears on the first load. If you're persistent, they'll let you in even without IE.

I'll never, ever, EVER make any of my sites render properly only on IE. I promise this to the world.

Of course, since I comply with W3 standards and use lots of CSS2 features, my sites look quite bad by default on IE (text-align: center; is NOT the same as margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;). IE is a giant pain in the ass. My biggest pet peeve ever is when people say IE renders properly while Mozilla doesn't. 99.9% of the time this is completely untrue.

Netscape 4 isn't woth supporting any more. It'll just make your code twice as complicated as it should be.

Anyway, browsing around the other day I found a neat site called the Viewable with Any Browser Campaign. Thought people might be interested.

Ironically, both times I tried to reply to this post my browser (Galeon) crashed whilst trying to access argos.co.uk's vehemently anti-non-IE internet shopping site.

Firstly, yes, "Mozilla 5", which I believe is used in Mozilla 1, Galeon, and Netscape 6.x seems pretty standards-compliant. (Netscape 4 of course, was the de-facto standard, because it's been the only real browser available since the start of the intternet (i.e. before W3C, and long before IE)

That wouldn't be my reason to suggest upgrading though: I'd always cite stability, security, popup-blocking, advert-blocking, cookie management, open-source, and a disinclination to run arbitary code on your system as a reason to upgrade from IE to something else.

Secondly, to the wit who quipped: "Yeah, make it so 95% of the world can't get to your website. Genius", please read the message before replying to it.

I am not suggesting that anyone stoop to the level of microsoft, or of argos in making their sites inaccessible. My website passes W3C tests, links to anybrowser, and displays correctly on Links.

The proposal was to make specific sections unavailable, specifically the privacy policy (which is pretty irrelevant for IE users anyway) and other sections which are not vital to the site, but which are useful enough to interest people in the opposing site of the "IE5 or higher only" debate.

I really don't know where you got the 95% figure from. All I can guess is that you're either running a corporate internet, or the MSDN server to get that many IE5 hits.

My website gets around 70% IE, and:
6% Mozilla 5
5% Galeon
2% GoogleBot
1% Netscape 3
... and the rest are mostly from the Netscape 4 series

(before anyone levels the "foaming-mouthed-linux-advocate" accusation at my website and their browser stats, 90% of the visitors to that site come from download.com looking for MsWindows software.

It is a bad idea to make any of the content of your site only accessible via a plug-in, sure this software increases the number of systems that a plugin can use, but why bother? Why not create and encourage useful websites that don't need them?

Any site that requires you to have flash usually isn't worth visiting.

The SVG format does everything Flash does and more. Adobe SVG Viewer and Illustrator, JASC Webdraw have moved to support it and Mozilla already displays it. And because it's XML, browsers that can't display it won't croak when trying to display the propriety format. AND it can be dynamically updated in web servers such as Apache w/ Perl.

Vector graphics are good. It's clear that Macromedia is attempting to secure a monopoly here.

• Content

  If you don't have anything interesting to say, don't even bother.

• Animations

  Do not use any animations or blinking text on a page, when there's any text to read, especially if they can't be turned off by simply pressing Escape or clicking Stop. I don't mind ads, as long as they don't interfere with reading, and animations do interfere.

• Valid HTML

  Don't publish invalid HTML. Always use W3C HTML Validator and CSS Validator on your pages online. Always use HTML Tidy before your new pages are online. If you don't write HTML but you use a WYSIWYG Web authoring tool instead, and its output gives any errors or warnings when tested with HTML Validator, complain to the vendor of this tool you use asking to remove the bugs.

• HTML is not a typesetting language

  HTML or XHTML are for the logical informations about your document. CSS is for defining the look and feel.

• <NOSCRIPT> tags

  The <NOSCRIPT> tag is not for writing "Your browser is bad, come back when you install better" but for providing the same functionality for browser without JavaScript or with JavaScript turned off.

  (By the way, texts like "If you can see this text, that means you have no JavaScript" are as stupid as "If you can see this text, that means you have a kernel panic")

  If your website is unusable without JavaScript, it needs a redesign. Don't use <a href="javascript:..."> links if you don't have equivalent <a href="http:..."> links inside a <NOSCRIPT>.

• Remember about other browsers than yours

  If your website is best viewed with any specific browser, or in any specific resolution, you're not a good web designer and worst of all, you don't understand what the Web is all about. See the Any Browser Campaign. Install Lynx (a text-mode browser) and see how your website looks like. If it's unusable, it's poorly designed. Remember to always use ALT property in IMG tags, aspecially in navigation buttons.

• Remember about people with disabilities

  See the Web Accessibility Initiative and always try to meet the Triple-A, Double-A or at least Level A Conformance. Use Web Accessibility Initiative logos on your website, or just a text information about your level of conformance.

  "The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect." - Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web

  People may access your website using Braille terminals or voice synthesis. Testing your website with Lynx is always a good idea.

• Colors

  Remember that 10% of your visitors are color-blind in some degree. Remember that black text on white background is the best combination for any text longer than few lines. Try to learn from the good old books, not from the magazines about the latest celebrity gossips.

• Fonts

  Remember that the best font for text longer than few lines is a serif, variable width font, like Times. Try to learn from the good old books, not from the magazines about the latest celebrity gossips.

• User defaults

  You should always use the default font face and default font size for the normal text content on your website. Just don't define the face and size, and it'll be ok. Remember that when you use size "-2" for the whole text on your page it means: "For the text on this page, use the font two levels smaller than what the user has chosen as his/her default and favorite size of font".

  Use your own font faces, sizes and colors other than black on white, only for logos, headers etc., but not for the main text to read, longer than few lines and especially longer than a paragraph. Soemone has set a bigger size as a default for a reason - maybe he/she has a small screen, maybe he/she has problems with eyes, maybe he/she just likes big fonts - respect this decision.

• Accept-Language

  If your site is multilingual, use the Accept-Language HTTP header. My browser sends Accept-Language in every single request and it's stupid that I have to click English version links, after I've already told it in my HTTP request. See the RFC 1945 - HTTP/1.0 (May 1996)

  D.2.4 Accept-Language

  The Accept-Language request-header field is similar to Accept, but restricts the set of natural languages that are preferred as a response to the request.

  It's nearly 6 years old feature, still most of people don't use it. RFC 2616 - HTTP/1.1 (June 1999) defines much richer Accept-Language header (See section 14.4), but please, use HTTP/1.0 functionality at least. See www.debian.org which is a great example of this feature functionality.
• See good websites and learn from them
  • debian.org
  • gnu.org
  • google.com
  • dmoz.org
  • w3.org
• Try to learn from the good old books

  Try to learn from the good old books, not from the magazines about the latest celebrity gossips.

• Hire an expert, like me

  Contact me and I'll fix your broken website or supervise your webmasters for very affordable prices.

There's a huge split. If you ask the "Slashdot Community" what makes good web design, you'll hear... a lot of noise.

There's the progress camp:
www.webstandards.org, that wants everyone to upgrade their browsers and live on the bleeding edge of style sheets (how ironic is it that their bleeding edge stance has been replaced with an "under construction" sign).

Then there's the compatibility camp:
anybrowser.org that wants every web page to work in the old browsers.

There are probably a few things everyone can agree on, like Flash being worthless at best and extremely annoying most of the time.

Personally, I say: look at the successful dynamic sites. Google, Yahoo, Slashdot. Light HTML, very light images, strong dynamic backend. Don't get too caught up in the format details; it's the power of what's driving the web page, and the content, that matters.

The problem is, corporate web designers don't care. They think that everyone uses IE5.5 in minimum-security mode, with everything enabled, and a whole raft of plug-ins.

I suppose it's almost as bad, in a similar kind of way, to the newbie sites with their "You must have IE5.5 to visit this site, here's a link to microsoft.com, go and get it now!"

There's a good page about it here

How about "use one of the browsers which work correctly and are freely available for every OS or don't view my webpage (or half a billion other ones)". "Correctly" being defined as "conforming to standards defined many years ago."

Well, since the subject was Netscape's failure to properly render CSS positioning, and since CSS wasn't in the HTML standards of "many years ago," you basically support my position. By the way, did you follow the link I gave?

braindead web design.

ncc74656:

A quick check of the HTML indicates that CSS positioning was used; Nutscrape...doesn't know how to implement CSS positioning. Internet Explorer works properly; Mozilla and Opera should work too

So, you're in agreement: It was a braindead web design. "Use my browser or don't view my webpage" is braindead web design. Period.

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• Frames,
• Cookies,
• Flash,
• Java,
• Javascript,
• platform specific limitations,
• large graphics,
• etc.

No Java, no JavaScript, no Plugins, nothing a surfer needs today. There are a lot of sites which state plainly: no access, your browser is too old.

I am still looking for an example of a website that is impossible to implement without Flash, Java and/or Javascript. The only example that I saw where Flash was used in a usefull way (and not eye-candy as everywhere else) was a site that even offered an alternative for users without Flash.

What will be next?
Web sites complainig that your IE5.7 browser has ActiveX and VBScript disabled and telling you that, 'to continue, you must set the option "Security Settings" of your browser to "None"'?
Webpages in Powerpoint format? (Including all those "usefull" macros).

Instead off trying to install every possible plugin (reducing the stability and security of your system to zero), complain to the web designers and tell them to read THIS.

Perhaps I'm some kind of techo-Luddite, but really, I yearn for those days, when substance won over style.

Ryan T. Sammartino

or, you could write a page that will open in any browser.
--

Screen size is a matter of "form". A "short fat screen" has a different form factor than a "tall skinny screen", right? A properly designed web page is not constrained to any one resolution or window size. CSS has provisions for layout boxes defined as a %-age of the parent element and for floating elements. If I resize my browser window, the web page should reflow into the available content area, not be locked to a particular presentation.

Do you really want to build a site 4 times to accommodate 4 different ways a user might access it? What happens if a 5th method is developed — do you retrofit all your existing sites? No! Build the site correctly and you only have to do it once!

Remember when most sites had a "text only" link? Maybe if the browsers make it easy to identify text-only users then that kind of duality can come back.

There never was a duality, except when lazy web designers were involved. Web content is primarily textual. If you have inline images or other media, you're expected to provide ALT text and similar fallback mechanisms. Graceful degradation and device independence are the key, but the concept seems to have flown right over the heads of an entire generation of dee-zyne-ers.

To the other reply, I'll add my recommendation of RichInStyle, featuring giant bug table, plus bug-demo and css test pages. He's working on mapping support in less mainstream browsers, like different Konqueror versions and W3C's Amaya, and has a decent cross-compatibility tutorial.

On the non-css side, the Anybrowser site has useful tips, and HTML with Style pushes structure first, then layout. For "what works in what" info, there's the results pages of Robin's HTML 4 Conformance Tests and Ian Hickson's Evil Test Suite.

PS. Your timetable looks fine in BeOS's NetPositive 2.2, except that without a body bgcolor, Net+ defaults to grey, and imho, the Windows-1252 charset declaration is unnecessary.

So now browser dictates content? This is a perversion of the idea of standards.

Check http://www.anybrowser.org to see what some people are doing to promote a web with access for all.

A related problem is that the Sun+Netscape Java Browser Conspiracy threatened to create a Runs-Almost-Anywhere programming environment that would make the underlying operating system mostly irrelevant, so software buyers and software users wouldn't have to care if they were using MacOS, Linux, FooBSD, Solaris, or those products from Redmond, which forced Microsoft to invade the browser market to keep from getting killed.

Support The AnyBrowser Campaign at www.anybrowser.org

Netscape was HATED by the online community in the mid-90's

Exactly! because the product of that day was not interoperable.

Now we have another company, which happens to have a lot of weight to throw around, trying the same old tired trick.

Netscape eventualy got a clue, and the newer version is attempting to be 100% standards based. Meanwhile other folks are tring to create the MS internet.NET

In many commercial settings, Netscape is the standard, and so other browsers are not allowed. Persumably in a lot of other places, other products like Opera may be prefered. I suspect hat most folks reading websites don't have a choice, or perhaps dont even know that there is a choice.

Now as for what to do, well I include a link to Any Browser on any web site I have control over. and I write a to the odd webmaster who is clueless.

I will say my reading of this particular case is that the webmaster who went to all the trouble in this case, is probaly not clueless, but may be trying to bring attention to his or her self.

The web is still - and perhaps will always be - HTML based. We've already got extensions to it - html 3.1, html 4.0, shockwave, php3, css, javascript, the list goes on and on.

XHTML is arguably HTML-based as well. The only things on the web that aren't HTML-based are embedded documents (like JPEG images) or stand-alone documents (like text files). I think I get what you mean, though, that generally, in a broad, vague hand-waving sort of way, the web is HTML-based.

I'm much more interested in getting a common set of standards that lets any browser (perhaps even lynx?) view the page with the content intact.

You mean like HTML or XML? I use w3m and with the exception of Am I Hot Or Not?, I can get what I need from most sites absolutely fabulously. The reason is because we have this cute little standard called HTML which displays properly on all browsers.

More information on the HTML standard and how it applies to universal access can be found at Any Browser.

I just love comeing across a site that REQUIRES a certain plugin, because they didn't want to spend their time making sure that their HTML would work with every browser. *sigh*

And you think dragging your heels on the XML standard is going to rectify this? HTML is already a standard; do you want to hyper-standardise it or something? I doubt very much that people dragging their heels on XML so that they can focus their energy on standardising already-existing standards is going to accomplish much. The problem is with stupid people, not standards.

> No, I didnt miss the point.(sic)

Yes you did. "Good" HTML isn't supposed to have any formatting at all. Yours is full of it. Yes, I am well aware of CSS' limitations, but you should be aware that any standards organization or accessibility organization would decry this as "good" code. I'll leave the "features vs. accessibility" argument to someone else.

I agree with Wonko; I don't like all these "640x480 in a box" sites, either. I run my screen at 1920x1440, and your site is just ugly. I can barely read the text, and the "box" the site is in is smaller than my GAIM windows.

Finally, validation is important. All my personal HTML validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict, but that's hardly realistic. Rather, getting pages "90%" compliant is usually good enough, and even the Any Browser Campaign admits this.

If you're interested in accessibility, check out the Any Browser Accessible Site Design page. You might be surprised at all the "inaccessible" elements your site uses. I know you said you didn't care about anyone but "average" people, but terming "average" as people using 640x480 and using a modern browser cuts out too many people. I noticed you linked to Bobby. Maybe you should read it sometime.

I have seen many sites that look like this, and I rarely get anything good off of them. Maybe it's the design and maybe it's the content, but when I see a site like this, I generally pull out in 30 seconds. If you want to see real web design, take a look at the big sites who depend on web traffic to make a living, like Yahoo!, eBay, or even Slashdot. You'll notice all of these sites will render cleanly and correctly in about any browser you throw at it. That's because none of those sites is big on specifying formatting.

> No, I didnt miss the point.(sic)

Yes you did. "Good" HTML isn't supposed to have any formatting at all. Yours is full of it. Yes, I am well aware of CSS' limitations, but you should be aware that any standards organization or accessibility organization would decry this as "good" code. I'll leave the "features vs. accessibility" argument to someone else.

I agree with Wonko; I don't like all these "640x480 in a box" sites, either. I run my screen at 1920x1440, and your site is just ugly. I can barely read the text, and the "box" the site is in is smaller than my GAIM windows.

Finally, validation is important. All my personal HTML validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict, but that's hardly realistic. Rather, getting pages "90%" compliant is usually good enough, and even the Any Browser Campaign admits this.

If you're interested in accessibility, check out the Any Browser Accessible Site Design page. You might be surprised at all the "inaccessible" elements your site uses. I know you said you didn't care about anyone but "average" people, but terming "average" as people using 640x480 and using a modern browser cuts out too many people. I noticed you linked to Bobby. Maybe you should read it sometime.

I have seen many sites that look like this, and I rarely get anything good off of them. Maybe it's the design and maybe it's the content, but when I see a site like this, I generally pull out in 30 seconds. If you want to see real web design, take a look at the big sites who depend on web traffic to make a living, like Yahoo!, eBay, or even Slashdot. You'll notice all of these sites will render cleanly and correctly in about any browser you throw at it. That's because none of those sites is big on specifying formatting.

it is meant to enlighten the people who use Netscape in Windows/MacOS...

Wolfie works really hard on the site he doesn't have the time to redesign it just so you guys can use your shitty browser.

if you could show me 5 sites that have valid, strict HTML of any version, or XHTML, I would be impressed.

• Debian
• anybrowser.org
• My homepage
• Cambridge University
• Microsoft (cough)

• Make sure that it still looks good when you delete all <table> and related tags. A left-navigated (like PinEight.com) or right-navigated (like BSI's Everything2) two-column layout works nicely.
• Make sure that it still looks good when you remove the /images directory (or whatever your site uses for its graphics).
• Make sure it doesn't require ECMAScript (the language formerly known as Java®Script) or Java® applets.
• Most recent text browsers handle client-side imagemaps properly (given good alt= text) but there is a patch to make server-side image maps work on any browser.
  
  And most importantly:
• Test your work on as many browsers as you can find, even telnet to port 80 :-)

If sites were coded to standards then less time would have to be spent second-guessing the user and more time could be spent on building the real functionality desired (and that's sort of the point of the site, isn't it?) so that they could be usable by anybody. More potential clients/customers is a good thing, right?

Why oh why is it taking the corporate world so long to realize this? Is it going to take a major law suit against a big company to make them open their eyes?

Back when all I knew was the DOS/Windows way of doing things, if it "looked good at the latest IE," that was good enough for me.

When I started experimenting with other platforms and operating systems, I saw what a mess things were. Don't get me wrong, to this day, I think IE is the better browser, but what it wrought is just horrible.

At about the same time, I started to see how the "other" browsers saw the Internet: Opera, older versions of IE and Netscape, lynx, and even OS/2 Web Explorer. What I found was, with just minor modifications to the code, a site can become very friendly to those with less than "MS standards" browsers. I rapidly became impressed how a lot of browsers, while not feature laden, followed the HTML model really well and could water down whatever you threw at them.

I have qualms with Netscape's CSS implementation but probably more with Opera 3.x. I discovered a box property bug in Opera that to this day is unmatched by Netscape. Opera has, however, signifigantly improved their product in the meantime. Netscape hasn't.

Getting back on topic, however, in regards to the troll, he, like a lot of people, think that building a friendly "somewhat" standards compliant site is a long and almost impossible task. This is a misconception, and the Internet is built around bad HTML and most browsers know this. To be accessable, you don't have to follow the HTML standard rigorously; in fact, there's only a few minor things that can really help, like alt tags and proper tag completion. A lot of this "standards" stuff can be done automatically by an HTML parser/correcter like W3C's HTMLtidy. More on this practice of making sites accessable can be found at the Any Browser site.

http://www.anybrowser.org

Because...

"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network."

Nuff said.

There's lots of specific information for this campaign at http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/

Lynda: Open standards, open source, browser compatibility and cross-platform compatibility. A tall order indeed.

If she wants open standards, why is she teaching people to disregard them? If she want's compatibility, why does she teach people to write poor html and deliberately break the cross-platform compatibility that's already there?

Supporting standards and not designing pages which are browser specific is the real way to keep the market for browsers open and to keep browser technology improving.

She speaks as if things like open standards and cross platform compatibility don't exist. You seem to have bought this, and think she must be great because she wants them to. This is just bull. These things do exist - they just aren't idiot proof. Just because it is possible to write poor html, violate standards, and by doing so break compatibility doesn't mean they don't exist - it means you should learn to write proper html. Too bad Lynda declines to teach people to do this.

I just checked out her webpage and the interview. What I found is a bunch of just bloody awful advice for web designers. For slashdot to give this woman credence as an "expert" is truly shameful.

Just off the first two pages I've already seen two really poor commands (suggestions would be a nicer word, but less accurate it seems) to her clueless followers - using tables to control text flow and designing pages for particular screen sizes, both of which are things that anyone that understands html would know better than to do. Check out this poll from her site - the question is "What size browser window do you develop for?" and then to top it off "any/all" isn't even listed as a choice!

Everyone always sights that pages don't work with Lynx but i have to ask, does anyone really still use it?

Sure. &nbsp Alot of folks who manage *BSD servers find that they don't need X, along with others who just prefer the command line, thank you. &nbsp You also have alot of folks out there with older 386/486 machines with small drives or who run the tiny Linux distros on floppies only, and thus may not have the space to install X, but still want to be able to browse the web unhindered.

Because of those who still want/need a text-based browser and because I'm sensitive to that, I support the Campaign for a Non-Browser Specific WWW. &nbsp I really think that this is the way to go, ie., stop making sites that are optimized for one type of browser or can only be read by one browser. &nbsp Give folks the option to NOT have to accept cookies to visit (ie., don't force them - you drive away a whole bevy of customers by doing that).

This browser "campaign" site also points to pages that show you how to design a site that can still be spiffy for graphical browsers while also being READABLE by text-based ones.

Support this movement!

I now step down off my platform. &nbsp Thank you. &nbsp Thank you.

I'm most frustrated by sites who's servers don't even serve content to lynx; my emails to www.etrade.com met deaf ears.

This is exactly why users of alternate browsers should politely email or call the offending sites. When we, as customers, start backing up what the technical people are saying, the PHB's will realize that customer functionality is more important than pretty pages.

Of course, they won't admit it. They'll just blame us for not doing it right the first time (so what else is new). The end result is the same.

In the meantime, send your PHB to "Why can't we just ask people to upgrade their browsers or switch browsers?".

Well, if the sites works for lynx, what's the problem?! It probably looks fine under Netscape and Mozilla too, if you can hack them so that they id themselves as lynx (HTTP_USER_AGENT or whatever). I hope we are not going to see a spate of stories like this: "www.so-and-so.com doesn't work on my browser". I mean, get used to it, people. This happens all the time. If we had a story about it on slashdot every time, there wouldn't be room for anything else. If you want to do something a bit more constructive than whining on slashdot, check out the Campaign for a Non-Browser Specific WWW. Then, write to the webmaster of offending sites, let them know they're fucking up, and point them at that page.

Visit the Campaign for a Non-Browser Specific WWW and put an end to this "best viewed with ..." or "... browser required" or requiring shockwave, java, cookies, etc.

``Anyone who slaps a `this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.''
--Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996

We shouldn't be surprised that once money makers got involved that the web became just another casualty in the war on our minds. Information is less important than image. Literacy is less important than economics. Critical reasoning is less important than feel-good emotive response. Welcome to our brave new world; we hope you like it, because you don't have any choice. Best to just lie back, close your eyes, and think of England--er--America.

Neil Postman's non-fiction book, Amusing Ourselves to the Death, is a disturbing report of this phenomenon that offers no real solution. Bruce Sterling's science fiction novel, Distraction, is not just a decent story; it's also filled with social commentary about a world in which media image is paramount. I heartily recommend both books. Huxley's Brave New World wasn't that great a read, but he was scarily on-target about a lot of this.

Here are two links to resources related to this disturbing trend. The first is to the Any Browser Campaign, a definite must-read for designers. The other is a far less ambitious work, my own short treatise on Diversity in Web Design. Both are replete with links to further resources.

There's also a subtle connection between the themes of bad keyboard strategies and bad webpage design. In both cases, we have people who think they're making things better for one portion of the populace at the cost of making things worse for another portion.

May I make a polite suggestion to ANY person who writes or is learning to write HTML? First go to the web site at http://www.anybrowser.org and read why it makes sense and how to code for the greatest variety of browsers out there.

To find out more about making your web site accessible for the disabled, here's two useful links.

Bobby - This web site scans web pages to see if it may pose a problem for the disabled.

Viewable With Any Browser - This site is running a campaign to make the Web a useful communication medium by making it accessible to as many different browsers as possible. This may appeal to Slashdotters. It would by implication vehemently oppose proprietary extensions to HTML, such as those perpetrated by Microsoft and Netscape, which must be a Good Thing.

It is important to remember that the blind are a part of our community, and would like to participate as equals as much as possible. Although they can't actually see images and other graphic coolness on web sites, they have access to voice synthesizers and similar technology that renders web pages and other computer-based information in a form that they can use. That's why ALT tags are important.

(I attended a 21st birthday party once where there were two blind people in attendance. The slam dancing was interesting. Apparently the blind attendees enjoyed it immensely.)
--

As the maintainer of a government web site, I can only say how much I agree. Those repeatedly posting that the web is a visual medium are just flat wrong. The web (and to a greater extent and more importantly the internet) ain't about pretty pictures or fonts only the designer of them can read. It's about ideas. It's a mechanism for communicating those ideas. And anyone who says "They're blind! Let 'em eat cake!" is not only heartless but ignorant. It is simply unacceptable for society to take a group of people who "see" the world in a different way and shut them out. Isn't that what all the Hellmouth uproar has been about? Saying "Blind people? Fuck 'em!" is the moral equivalent of saying "Plays Doom? Put 'em in isolation!" Neither condition is a good reason to cut people off from the rest of the world. And folks, I believe that the 'net has reached a level of importance, of validity, and of ubiquity that cutting people off from the online world is nearly the equivalent of shutting them out of the physical world.

I know my blind users appreciate the fact that I'm not trying to win any design contests. I'm just trying to communicate. Just like any other Any Browser proponent. :-)

As for the nuts and bolts, it's not all that hard to make sites useful to everyone. Check out the IRS web site for a look at a huge site that works in text only mode. And if you're open to making the sites you design more useful, try the basic information available from the Department of Justice page on this topic. There's even a fine page on the topic from the General Services Administration. Just because they're government sites doesn't mean they're bad.

On the flip side, of course, I think the folks filing this suit could have chosen a better place to try to make available for the blind than AOL. Suppose they get everything they ask for and AOL becomes totally accessible? What then? A whole new group of folks gets to look at the service and decide that it's crap?

:-)

Sorry. I couldn't resist the cheap shot.

I am a huge supporter of a widely supported HTML/CSS standard, accessible web design, ALT tags, Any Browser/Any Resolution/Any Color Depth web design. Just because someone else doesn't have exactly the same system configuration you do is no reason they shouldn't be able to access the content of your site in some fashion. The web is about communication, you know? Personally I think it's just plain foolish for any business to turn away potential clients just because they're lax. "It is too much hassle to make a curb cut. We don't really need business from paraplegics anyway," or "Bah, ALT text is for wimps. We don't need the business of any blind people." It amounts to the same thing.

However, I really hope this lawsuit fails utterly. You can't legislate everything that people do. Pretty soon there will be laws against talking too quietly, too loudly, or slurring, because people with hearing impairment might not be able to make out what you say. :P I could go on with examples, but I'll spare you. :)

This country (USA) is too PC for its own good. Harrison Bergeron, indeed. I've never liked the PC movement. I find that biblical principles suffice. If you love your neighbor, you'll do things for him without being mandated by law to do so.

CT

I definitely agree the a graphics intensive site should provide alternate text or if it uses frames provides a no frames version. However, isn't a pixel worth a thousand words? If the web is supposed to supplant television as the dominate media, shouldn't it be at least as visual? TGL

Every computer company, whether hardware vendor or software vendor, plays the "customer lock-in" game. The object is to foster customer dependence on technology that only one company can deliver, and then take the customers to the proverbial cleaners because the customer has no alternatives.

Open standards for computer networking protocols, and for file formats, serve to mitigate or prevent customer lock-in, and this is why more open standards are a good thing, rather than a bad thing. Unfortunately, it appears that this seemingly obvious truth is lost on the majority of Information Systems (IS) professionals in the business world.

Open standards of this type are the central message of the Internet. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) requires demonstrated "interoperability", i.e. disparate computers and software successfully communicating, as the primary requirement for any standard specification to be advanced in their process.

Imagine this scenario: you're the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of a major corporation. You, in order to promote the efficient flow of information through the company, issue an edict to the effect that Microsoft Word (or WordPerfect, or whatever) shall be the standard software package for producing and exchanging documents throughout the company.

While this should work fine provided that there is a version of that software for every computer in your enterprise - an iffy proposition these days; there are two unhappy outcomes from this kind of "standard":

1. It is very difficult for a single software package to fully meet the needs and working styles of every person or group in a medium or large company, aside from the issue of finding a version of that single software for every computer your enterprise owns & operates.

   Some people and departments will be very unhappy with your order, and will likely defy it, by using a different and probably incompatible software package that better fits their department's business needs. This will cause problems when they try to exchange documents.

2. You've just locked your company's document destiny to this one software vendor, and they can bleed you dry if they so choose. Or, worse, if they go out of business, you're stuck.

What's worse is that converting from one document format to another is usually difficult because of semantic information loss - different document representations have different assumptions, and it's usually not possible to cleanly translate from one set to another. This is the "lock-in." In strict terms, the software vendor can't charge you more than it could cost you to convert your documents to another format, but who has that particular price at his fingertips at any given moment?

Now, let's change the scenario a bit: instread of standardizing on a particular word processing software package, you order that all documents shall be in a standard file format, e.g. SGML with a particular DTD.

In this world, your company makes it clear to all software vendors that this is your chosen corporate document standard and that if they wish your business, their software must implement appropriate interpretation and manipulation of that file format.

This puts those software vendors into competition with each other for your business; presumably the one who can produce the best results with the most pleasant and efficient user interface will win your dollars.

This also gives the various different groups inside your company the freedom to pick the software that best suits their working style, so long as it produces the standard document file format. Everybody wins.

If we take this scenario further - you contact your fellow CIO's in other companies and promote this idea, then even more people and organizations win. Just by doing the right kind of standard.

This is precisely what the Internet is about: standards for networking protocols, for E-mail & messaging, for file transfer, for remote access, and file formats like HTML. The Universities and Research Institutions that initially designed the Internet had exactly this result in mind: no one vendor in control, all competing on a level playing field for the business, with the best results for the customers.

Of course, the big companies will fight this kind of initiative because it requires them to compete harder - they can't rest on their laurels. Small companies will welcome this kind of initiative, because it gives them a foot-in-the-door with potentially big accounts, for (relative to their size) lots of money.

Some vendors will counter with "standards" of their own. Of these, some will be honest attempts to extend an existing public standard in a useful way, and some will be an attempt to stymie the process. The things to watch out for are:

1. no published specification (or an insufficiently published specification that cannot be independently implemented for lack of particular details).

2. onerous license or patent restrictions.

3. No alternative vendors of software for that "standard."

All of these end in customer lock-in to a proprietary "standard" - a situation which is not to the customer's benefit in the long run.

Open, public standards for file formats, and computer networking protocols are the right thing for everybody.

Another essay on this issue can be found at the Best Viewed With Any Browser campaign site.

This article is at http://www.clock.org/~fair/opinion/open-standards. html

After all, if the designer cared about the content, she would create a page that could be viewed with any browser. If the designer doesn't care about the content, why would I?

It's the only way to true salvation.