Slashdot Mirror
Will Browser-Neutral Web Soon Become Thing Of Past?
Psychotic Venom asks: "I do ASP development as a part-time job during school. ASP's not my first love or anything, but I don't have a great deal against it. I recently went to an ASP site and got this message and I just wonder what's really going on. I mean, I LIKE Netscape. I like having an option...and I thought that was part of the reason behind a server side scripting language. So are we all slowly being pushed out to the point that we really DON'T have a choice if we want to really do Web surfing? Are we going to have to keep IE on our machines to view anything Pro-Microsoft and Netscape for everything against it?" And after reading this, I suddenly found the words "Netscape-specific tags" on the tip of my tongue. Yes, the bad karma finally catches up with Netscape, but the browser market is a hell of a lot larger now than it was in 1995. Pretty soon we may see e-Commerce sites silently echoing this sentiment, upgrading perfectly valid HTML forms to ones that depend on client-side components that will only work on Microsoft (or Microsoft sanctioned) operating systems. If a few major players on the Web adopt similar practices, the standards-compliant Web, as we know it, will die. Can this be prevented?
This is great, using Netscape at work and IE at home I can find out which sites are setup by arrogant idiots and make sure I never go on them when using explorer. Nice one ASPAlliance, long may you continue to make fools of yourselves.
They've renewed that contract since they bought Netscape.
<Script Src='../rejectNS.js' Language='JavaScript'>
which itself is a simple thing relying on the difference between IE and NN document models:
if (!document.all) location.href="/dagon/rejectNS/rejectNS.html";
It is a Javascript thing...
well then, do your duty to the karmic flow and fire his punk freshman ass. do him a favor and wake him up to doing work he was paid to do rather than work he thinks is right. if you don't smack this bitch up now, think of the egotistical moron that will be unleashed upon the developer community in years to come. you shouldn't have to think that hard, examples of those without humility or even the ability to follow instructions, because ''they know better'' abound in development and web content creation circles. So do wide guys driving wide cars.
Oh yes you can: 1) Disable JS if you use Netscape 2) Set "Identify as MSIE5" if you use Opera 5
At first I thought this guy was trolling, 90% for IE? *shudder* Then I found this.
Switch to Windows and IE? You'll have to pry Linux and Netscape from my cold dead hands.
On another note, it scares me to my core that 90% of the web may be surfing with VBS enabled.
Sites that do this are likely to piss off huge sections of their audience. I for one quickly head for the exit when I see the words "You need *browser X* to view this site...."
With the web becoming increasingly heterogeneous thw MS embrace and throttle philosophy could still yet backfire. MS are having trouble breaking into some of these markets (mobile comms, webtop boxes etc) and this certainly a good thing for competition and choice.
People who make implementation decisions based on today's proprietary technologies (and not open ones) are soon going to find life inconvenient and very expensive.
Remember, 5 to 10 years down the road the idea of the Internet being a purely desktop driven thing will simply be wrong and those of you/us (delete as applicable).who stick with the open philosophy will see payoffs.
XSL is not a Microsoft specific technology. In fact it is about as far away from it as you could get, being the fact that XSL (and XML)'s main purpose is to allow exchanging of data between diverse platforms/applications.
As there is no code on the opening page to check for the type of browser it can only be that he wants to check wether or not his site can handle being slahdotted. And get some free publicity too.
Yes, and WAP is a flop. On the other hand, NTT DoCoMo's i-mode phones have around 20 million users in Japan, up from 2 million just over a year ago. Why? Because it is packet based, and uses HTML.
Its only when you stop using the Big 2, Nutscrape and Exploder, that you realize. Javascript code checking for NS,IE > 3 and rejecting all else. Embedded Java needing someones broken VM, or broken becase of someones broken VM. Single platform plugins. Specified fonts. New image formats. New markup (bastardised html, xml + variants, *script, DHTML, etc...) Alt tags missing text (and who isn't guilty?). CSS that works, um, differently every time you use another browser. And poor fallbacks for lesser capability browsers.
The table was the beginning of the end. IMHO. Blink, Frame and Marquee, Applet and more.
It can be prevented. Use server side where possible, cross platform client side where not, and proprietary as a last resort. But most importantly, use a browser from outside the big two to test your own works. Noone will change theirs if you complain - its up to you to fix your own and inpsire others to do the same.
Fwiw, Konqueror comes close to being adequate, with CSS, JS, and ns plugin integration, plus supporting realplayer very nicely. Its font handling is also goo. Text zoom, minimum font sizes. Its Java support is broken for me though.
Mozilla is too slow, and NS 6 too buggy. On an 800Mhz Athlon Linux system with 128Mb RAM too!
Opera is supposed to be quite good. And links is better than w3m is better than lynx for console (imho)
At least I know what the NS 4.76 bugs are, and it mostly works....
Roll on KDE 2.1 and konqueror.
Maybe web page authors should write in some sort of abstracted language, which is then run through an interpreter that spits out code that will display properly, and will filter out browser specific tags, etc?
Of course, that's what I thought a BROWSER was supposed to do!
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+5 Good Karma
:)
This is the sort of thing the net needs
Looks like they put down their DNS servers, the domain doesn't resolve and both of them can't be pinged:
# whois aspalliance.com
[...]
Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.ORCSWEB.COM 166.82.35.3
NS2.ORCSWEB.COM 166.82.36.253
# ping 166.82.35.3
PING 166.82.35.3 (166.82.35.3) from 141.84.xxx.xxx : 56(84) bytes of data.
--- 166.82.35.3 ping statistics ---
6 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss
Sebastian
does the gross difference between cyberspace and real world strike anyone beside me as odd?
in the real world, companies spend a lot of money to make their shops accessable to disabled people and to make it appeal to as many potential customers as possible and most of them spend huge amounts of money just to attract customers.
then, on the web, you suddenly see "you need IE 7.5, flash 8.4 and at least 3 TB of ram to visit this page".
in the real world, 1% of the customers counts enough to seriously think about them. on the web, people say "ah, only 10% of my visitors use lynx or opera, so why should I care?".
or maybe these are just the same people who put "no shirt, no service" posters into the windows of their beachside shop.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The guy who wrote the anti-Netscape page must have taken a lesson from The Simpsons(?): "You can prove anything with statistics - 90% of all people know that."
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Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
First of all, I live in a country that Microsoft has a big and strong "convincing power" (y'know what it means), so most WebMoronMasters make their pages IE-only, and f*ck the rest. I know EXACTLY what the aspalliance's troll is saying, because is what people does here in .br.
Said that, I could say the following:
Sometimes I need to boot in Windows only to use IE. Yes, IE is a big big big crap - it only runs fast because IE is now the shell of the Windows 98/ME OS, so it has no stinkin' shell to make life difficult.
Netscape, unfortunately, has commited suicide. NS 4 is unbearable, NS 6 is buggy buggy buggy buggy (has anybody get fired because of this damn release?)
Mozilla is great... if you use a native UI like in Galeon. Mozilla's original UI is ridiculously slow - yes, blame it to cross-platforms UI, the guy who invented it should be shot to death - but if you use a native UI it's fast. Galeon is fast, VERY fast, even in my work machine (a lame-for-US-standards AMD K6-2 450 with 64MB RAM).
I've seen Konqueror and even used it (I don't use KDE because of their moron developers that, instead of working hard to stay in the edge, thinks that GNOME is only GNU marketing - GNOME 1.4 will surpass KDE 2.x), and I've yet to see all the marvellous things everybody tells about it. NautilusMozilla looks more promising.
Cesar Cardoso can be found at cesar at zyakannazio dot eti dot br (or at least I believe so)
Who are you trying to kid?
More of us vi and emacs jockeys were happily using GUI's when people like you were still busy ensuring that MS-DOS became entrenched and Macintosh was ignored.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
...only if you neglect that bit about Microsoft 'cutting off Netscapes airsupply' thus using illegal means to prevent Netscape Navigator from paying for itself.
Unlike Microsoft, Netscape doesn't have other monopolies that it can use to fund new conquests.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Reminds me of a project I worked on recently. We spent literally weeks debugging and testing to make sure everything that worked perfectly in MSIE would also work in Netscape. When the site went live, we checked the access logs... and there were more AvantGo users that Netscape users!
In the real (i.e. commercial) world, in most cases it is not worth supporting Netscape or MacOS. MSIE 4+ on Win32 is the de facto standard, and that's all that you can justify developing for in terms of revenue generation.
Of course, we need to develop applications that work on browsers on PCs, WAP phones, STBs and suchlike, but no-one can afford to support every possible platform and configuration.
Hi,
konqueror, www.konqueror.org, is an integral part of KDE. If you want to use the technology without KDE, there is a project that builds the same browser without KDE.
Both have afaik IE/win* in their browser 'fingerprint', so both work on the site mentioned (which sucks bigtime btw and all asp users should be killed)
-- signed for your pleasure --
Interestingly enough, while using iCab on the Mac (with "referring page" checked *off*), since:
p ?AN=716163755&fmt=text
a) iCab did not identify itself as a Netscape product and
b) iCab sent no referring page
I actually got to see the page. I did not realize anyone had problem until I read about it here.
For a better discussion of problems with web servers filtering based on the browser's identifications, see a Usenet discussion we have been having in one of the *.mac newsgroups: http://www.deja.com/%5BST_rn=ps%5D/threadmsg_ct.x
Sorry, Deja only seems to allow links to individual messages and not to threads.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
That's not JavaScript errors, but DOM errors. Trying to access document.layers won't work on Mozilla. Using the standards compliant domcument.getElementById() works great.
War is one of the most horrible things a human can be exposed to. And one of the worlds largest industries.
Action computer supplies, used to be www.action.co.uk, now www.action.com.
They used to use flash for *everything* with a dozen frames on each page. It was sooo bad that I phoned up their sales line and persuaded them to put me through to their director, gave him a bollocking before I called their tech support line and asked to talk to the moron who designed the site.
Deleted
More likely a Lovecraft fan.
Deleted
Send a mail to all the addresses I can find and tell them that I'm off to a competitor who's site does work.
Seems to do the job.
Deleted
I'm using iCab with the iCab identity script (not masquerading as IE or NS) and I'm not getting rejected! Hey, I use a Mac and a little known browser. Why won't they reject me? I feel so included and dirty...
You're asking the wrong person. He's not looking for sites that use "HTML4, XHTML, CSS, and the rest of the alphabet soup". No-one does. The sites he reads use that stuff. Ask the people who coded them.
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Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
>It's time non-Microsft users realize that the >world has left them behind.
Nice troll, but irrelevant of course.
It's time that trolls realised the world has left them behind and no-one finds them funny anymore.
It's alright. If that person ran a business they'd go bust quite quickly after rejecting plenty of well-paid Netscape-using customers and gaining a reputation for hating their clientel in the process.
I think this page is designed to piss you off.
> they'll just switch and try again.
No, they'll just go to some other site that doesn't insist you use IE, and you've just lost a customer.
I suggest checking out Jakob Neilson's useit.com site for some tips on building web sites.
Oops! Suddenly there's a potential for 40 million people to not be able to see your site at all!
Unless, of course, AOL just wanted Netscape so they could dismantle it... Let's hope not.
--mandi
I need about three-fiddy
That's the thing I like about developing for WAP in wml. wml is an XML. You specify the DTD. You close each tag you open. And the checking is damn strict: one syntax error and all you see on the phone is 'invalid tag'. It would be nice if some popular browsers did that.
Maybe we should let all 'web developers' test their site sitting behind a VT-terminal which loads the page over a 9600 bps ppp line :)
The Virtual Bookcase: book reviews
Netscape (and Mozilla) are the most standards-compliant browsers out there.
Doesn't Amaya hold that crown?
Free Mac Mini. Yes, I'm
The article says that JScript is better than VBScript in umpteen different ways.
(and it is true)
Actually, to me his explanation made sense. His content is targetted at technologies mainly used on Intranets, and it is much more reasonable on an Intranet to assume/require certain browsers and make use of features they have.
Since a big point of his content revolves around IE specific features, it does seem like a waste of effort to make it so people can read about these features in Netscape - they would have to switch to IE to try them out.
He didn't seem to be advocating Internet deployment of IE-only features; he simply did so himself because it's a site about IE-only features.
It accepts omniweb, because omniweb masquerades as an MSIE browser. Just check your setting in Omniweb (be sure to pick the advanced settings).
I believe the tab is called 'emulation'.
Oh, you can also use JunkBuster to modify your user-agent info. Piece of cake.
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Slashdot didn't accept your submission? hackerheaven.org will!
BTW do you have an example of a page that breaks JavaScript, as I haven't seen any since M17.
Absolutely any page that uses layers, or DOM. That includes anything that uses dropdown menus, cutesy mouse pointers, etc. Both my Bank & Credit Card company work fine with NS & IE, but not Mozilla. Where I work we've decided that Mozilla compatibility is simply not worth the programmer time - we've developed a website that is compliant with as many standards as possible, works fine on every browser we can throw at it *except* Mozilla, which barfs with hundreds of bogus Javascript errors. For the <0.1% of users who are likely to use it it's not worth investing time and money in.
Mozilla decided to ditch compatibility and use a 'pure' w3c design, which *nobody* uses. This means that mozilla is utterly useless for browsing a large percentage of Javascript sites. They should provide compatibility with both NS and IE DOM models (for fsck's sake, at least NS since this *is* supposed to be NS 6.x)
I try to keep track of the mozilla nighltlies, and have never seen a single version that doesn't lock *hard* when asked to do SSL. Older ones used to be able to crash X, on occasion.
For example, try http://www.co-operativebank.co.uk, click on the top left icon to start the java applet. This locks mozilla solid.
www.barclaycard.co.uk, try to click on something. Nothing works - Javascript errors... the code looks fine to me.
Then whoever does not use the specified standard should be smacked in the face
Microsoft and Netscape you mean?
The 'standard' is not supported by 99.9999% of browsers. Probably never will be. That is not what I call a standard.
You *cannot* write a website using this 'standard' and have it understood by *any* current browsers except Mozilla. No company in their right mind would create a website that way.
Mozilla needs to be compatible with the existing standards before it starts messing around with wannabee standards. The existing standards are what is implemented by NS and/or IE (take your pick).
Of course, the submitter didn't give a link to where s/he was trying to go, so I can't really figure that out. From what I can tell, mozilla isn't really being blocked from that site on any of the links that I tried, and the blocking page talked about "Netscape 4" without talking about mozilla at all. Given that mozilla fixes most (if not all) of the problems that the authot was talking about, there really isn't an excuse to block mozilla users from the site. I think this was just a reaction (albeit immature) to Netscape 4's lameness. Of course, I don't agree with that approach. If a web browser is going to have problems with laying out a page, then give the surfers a warning "You're using Netscape 4.x, therefore, this page may look like crap, but it's not my fault", but still let the viewers get the damn page!.
:P
I think this is typical Slashdot alarmism: take an extreme edge case and state that soon everybody will be doing it.
BTW: From my own experience, there are a LOT more pages that disallow or deliberately try to crash Internet Explorer than there are pages that refuse to use Netscape.
If msft maintains it is not a monopoly, the DOJ attorney would simply have the judges go on the www.aspalliance.com site using ns or opera.
in the real world, companies spend a lot of money to make their shops accessable to disabled people and to make it appeal to as many potential customers as possible and most of them spend huge amounts of money just to attract customers.
One positive development is that governments are developing standards for accessibility of public sites for those with visual and other impairments.
In practice this means the sites should be usable with any standards compliant browser.
As these standards become implemented there will be pressure on private sites to comply.
Some people just don't get the point of writing for Web is writing content that adapts to all manner of users instead of trying to make the users adapt to your content.
Still, I wouldn't worry unduly about too many webmasters sharing this lack of insight. Their readership will dwindle simply because of a very important readership that doesn't use the Big Two: search engines.
So let them lock out Gulliver and Scooter and Mercator and LinkWalker and InfoSeek Sidewinder and other web crawling user agents which aren't MSIE or Mozilla. Such sites deserve to drop off the radar while the search engines send users to sites with information that anyone can view.
For a client application, there is no such thing as "way too forgiving" or "too flexible." The real problem is that some w3b d3sign3rz are using IE to check or test their page. From your description of IE, it sounds like it is more suitable for use as a web browser, and less suitable for use as a "test viewer" for w3b d3sign3rz.
In this case, I gotta blame the way the tool is being used, not the tool itself.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
-- Michael Chermside
T h e U n d e r g r o u n d W a r e h o u s e
Detachment 3 Media
Exposed, Exploited, Exploded
>I guess it all depends on what you're trying to
>convey from the site. If it's just a plain old
>artsy fartsy "Look at me, I'm naked and
>petrified" site, then cross-browser
Heh, I'd forgotten that particular troll(set).
>compatibility should be easy to implement and
>well worth the effort, but when it comes to
>efficient web applications,
Just curious here, what kind of web applications are you talking about? I can't think of any I use that require ActiveX or any of the other MS stuff (which is a good thing, since I have AX turned off).
I support your view that set-top box net access is going to cause people to rethink their web-applications' reliance on particular browsers. We need to see the financial web sites begin to support these things to get some momentum.
My father is a keen private investor, making use of the full spectrum of financial services regularly. He is interested in what use he can make of the Internet, but won't touch my mother's PC. Unfortunately it runs Windows, and having seen how it can go wrong without user intervention, he won't touch it - if it goes wrong while he is using it, my mother will blame him, not Gates!
So he is only prepared to use a proper consumer Internet device. To him it is the perfect choice. The VCR, fax and microwave never malfunction, so the set-top box is going to work perfectly out of the box, right? Until he finds that it doesn't matter if his set-top works properly or not, because he's being served broken content...
As far as excluding the disabled goes, isn't it actually illegal in the EU to exclude someone from your shop because of disability? I seem to remember hearing of a move to prosecute some business using those rules because their web-site didn't work for the blind. Anyone remember that? What happened? (Its probably still waiting to go to court or something).
In this specific case, just build a mozilla with edited browser type.
In the end, no, there is nothing you can do to prevent MS to use its domination of the Browser market to completely lock out competition. I mean there will always be sites open to all, but still it'd be bad enough.
But this is really what the MS Antitrust case boils down to. Stop MS from becoming a threat to the public before it's really too late.
Try opera. I admit I haven't tried the linux version myself, but opera 5 for windows is very nice. I only have one or two minor gripes with it; otherwise it's very neat.
*sigh*
:). A goodly portion of this breaks in Internet Exploitable, yet the author wasn't searching for it as hard. Kind of like the self-fulfilling prophecy thing.
One of the *points* of the Open Source movement is that, if you find a problem, you can fix it.
Thus, if you find a problem in Mozilla, download the source and fix it! If you can't code it or don't have time, submit it to Bugzilla (bugzilla.mozilla.org.). Stop your whining and *do* something about it.
Now, as an aside, you should also always check your code first. In my experience most of what breaks in Mozilla is bad code (a friend of mine whines about NS and its derivatives all the time; I helped him fix the bugs in his code based upon his complaint list.
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Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
I had to setup a web based interface recently as a frontend to administer some functions of a service the ASP I work for provides. It would have been nice to conditionally disable parts of the form so that there could be no input in certain fields depending on the state of others. IE will allow you to do this as it follows the HTML4.0 spec, but Netscape will not. I think most web developers were waiting for Netscape to make Netscape 6 HTML4.0 compliant so they could use things like 'disable' in a form field and have the field refuse to gain focus.
We can keep setting up all sorts of JavaScript rules that the browser has to go ahead and render just so we can simulate this in Netscape, or we can all use the spec provided by w3 which is the proper thing to do. I don't think Netscape will die because the industry is leaning towards Microsoft's browser, I think Netscape will die because it's beating itself slowly to death with an elephant.
I, like most web developers I think are getting tired of having to worry about how Netscape is going to render HTML that IE renders perfectly. I really like Netscape, honestly, but I'm not going to hold out anymore. After Netscape 6 came out and all that changed were the buttons, I gave up. I now use Konqueror (for KDE) most of the time, but if I happen to boot into windows to play a game, I'll use IE to browse.
This is not to say that MSIE is totally compliant with the HTML4.0 spec, but if you pick up a book from O'Reilly Press called Dynamic HTML and go through the HTML Reference you'll notice that Netscape doesn't implement most of what the spec outlines, and in more cases than not MSIE does.
Anyway, it pisses me off but I think I've used up enough space on this drive. :)
"It's here, but no one wants it." - The Sugar Speaker
It does, but I have it disabled. The site did whine about my not seeing all the point-and-drool crap, but it didn't refuse entry into the site, which was my point. Although, in reading my post, I guess I could have been clearer.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
It appears that your message had some impact. I was able to browse thru the link they put on their warning page, using Opera 5.x on Win2k Pro.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
- Kaatunut
Yeah, but Netscape never had a monopoly. Microsoft is required, by law, to play by different rules.
"The cost of freedom is eternal vigilance." -Thomas Jefferson
Tell them about it:
Feedback page -- this does work even on Mosaic on FreeBSD!
Bastards.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
To get there from the main page:
http://www.aspalliance.com/
in the other zones click on 'Complete Author List' and right on top is 'dagon'. Gets me the same error with netscape as the deep link.
Rainer
----- On the requirements it said: Windows 98 or better - so I installed Linux
Not sure if I'm right or not but the new AOL 6.0 has moved to a Mozilla base I believe. I remember reading that somwhere.
Funny thing is:
I develop JS intensive pages for an online commerce server that I didn't write - so it's not exactly by my choice. There have been countless times when I've first tested something in IE, where it worked, and then tested it in NS, where it didn't.
Upon closer examiniation of my work, I usually find that NS has more strictly interpreted my code and discovered problems it couldn't figure out how to correct, while IE made enough assumptions to deliver the page, regardless of how those assumptions might change what I intended.
Either approach cuts both ways. I don't want to write code that's wrong, but I don't want my code rejected if it -is- wrong somehow.
The silver lining is that I've only rarely written code that works in NS but causes errors in IE.
The biggest difference between this reason "Netscape sucks" and the other cited reasons (bad CSS support, etc.) is that the other reasons show how NS fails when you do things correctly, while this one either shows how NS fails when you fail, or, as with this site, requires that you correctly implement code written specifically to dodge NS.
Err...which part of HTML4 doesn't Netscape 6 support?
<p>BiDi (Bidirectional languages, e.g. Arabic, Hebrew) support is missing, atleast until the IBMBIDI patches (made by IBM) finally get merged into the mainstream build.
Netscape Navigator 4.0 did support and tags, though they were discouraged and it did support CSS-P (positionable stylesheets), almost as well as Internet Explorer 4.0. The API wasn't a standard (document.layer[menu].top = '5px') and you couldn't change CSS properties (not position, but things like background color) on the fly.
Internet Explorer 4.0 and up only supported W3C-based stylesheets solution for positioning content ("ids and styles"), but the API to accesss it via the JScript wasn't a standard (document.all.menu.style.top = '5px').
Internet Explorer 5.0 retained the document.all compatibility and also added a JScript API compliant with the W3C ECMAScript bindings for DOM specs (for example, each object has a getElementById method, so you'd be writing: document.getElementById('menu').style.top = '5px')
Mozilla supports only the W3C way of both creating positionable objects and using them in JavaScript.
Thus, when you design a DHTML site:
Netscape Navigator 4 has so many quirks though, you might end up debugging it for days, so judge for yourself if you really want it.
Tip: A nice way to shorten variations of the code would be to detect browsers, and then fill up an array with references to the "layers" you intend to work with. For Moz/IE, add the 'layer.style' object for each "layer". For Nescape, add the 'layer' object for each "layer". Then you could simply use: array[menu].top = '5px'.
I thought Slashdot was pro-freedom, pro-choice? This guy made his choice. He programmed his site for the browser client of his choice. If you don't agree with him don't browse his site or better yet put up your own advocacy site.
The real problem isn't which browser is better, and sites shouldn't ask the client what agent they are. What is smarter is for the client to report what standards they follow. That is what makes sense. (CSS 1.0, DOM 1.0) vs (Netscape X.XX) Browsers should be judged by how well they follow the standards. Browser specific tags are ok, it just limits who can visit your site.
Personally I use HTML-Kit and HTML-tidy so that I know I am targeting a specific standard and not a specific client.
--Peter
CSS helps the content by reducing the size of the HTML document. Style can convey a lot of meaning - ask anyone who does layout. Smaller file size, means better through put for the site, the more sites that use it the better through put for the entire internet and the better off everyone's experience. I maintain a site for an organization that changes theme focus a lot. CSS means that I can change *one* file to change the *look* of the whole site instantly. The new look is then applied to the new content. Whenever someone wants to change style they don't have to mess with any of my code or mess with a ton of files, they can just go to the correct style sheet file and maket he changes there. It is a good technology. You should embrace it.
The HTML 4.0 support is what kills it, coupled with Netscape not quite being a "product". For example, Wells Fargo have a FAQ about beta browsers, and they state that when a browser goes out of non-beta status they will support it within a few weeks. This is clearly directed at the Mozilla effort. In addition, when Mozilla comes out the box with recognized https support (recognized by sites that are selling product), the tide will start to turn. Why? Because suddenly the concept of the internet appliance becomes an affordable reality again, and you won't have to deal with the just plain bad rendering of Netscape 4.7x. Other than OS specific tweaking, my own CSS testing of IE -v- Mozilla has shown that it's almost completely identical, allowing you to layout according to specs, not browser functionality.
While I agree that sites "should" be written for multiple browsers this is becoming harder and harder to do. Sites either have to code very simple websites that do not take advantage of almost any new web standards or techniques, or the sites have to maintain multiple code bases.
Why is it harder to do? Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) seems to be forgotten nowadays by the crazies who think a website is nothing unless it has some worthless Flash animation on it.
This story reminds me of a problem with my old bank, note I said old, they changed their web banking site for some reason that made it unusable in Linux Netscape, I bugged them for over 3 months to fix it and finally gave up and changed banks.
A couple months later I hear that the reason it wouldn't work in Netscape was because of bad Javascript and Style Sheet code mixed, if you turned off StyleSheet support in Netscape it would work.
I have to ask, was such useless code necessary? No, I was unable to access web banking because someone figured he needed some fancy style sheet code that wasn't 100% cross-browser compatible.
Was it worth losing customers over? I doubt it.
As I told that bank at the time, get rid of the idiot who's using javascript for such tasks as footer layout on the pages, hadn't this joker heard of server side includes or something that wouldn't cause any browser trouble?
Frankly too many website designers try using useless and uneeded code on the client side, if they can't guarantee it will work on all browsers it shouldn't be needed, unless the application in question is aimed at one specific platform to begin with.
Client side code should be kept to an absolute minimum at all times for best results, very few websites need it anyway.
Hey, what about Lynx! Except for the Javascript of course.
No, they resigned the agreement.
d00d! That's not the freakin' point, man! Those Windoze users are zealots! They're children who base their self-esteem on what operating system they use. We gotta show everybody how non-conformist we are by dissin' the dominant meme here on slashdot. Just 'cause all the slashbots use Windows doesn't make 'em mature, sophisticated computer users, and this proves it! This one example of zealotry discredits the entire Gatesian movement! We win!!!
--
Bush's assertion: there ought to be limits to freedom
If you browse the link with IE, it takes you to a page comparing the speed and accuracy of running vbscript vs javascript. Surprisingly, the author of the page goes on to great lengths about the inherient superiority of javascript
I'm still trying to figure out what the name of the website, "ass-palliance" means. The closest my dictionary gets to "palliance" is "parlance", or "talking out one's ass".
Maybe if Netscape didn't blow like the sweet Santa Ana when it comes to supporting new technologies.
Netscape : "What, me update?"
-Zen I'm gonna make the _world_ my bitch.
Sure the content does matter, but the presentation of the content DOES make a difference. For example, say that you are developing a site for distance learning. Do you think that the students, especially 4th graders or so, would get as much out of a flat grey-background-black-text page as they would with a page that is formatted in a way that they expect, with colors that matter? Take a cognitive psych course, you will see that the brain does indeed process things better when things are presented better.
Another example: try building a web application with flat content. Now I know that this doesn't apply to lynx/console gurus, but try to get your grandma to use lynx, then have her use IE, ask which one she likes better.
CSS (which is a w3 standard, one of which Netscape/AOL/Sun/TimeWarner support) great for presentation management when it works. Mozilla is getting there, IE is getting there too. NS is sad.
You just make me spit up my coffee!
Some say that web access for other devices will help this situation, but I doubt it. The display needs and platforms for PDAs, cell phones, and whatever are so different that companies will code entirely different interfaces for those devices, instead of hoping that their HTML will work across all possible devices.
Wasn't the whole purpose of HTML to create a universal markup language that could be accessed by all? Doesn't making different versions for different devices seem somewhat contradictory? That's the whole reason Java is so popular since it's platform independent and doesn't need to be re-written for every different client. I think if companies realize the not adopting standards is more expensive and less productive, they'll see the light. If not, then don't patronize them and let them see how their marketshare falls.
if(!toilet_paper) roll.replace(new roll);
siri
Try Netscrape 6.x... I'm betting you'll see something different. I actually tolerated NS until v4.7, but after that things began to get rediculous. Most especially, the addition of various Features without fixing the various problems that NS had in the first place. (Table support for instance... NS is still touchy as hell)
-Noctavis
-Noctavis
he's got a good point though - developing for NS is a major pain. Not that IE is perfect, or even good. But it is a lesser of the two evils. NS6 is considerably better than older versions, and is more fun to work with, but still the guy got the point.- -------
-----------------------------------------
Jobs? Which jobs?
I am a web developer for a major band with a brand new website going live in a day or two. We support everyone...including Lynx. Yes, it took some extra work, but it wasn't worth blocking the 30%+ users that use Lynx, Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, etc. That's potential CUSTOMERS that you block. I feel the same way about that Flash shit. Not everyone bothers installing that fluff. I like Netscape and Mozilla, so that's my primary devel platforms, but MSIE is also well-tested and WORKING. Even Lynx is tested! It's not pretty under Lynx, but it fucking WORKS.
"Microsoft (only) technologies (take data binding and xsl for example)". He's a troll all right.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Are these supposedly shady practices are what spawned the Mozilla project, which just happens to be the most open, standards-compliant browser out there?
Easy. He says Netscape is an inferior browser; Netscape (and Mozilla) are the most standards-compliant browsers out there. He must've been talking about Netscape4.x. He's obviuosly not keeping up with technology.
There are also plenty of other highy standards-compliant browsers out there, including Konqueror and Opera. Anyone who thinks the battle is only between IE and Netscape should really wake up.
Amaya, from what I can tell, does not support as much CSS2 as Gecko. Amaya is much more pedantic in it's rendering of documents, though; you can't give it garbage markup and expect it to do anything with it.
It's probably a good thing you didn't use the tag, since it's commonly misrendered by older browsers.
Since when is XSL a "Microsoft Only" technology?
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
Now you may not be aware of this, but in many countries, sites must be accessible.
With this going on, an IE-only web is going to get further away, not closer. The only way to be accessible is to ensure that basic HTML standards-compliant pages will allow users to access the basic functionality of their sites.
More info:
The only thing you can accurately describe as "Scotch" is a sticky tape made by 3M. And it's
... or BSD ... or Solaris ... or Amiga ... or Mac ...
--------
Genius dies of the same blow that destroys liberty.
IMHO, if this guy doesn't want me there, I'm not interested in what he has to say.
--------
Genius dies of the same blow that destroys liberty.
--
--
"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
--
--
"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
Looks like that site that turned down NS is slashdotted. Serves them right for not letting minorities have the same rights :)
HTML validators attempt to do just this. As long as you don't get too crazy with JavaScript and CSS, HTML compliant code can take you a long way.
Why do programmers assume users want browser-integrated IRC clients? If you know what IRC is, you know where to get an IRC client. Period. The same goes with USENET, Gopher, and a host of other protocols.
Hundreds of competent IRC clients exist. Why not simply point a user to one of those with simple instructions for use? If you *really* want a "browser" IRC client, use Java. Why on earth you would even attempt to do this with HTML is beyond me. Active-X is a little more reasonable, but since free (beer at least) Java IRC clients already exist, it's puzzling why you wouldn't even consider using those.
hear, hear.
Everytime someone time someone tells you they *NEED* these wizzo features to be successful and it'll only work on IE, point them to eBay, Amazon, and Yahoo.
Absolutely correct. Netscape 4, with correct (X)HTML, will just look "weird" and only if you compare it to other browsers. Half the time, one may not know if he does not compare. Otherwise it works fine. Much of the perceived problems with Netscape and CSS comes from mixing HTML format tags with CSS. While this should be possible, it's a big no-no in Netscape.
Also correct about IE3. Since IE3 allows for external style sheets to change text color but not background color, it's completely at the whim of the user's color settings to whether or not the page will be readable. The only way around this is to make vanilla pages or place the colors in every HTML document, the latter going against HTML maintainability.
The WORST part about IE3 is there's no way to turn the CSS off! And don't get me started on font units...
Finally, in the beginning, I went for a stylistic site that would render in every browser ever made. Every page validates as XTHML Strict, and the CSS file(s) validate with no errors or warnings. At this point, IE3 is the *ONLY* browser that will not render the page correctly. I tested ancient versions of Mosaic, Netscape, IE2 (which has a MUCH better parser than IE3), and all the major browsers, of course. Pretty much the only way to get IE3 to work would be to delete the CSS file.
In my opinion, it's just not worth it. Were I employed, my design would reach over 99% of the audience, which is far greater than most sites.
Excuse me? What kind of "web apps" do you write in DHTML? Ever hear of server side programming?
the customer doesn't want to spend the extra time, money, and headaches trying to get a web app working in Netscape.
What? The customer doesn't want to spend time and money....or you don't?
I'd bet that Slashdot's "web puke" is infinitely more complicated than whatever you churn out with DHTML.
Netscape is all but dead for Intranets except in a few companies, namely IBM.
Ever think that's because IBM specialized in enterprise solutions which do not include Windows? Is Sun a "dead" company as well? I'm sure they use IE out the wazoo there.
use this.
# ping 166.82.12.4
PING 166.82.12.4 (166.82.12.4) from 24.17.218.106 : 56(84) bytes of data.
From h0.ctcom.bbnplanet.net (4.24.66.82): Packet filtered
From h0.ctcom.bbnplanet.net (4.24.66.82): Packet filtered
A traceroute stops at a specific router, returning !X (which corresponds to the "Packet filtered" messages). A call to bbnplanet's support line reveals (after 3 calls) that they are blocking it "for a reason", but they can't tell me more. Allison got snappy and pissy with me.
Anyway, the gist of this is that folks on @Home (at least in my area) cannot see this page.
Michael
Do you have ESP?
>and you should use Explorer (unless you're a real masochist) over Netscape.
... I personally still use Netscape 4.5 and I will continue using it either until Netscape comes up with v6.1 (take the Gecko Engine, make the thing stable and throw out the bloated junk AOL added) or I get the hang of Opera. (Hoping that M$ won't be able to force me to use IE until then)
Well, I have the exact opposite here: Somehow IE is completely unable to perform POST and GET actions correctly through our firewall/proxy and I end up submitting forms twice and/or having to refresh 3 times until I get it to actually show me the result page instead of an 'document contained no data' message. So using IE here is a real pain (Netscape just plain works, it does crash at times, sure but so does IE)
As for the sites starting to be MS only, did anyone notice that all of a sudden a lot of amateur pages are done using Frontpage? (just because they don't know or don't want to learn how to write HTML and/or do an FTP upload)
In addition to that, I must admit that Netscape is in a bad shape at the moment and I explicitly blame AOL for that. Let's be honest: If I download a browser I DON'T WANT AOL Instant Messenger to install itself with it. (in Netscape 4.x there's not even an uninstall option so I need to delete it manually) And if I want to have Real Player I'll go to www.real.com and download it, the same goes for Winamp, Shockwave and whatever other crap AOL has put into the Netscape 6 distribution. (It had about 8MB when I downloaded Preview 1 and now its 25!) And let's not forget the rushed launch of Netscape 6 which IMHO was a severe mistake, it simply wasn't ready yet and now it is giving Netscape a bad reputation which will be hard to make up again later.
Well
Greetings,
Lev
Captain Amazing points out that he's an intranet developer (and knows how to use a bold tag) and won't support Netscape. Inflammatory comments aside, it's fairly obvious that after years of intranet-only (read: enforcable browser) development, he's completely succumbed to IE - specific tags, functions and script wierdness. I know - I've bowed to the false god of before, and it's easy to get sucked in.
That'll work, until Microsoft gets tired of it's plucky little competitors and starts using authentication of some sort to "protect the consumer" and "maintain a positive web experience". Then you'll have to hack their encryption.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
As a web developer, I find this guy to be just lazy. The well _I_ don't want to code for other browsers is just pathetic. It doesn't take a genius to code for both browsers nor is it very hard to make sites that don't make Netscape slow to a grind or crash, when you open them. If you can't use XLS MicroCrap-Only code, then use something that works, like Perl. It's easy to learn, and is pretty damn platform unspecific.
.. it has just about everything that I need for a server side scripting language! Professionaly I decided against focusing on ASP, because I don't want to be limited to one browser.
I use Perl on NT and *nix
I also accept the most people do not have broadband and do not or cannot download 50mb of IE 5.0 at 56k or less! Also, to expect someone like my grandmother, my mother, or Joe Average to figure out how to download Internet Explorer or Netscape for that matter is totally ridculous!
--
you are not what you own
it's a sig, wtf?
Seems fair to me. The author's anti-Netscape rant shows what an arrogant person he is. Quite frankly, I think he deserves whatever he gets.
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try."
My site (URL above *plug plug*!) passes W3Cs XHTML Transitional compliance tests and CSS-1 compliance, and guess what? It renders perfectly on: IE (4+), Netscape (4.7+), Opera (4+), Neoplanet (Lynx obviously is a different kettle of fish), and on different platforms too (PC/Mac/Linux - I'd test it on more if I had access to them). It would render fine on WebTV without modification if the browser behaved itself and ignored non-recognised tags (it chokes on the tag).
The problem really is sloppy coding and poor testing. More companies should provide tools like CSE HTML Validator (which is what I've used, along with W3C's own tools, to verify Dreamweaver's output).
As a final word, I am a professional ASP developer, and I go to the same lengths to make sure that my ASP output is as valid as my HTML. I'm wondering just how valid ASP.NETs output will be...
"Life is like a sewer - what you get out of it depends on what you put into it" - Tom Lehrer
How can we, in good concience, pressure web sites to maintain Netscape compatibility when every release sucks worse than the last one!
If Microsoft did one thing right in the browser wars, it was to go through the Mosaic code and do a ground-up rewrite that killed the bugs that had plagued it from the early releasees.
Microsoft won, not so much because of bully tactics, but because people got tired of new "features" like pop-up windows taking priority over "don't crash my system".
the standards-compliant Web, as we know it, will die.
Last time I checked most sites (and browsers) do NOT comply to standards. ie. Slashdot
As far as I know the "Standards-Compliant Web" has never existed...
Well, for example, you're forced to use:
href=javascript:window.open("target.html"); document.window.back;
to link to a redirecting page. An ordinary link to a redirecting page will leave your hapless user with no "back" capability, since when he hits "back", he'll get redirected again back to.. er.. where he is. Chances are he also doesn't know how to use "history" to find his way home. Buh-bye.
Another reason to open a page in a new window with javascript is to keep your primary page visible. Many novice users don't know how to right-click to open a link in a new window. Instead, they keep redisplaying the root window over and over again by going "back" to it. This tends to be slow, and tends to piss people off. You risk them experiencing "lack of attention span fever" and going elsewhere.
You can solve this on your own pages with a navigation frame or with navigation tables that replicate everywhere, but what about foreign links? Serving up other people's pages in frames is not a good solution for lots of different reasons which I won't go into here.
So, yeah, there are good reasons to use javascript to pop up linked pages. But I also agree with your general complaint -- too many automated page generation tools generate stuff for no apparent reason.
While I don't agree with browser discrimination, browser detection is still a good thing. Even Netscape 6 and IE 5.5 are different enough that it can cause major headaches to get pure HTML code to look consistent on both browsers, let alone JavaScript/DHTML.
Webmasters should be able to warn you that their site doesn't work so well with a browser, because I don't believe that hobby web-designers should have to put up with the bullshit of how inconsistent these two browsers may be. Sure, it's Microsoft's fault, but looking at the situation now nothing can be done about it, so browser checking is a good thing.
I write "distance learning" courses for a number of Massachusetts State Campuses and each and every one of them to some degree relies on MS specific tags and tools. That is not to say that any of these "enhancements" improve the educational experience or do something that couldn't be done in a platform neutral manner. It's just that the people running the educational show are familiar only with MS and don't bother to force the developers of the educational systems to accomodate other platforms or browsers.
These problems are everything from little things like javascript based upload checks that look for MSDOS file conventions to MS only ACTIVEX components and MS only file formats.
I've taken on the task of engaging in a polite manner, the system developers but constantly get the "we're a MS shop and your College is using us so p*ss off" response. They are far more subtle in delivering the message but it's loud and clear.
So, if you're a student using Distance Learning for your education PLEASE take the time to write the University and the system developers to voice your desire for cross platform capability. Say you use Linux, say you use Konqueror or whatever your desired combo is and insist that they support you!
If we don't all voice our concern each and every time we encounter limitations caused by a Microsoft focused site then those people will roll right over us and not even look in the rear view mirror to see if we're all right.
Justin
For "clueless newbies" and even fairly sophisticated web authors I'd recommend StarOffice. Since it's free and runs on most platforms except for the Mac it makes a fairly acceptable choice and it's easy to learn. It doesn't handle Javascript or CSS2 very well but in many respects this is a good thing.
I use Staroffice HTML at work for EVERYTHING and suggest it to all the students in my University classes. There have been some complaints but most people find it easy to install and use- which I've found in 9/10s of the battle to keep people from using things like Frontpage.
For good, browser neutral, easily produced HTML I've found it's just the thing. As an aside it's also very good at translating MS formatted documents into HTML.
Justin
"Hey, it comes with the OS"? Now just stop for one second, look at the whole quote, and then look at the snipit "Hey it comes with the OS."
Buddy, it doesn't come with my OS and it is that kind of subtle, incideous way of thinking that'll ruin the web. (if it hasn't already).
There is something you can do. Tell the companies you won't go to there sites if you can't view it in Netscape! IF enough people do that, they will change there code. If you design web pages, don't design pages that only work for one brwoser.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
your code isn't xhtml compliant without end tags anyway. your xml code won't be parsed properly. might as well get used to doing it the right way?
no, it's really not hard. use an editor to double check your code.
my entire (200000+ people) company uses the netscape 4.7 browser. would you be willing to give up $1000000 parts contract because your web page designers are too lazy to make the links to datasheets display properly?
I used to do a lot of really intricate client-side JavaScript programming. I started out my web programming career pretty solid on the side of Netscape, and last I checked I was pretty solid on the side of IE. I'm very glad Netscape exists: I need something good to run when I'm not running MS operating systems. However, they've done a lot of things wrong, MS did a lot of things right with IE, and I'm not seeing much change in the situation in the near future. I would love for Netscape to become as stable, capable, and easy to program for as IE, and once it happens, I will renew my efforts to support it. But it hasn't happened yet, and I can't sacrifice my productivity to the cause of supporting something that doesn't deserve my support.
Can I just say that IE is much easier to program for (in JavaScript)? The document object model is more consistent and powerful. A few things are easier to do in Netscape, but most are better in IE. In addition, CSS works much closer to the way it is supposed to in IE. Finally, while trying to create some normal (non-malicious) programs, I found some innocent looking JavaScript code that would crash any Netscape browser and, if running Windows 95/98, would put the OS into an unstable state (NT just had to log out and back in). That is really unacceptable.
Back to the main topic: standards on the web. No, I don't think things will get much worse than they are now. I've personally been seeing about the same percentage of browser-specific sites over the past 3 years or so, without much change. If anything, things will get better. Standards committees have been getting more attention recently than they did a few years ago. Even though there will always be proprietary extensions making some sites browser-specific, as long as the standards are adequate, it is easy enough to write to them and avoid the incompatible stuff.
Try to see the other point of view. Programmers for some sites simply get tired of pounding their heads against the wall to get their code to work on all browsers, and just spend their time working on the one that accounts for 96% of their web traffic, inviting the rest to try a different browser. If I were in that situation, yes I would try to at least make it visible to other browsers, but I would probably not want to spend a whole lot of time on it. Especially on a site where they discuss technology that is inherently MS specific, it makes a lot of sense to require IE: all of the customers are running Windows anyway (or they wouldn't be using this MS specific product), so why not save thousands of dollars in web programmer time and just support IE?
Anyway, that's my $0.25. YMMV. And I'm still waiting, for the Second Coming (of Netscape, that is!)
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
It won't happen. Not now, not in the foreseeable future. M$ can still make life miserable for AOL, and I'm not just talking about removing the lovely AOL icons from the desktop.
The real reason AOL bought Netscape was for the web portal... netscape.com and my.netscape.com. Think about it, does a free browser make any money? Nope. On the other hand, ad sales on the website make quite a bit...
--
Dan B.
The real problem is that websites have become "web applications". Simple forms are not enough anymore. There is demand for web sites to act like full blown windowed applications. Standard HTML and JavaScript just don't cut it sometimes. But M$ gives you cool JScript functions like showModalDialog() (which is really handy) and it supports IFRAMES, and does a few other things that make developing "applications" easier. That's why they are winning... features that people want.
Personally, as a web developer, I'm tired of building "applications" on top of a platform that's meant to display "pages" of information. It's dumb and slow sometimes. We have to maintain state ontop of a stateless server connection. We have to do tricky things to client side script "hidden" requests back to the server just to get a little piece of information in a JavaScript function to, I don't know, change the contents of a select box. It's ridiculous. There needs to be a new system... or framework. Browsers just aren't good enough for this sort of thing.
--
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
Why not use JavaScript? It's standard... well, ECMAScript is but that's the same thing... the solution is that web developers need to be more active in providing alternatives for browsers that are older or don't support all the standards.
--
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
Yeah. That's a good sentiment if you have a compiler with some decent diagnostics (i.e. "'}' expected on line 554" or something like that), but most of these errors are very tough to catch in a non-compiled language (or rather an interpreted one) where some random user agent (read: browser) can handle bad code in any number of unexpected ways.
If HTML was compiled and then released, I would agree, but the reality is that it's not. Any tool that helps allow for this and still comply with the intent of the author is a helpful tool.
Don't get all snobbish just because you can program and others can't.
Impossible = A fun challenge
why are they still developing? because lots of large CORPORATE clients still use netscape and that whole server package.
the mass market isn't as much a target these days as much as appealing to those corporate clients.
how did my post get moderated down to flamebait, I assure you it is not. I meant every word and was not in any way trying to provoke a fight. -Mark
It's designed to prevent the slashdot effect. Unless you think it's fair that this little site should be hammered out of service until the story scrolls off the main slashdot page...
What's even funnier is that it DOES run and everyone else has noticed but you didn't even bother to check yourself - ha!
Hehehe, this guy was smart, they aren't going to get slashdotted (and no one is going to see the original message) because the page was changed with this small addition:
t .org")>-1)
e /";
....
if (document.referrer.toLowerCase().indexOf("slashdo
location.href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/i
else
He has certainly every right in the world to target whoever he wants, but he might consider a message that doesn't blurt to the world that he's full of it.
Full of it? What exactly is he saying that is incorrect?
That's right, kids! Microsoft's not the only one who can do it! What is all this blabbering about? Anyone with half a clue knows that VBScript and JScript are server-side languages; you can use them client-side (IE only, naturally), but the smart money's on ECMAScript there. So what's the point again?
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
He's not "doing your HTML", because if he really was doing HTML then browsers wouldn't matter. Obviously he has not been taught HTML, he has been taught how to do Internet Explorer pages.
.- -.. .. --- -....- .- -.- - .. ...- .. - .-.- - ...-.-
OTOH, it's a Good Thing that he doesn't know Netscape specific tags. The only tags an HTML author should need to know are HTML tags.
Simply tell him that you're publishing for the WORLD Wide Web on the INTERnet and if he can't comprehend that concept then he shouldn't be playing with HTML.
.-.
Help savingAmigaOS and a free PowerPC market
Looks like the owners of the site didn't want to get slashdotted, so they decided to redirect anyone who came to the site from slashdot. They weren't smart enough, though, to realize that the browser is going to have to download the entire page before it can be redirected since they did the redirect in JavaScript. Therefore, they are still capable of being slashdotted. What a bunch of morons!
However, if you visit the page directly, as in not coming from the slashdot link, you will see the rather rough message that tells you to go get the superior browser IE. These guys don't care that Netscape users can't see the site.
Brad Johnson
X is designed for showing presentation-level graphics. HTML was designed for showing information at a higher level of abstraction. It leaves the layout unspecified; that's why it is so much smaller and faster.
Yes, of course there are layout hacks in HTML (tables, FONT, etc.) and proper layout (CSS) but you still don't have complete control over all pixels like in a regular app. You still don't know how big the window is, what fonts are available, what the screen size is, how many colors are available, etc, etc.
What's really needed is good, network-enabled Java clients, like Yahoo Games: you keep the presentation client-side, so just the information is sent across the wire.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
They loose customers if they depend only on a specific browser.
The owners of the company that is loosing customers want more customers, and that will learn the company to adapt to the other browsers.
And if the TOBC (The Other Browser Company) invents something useful, the features will creep into Mozilla/Explore/Opera/etc and the evolution of the web will continue in a healthy pace.
Enough said.
http://www.millnet.se/ GO/U d- s+:+ a C++ UL++++ P- L+++ E W+++ N+ w++ M-- PE+ t+ X++
That's odd. Shockwave for Linux They have a Linux client, wonder why they won't let Netscape on Linux view the site.
Michael
But it takes even more effort to exclude them than it would to simply let them in and see the crap that you couldn't be bothered to clean up.
Get some decent tools, then. You know, one that produce valid HTML 4.01 Strict, and valid CSS2 to go along with it. Ones that don't let you set fixed sizes for fonts. You know, so that the design philosophy of "graceful degradation" would actually be realized, and the web would be accessible to everything. If there was just one decent tool like that to use, it would take no more effort than it currently does. Maybe Mozilla will come with a decent authoring tool. I bet the folks at Opera could do it if they wanted to.
Constitutionally Correct
That's why I really hope Mozilla gets the iCab-like feature discussed in bug 6211. And I hope they put it right smack dab obvious in the UI like iCab, too.
Constitutionally Correct
After a demo of Opera 5 I did for my company, the two Linux-heads have been running the latest betas as their primary browsers. They run into quirks occasionally, but it doesn't cause them much hassle.
Constitutionally Correct
Both browsers? Are there only two?
My typical reaction upon hitting a site that rejects my browser is, "Idiots. I guess I'll try their competitor's site." I'm not going to adjust to them. I'm a busy guy. If they want me to use their website, it's their job to make it open and accessible.
I really don't think there's much more to it than writing good XHTML. It should be parseable by anything and displayable by anything, at least in some form that makes sense in the context. If it's not, the designer/developer screwed up.
Constitutionally Correct
I've actually done quite well designing compliant sites that work acceptably in N4. It doesn't pick up all the advanced features, but that's OK. Graceful degradation and all that. The browser that really sucked was IE3. And if N4 really barfs that bad (which I agree it does on sites that make use of advanced CSS) I consider it incentive for the user to get a better browser. I'll build sites for the lowest common denominator - compliant HTML. If the browser can't even render that, IMO it's not my job to cater to it.
As far as Netscape 6? No thanks. I'm currently using Mozilla 0.7 (much improved over N6) and Opera 5. At home I use iCab.
Constitutionally Correct
If people want to be interactive they should be doing proper client/server protocols.
If they want total control over layout they may as well use DisplayPostscript and be done with it.
But I'm using Konqueror. ;-)
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"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
I forged my browser identification before going and it worked. Problem solved.
I remember the days when word processors reverse-engineered and read each other's formats. Good for the products and good for the customers. Where has the spirit of this industry gone?
Translated to the Web: browsers need to track each other's standards and behavior. This means everyone gets to "play" de facto, plus every product ends up the same for developers.
Instead we hear nothing but whining.
In fact, AOL dont use Netscape because they made a contract with Microsoft to exclusively use IE for several years before they thought of buying Netscape. There are no quality issues involved there.
Kiwaiti
Member of the Legion Of Microsoft Haters
His name is Steven Smith, his email address is stevenator@aspalliance.com .
I forwarded the url in the article (Dagon's anti-NS statement), so he knows what his employees are saying online.
When I die, please cast my ashes upon Bill Gates -- for once, make him clean up after me!
Stefan, who will not mourn the loss of shockwave capability, should it come that far.
It takes a lot of brains to enjoy satire, humor and wit-
The truth shall make you fret. (Ankh-Morpork tImes motto)
Hope this explanation makes sense. Ok back to work
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
Is this the end of sex as we know it?
Just because one dipshit doesn't like Netscape do we have to get stories proclaiming the death of ... ?
--
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Everyone who still uses BASIC after having turned fourteen is simply stupid and worth ignoring.
/. is better than anything he deserves...- -
Just look at the one FAQ available: "Hard facts that prove which is the BEST cripting language!"
I didn't even read the article (I'm on Solaris and I can't be arsed into disabling Javascript) but I can tell right now that this guy simply is a troll. Being mentioned on a site like
------------------------------------
With more browsing devices, the manufacturers unfortunatelly tend to create new protocols. Look at WAP with mobiles. I would *love* to have HTML browser like lynx in my mobile, but instead I got WAP. It is very, very sad..
What really chews me up is programs that require having IE 4 or later that shouldn't need to access the internet at all. Musicmatch Jukebox just bit me when I tried to upgrade and wouldn't run because I had IE3 and NS4.7 (not to mention M0.6 and Opera5) instead of IE4. when I tried to de-upgrade all hell broke loose and it forgot how to rip and burn. I had to basically delete the directory (losing my settings) and restart.
Thanks IE -sic
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Someone should mention to the W3C that XSL is a Microsoft-only technology so they can stop wasting their time with it.
illegitimii non ingravare
Hehe, nothing like a clueless web dweeb. look at this, taken from said page of the story:
t .org")>-1) location.href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie /";
if (document.referrer.toLowerCase().indexOf("slashdo
For people who don't understand Javascript, that snippet basically sez "If the user is coming from slashdot.org, redirect him to the IE page of microsoft"... silly
http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/
Fixes 90% of the stupid errors.
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
Jumping to Conclusions.
You can write really good Perl, or really crappy Perl - really good Java, or really crappy Java. It's the same with ASP and any scripting tool. It all depends on how you use it.
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
Secondly, just because 6 million people bought VS, doesn't mean they'll upgrade. At the company I work for we're trying to figure out what to develop with because a lot of our clients want Java, but MS dumped us out in the cold with J++. I'd start in on C#, but that's a whole other tirade.
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
this problem is more apparent here in far east than the U.S. of A.
friends of mine in 'net service corporations always mention this problem. interesting thing is, although they(geeks in development) 100% want to make it browser neutral, often budget and time prevents them to do it. even server-side scripting other than JSP is nightmare, because not so surprisingly, most BOFH's in your ISP doesn't know how to setup things properly to run mod_perl. or php4. or even apache. every now and then my friends run to the ISP, just to fix the configuration errors, and help BOFHs compile gcc-2.97.
so, with limited resource and wasted effort, you must choose the biggest pie you can get. and what is it? IE, of course.
worse is, most PHB clients want their webpage look fancy on their own desktop. they want every fscking kinds of bells and whistles, even if that actullay lowers usability of their own site. and what browser would they use, do you suppose?
only when other browsers gain comparable usage popularity, this trend could be hindered. and that means better-than-IE at least. especially dealing with I18N, especially around these parts of the world.
not to mention horrible rendering speed of mozilla 6.
http://www.ews.uiuc.edu/bstats/latest.html
http://browserwatch.internet.com/stats/stats.htm l
IE has about 75% of the browser market so he, or any other site with an MS only policy, is turning away 25% of potential punters.
Turning away "lynx" users is just plain mean, as this is the browser of choice for blind and otherwise disabled people.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
Was going to post some of his source/errors here, but the lameness filter would have aborted me...
2) Disney tried one of those detection things a while ago to see if you were coming with an M$ OS as opposed to Mac. Was with Disney Blast I think. One guy hacked his resource fork in NS to cloak himself and appear like a WinDOS machine. Got in fine and used the features of the site just fine. Point is? The decision to do that was political, not technical. There's no technical merit for doing such a thing. Only malice, ignorance, greed and prejudice can be blamed.
3) A standards-based web has to/will continue to exist. The continual fight is how to keep M$ from dominating/"innovating" their own standards and changing the rules mid-game. Again...see point 2. They will try to make such 'innovations' and standards appear to be on technical merit, but they will most likely be political. So the battle has to be fought on both fronts. If they can actually innovate without pushing people around, then great!
4) What do I use? NS 4.7 and IE 5.tuvwxyz at work on Win2k. At home, IE 5 on my Mac and soon to be NS 4.? on my LinuxPPC boot (once I get my DSL/networking configured :) So, yeah, I like to have options.
Cheers!
Galego
Que Deus te de em dobro o que me desejas
[May God give you double that which you wish for me]
Cross browser compatability - what's that then ?
Oh yes, I remember, it's something you need to do that will take you 3 times longer than planned to do, lose your profit margin because of that lost time all so that 10% of web surfers can see your site, just so all the fancy animations, graphics and drop down menus will help you sell Monkey Nuts.
On a more serious note, I think ASP blows donkey-dick, so who gives an oxymoron anyway !
Perl and simple HTML - thats the way to do it !
ASP is evil I'm telling ya - evil !!!
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
If you think that's the solution then you don't understand the problem.
If you go to a restaurant and get bad service you won't go back. If everyone does that they go out of business. With all these e-business ventures trying to make it you would think they would be more considerate to their clients. Such is life. Send them a message. Tell your friends and never go back.
I was doing some online price shopping in my area and found this site:
http://www.fedelecomputers.com/
This site won't even let you in to see the site to get something simple like a phone number or email address.
I bought my computer elsewhere of course. If people don't complain about such bad practices peole will continue to do it... until it won't matter any more.
+++
+++
NO CARRIER
oh wait, that was last week, and the week before that, and....oh never mind.
One of the many things I like about iCab for the Mac is the ability to change the identity of the browser if necessary. I can go into the preferences menu and choose IE, Netscape, and assign specific version numbers if necessary. I don't use the feature that often, but it is handy to have. (There are some ultra-radical Mac websites that block entry by Internet Explorer out of some weird grudge against Microsoft.)
Random Musings at Rum Smuggler
Obviously, this company hasn't heard the idea that 20% of your customers provide 80% of income.
If a company excludes 10% of a population they might just find a few problems...
This is a subject that always rattles my cage - the web was brought about to allow a vast number of people to communicate, and now certain companies are trying to push closed source and/or proprietary technologies, or worse still subvert existing crossplatform systems with proprietary "improvements" (yes, I mean you, Microsoft).
Taking this slightly too far - is this also not an infridgement on our freedom to choose? Why must I be expected to run a system built to support Microsoft protocols/systems?
There are still plenty of other systems that are not Microsoft - especially in the server market I don't expect (or at least I hope) that this is not the way of the future.
This post seems to come across as an anti-Microsoft rant. It's not supposed to be, however most of the examples of this behaviour that I'm aware of do seem to originate from Redmond.
Hopefully the growing number of Linux/*BSD and other "alternative" OS users will make Microsoft sit up and think.
if (document.referrer.toLowerCase().indexOf("slashdot .org")>-1)
location.href= "http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/";
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
Would I hire such a person? If I knew about his methods, hell no. I'm surprised you haven't fired him.
When i open a parenthesis in my favourite programming language and forget to close it, any standard (compiler/interpreter/browserifyouwish) will tell me that it's wrong and not accept my work. And I like this feature. Now, i rarely forget to close a parenthesis.
.sig
phobos% cat
phobos% cat
cat:
No.. to interpret it its more difficult... To output it ? No way.. Its developing the grammer thats difficult (like how do you represent the cost of a widget that is $ 3.54
<widget type="$/unit">
<price currency="USD">3.54</price>
</widget>
UPS Sucks
I too used to say, "Well let'em upgrade. It's free!" But unfortunately, Joe Modem isn't about to take his evening to get the latest freebie since he usually only surfs to ESPN anyway.
So you're designing a site not for 2 browsers, but 6 or 8. Of course you could always dumb it down to the lowest common denominator: you'd have a fast and efficient cross-browser site that would have the suits crying for your pinkslip in a matter of days...
Ok my karma is maxed out. When do I become Enlightened?
Though I agree that Javascript should be avoided and if scripting is really needed something defined in standard should be used. However, CSS should be used exclusively because when done right it allows page to render correctly in browsers which support CSS and it should be still highly readable in browsers that doesn't support it. Remember though that Netscape Navigator is broken enough to mess pages with CSS completely.
Why do I think CSS should be used? Because ppl want their web pages to look nice and the only other way to do it is to use tables. I hope you agree that tables aren't the right way to do this. I'm still formatting my pages with tables instead of CSS because I have to support NS4.x. If I needed to support only CSS compliant browsers there would be much less tables in my HTML source.
Saying that CSS is IE specific is like saying that TCP/IP is UNIX specific. In both cases it may be first platform to have support but in no way it's the only platform to support it.
_________________________
_________________________
Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
If a bicycle can fly, why constrict it to the ground? Because arrogant pricks like you only want to use things as they are intended. It's too late to reinvent the wheel, the internet is too big, too old. Get over it man.
"A good conspiracy is an unprovable one." -Conspiracy Theory
That would certainly be a paradox as most of the world's web SERVERS run a unix variant.
Keep in mind that the world's largest media company, AOL/TimeWarner owns Netscape. Even though AOL users still get IE as the default browser I can't imagine the company purposefully designing websites that would not work on Mozilla/Netscape browsers.
Isn't M$ on the XML committee and also on any committee that's doing anything that remotely pertains to XML? They may not have 'invented' it, but they're definitely involved with shaping it.
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
Now I'll have to look up your Dagon reference, because I was almost positive Dagon was something Lovecraft made up when he was bored. Hm...
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
release a version that could handle css better
Recent Mozilla supports CSS stylesheets, and it supports them well. Or are you trying to make a combination DVD player/set-top Web terminal? In that case, you'll need to get your CSS elsewhere.
or didnt fail because some piss poor coder forgot to close off a table
Not only is the HTML invalid in that case, it isn't even well-formed, and (once the stricter XHTML standard becomes widespread) most browsers will throw up an alert box for that. Note that even in Slashdot and Kuro5hin comments, I use a </p> for every <p> .
The version 6 is so freaking bloated
The release labeled as "Netscape Communicator 6.0" is bloated with AOL brand clutter. If you download a Mozilla brand milestone such as 0.7, it'll be almost as fast as the Netscape 4.5 you're currently using.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Even Netscape keeps on its pages tons of links to zdnet. All those are killing my netscape 4.76, but work fine with IE. They try to force me to use IE.
So what more can be said? It seems that Netscape tries to find a way to gracefully dive into the trashcan of the history...
Perhaps it`d be worth-while for a web-design company to approach clients of people who can`t be arsed to do netscape compatible versions of their web-sites and offer their services?
Most sites want stupid customers. They question the least, and are most amused by many of the gee-whiz effects that only IE supports. You think they're going to go out of their way to support the minority market that's probably more likely to flame them than to buy something?
"You can never go wrong appealing to the lowest common denominator." - Lisa Simpson
If I want to make my web page only accessable to those running uber-Browser 10k, that's my choice. It's also your choice to either download and use that browser, or don't view my web page at all. It's that simple.
:)
If I make a browser, why should I have to care about w3c at all? If my product provides features that people like, and the competition complains, OHHHH WELLLL
If you're running Linux, and you're only choice is Netscape, well that just makes me a saaaad panda.
On the fun side, try to do a Google search on Shockwave, that's what they get for being idiots.
-ZeMenace
I try to keep track of the mozilla nighltlies, and have never seen a single version that doesn't lock *hard* when asked to do SSL. Older ones used to be able to crash X, on occasion. For example, try http://www.co-operativebank.co.uk, click on the top left icon to start the java applet. This locks mozilla solid.
Tried it with nightly build 2001011608 for Linux. The applet loaded and started nicely, although I couldn't try onward from the beginning, as I do not have any account on that bank, so I couldn't go further.
www.barclaycard.co.uk, try to click on something. Nothing works - Javascript errors... the code looks fine to me.
A few clicks worked nicely. Here's what mozilla dumped into the debug output for me:
Document https://the.co-operativebank.co.uk/help/help_5.htm l loaded successfully
Document http://www.barclaycard.co.uk/ loaded successfully
Error loading URL http://www.barclaycard.co.uk/sniffer.html: 804b0002
So, one error but everything seemed to work nicely. Feel free to try the same nightly build if you doubt my results. I've used Mozilla with the now included as standard - PSM for https banking myself, and had no problems after a certain Finnish bank added NS6 (and Mozilla with it) to the list of user agents that are allowed.
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
i use iCab all day but i bet at least once a day i'll need to use IE, usually for some commerce site. much of the time its because the site uses JS that was nice to add but not essential to using the site but they didn't degrade the site properly so u couldn't use the site with a browser that didn't support the (non-essential JS). its just laziness and arrogance. as a web developer i like to check pages i do in at least 3 different vendor's browsers. it doesn't take that long to check a site out.
Ok, on the other side of that comment, Why hasn't anyone made a patch to make IE report itself as something like, say.. Lynx? I bet the worldwide statistics would be really wacko then. :)
It's a shame, there's good material on this site. Lots of creative Flash animation, for which Linux works just fine, but I guess Macromedia just doesn't care. Perhaps some emails might convince them otherwise?
Once again, that address for aspalliance.com is 166.82.12.4 Be sure and let them know how you feel ;-)
Johnny Quest has two Daddies.
Err...which part of HTML4 doesn't Netscape 6 support?
So, just because it's not Netscape any more, we should be perfectly happy? Hmm...
I have a good solution, but it would need to be driven by search engines.
Suppose google were to introduce a query option that excluded matching pages incompatible with the user's web browser. For example, if I am using Mozilla, then I won't get sites in my results that require IE widgets.
By making it a highly visible option, people (web designers, system architects, PHBs) would be forced to realize that not everyone uses (insert your browser here).
This increased awarenesss of browser-specificity would exert pressure on providers to create browser-neutral content.
You can never equivocate too much.
I have no problems with my bank PSECU
Mozilla decided to ditch compatibility and use a 'pure' w3c design, which *nobody* uses
Then whoever does not use the specified standard should be smacked in the face
I try to keep track of the mozilla nighltlies, and have never seen a single version that doesn't lock *hard* when asked to do SSL. Older ones used to be able to crash X, on occasion.
The above web site works well (and most of the "access your account" stuff is under SSL
For example, try http://www.co-operativebank.co.uk, click on the top left icon to start the java applet. This locks mozilla solid.
www.barclaycard.co.uk, try to click on something. Nothing works - Javascript errors... the code looks fine to me.
Then complain to them and you'll see that they will change it. Instead of moaning on /., make yourself heard by the corporate moron that programmed the said sites without testing them.
Now, any idea of what the hell that is ?
<Style>v\:* { behavior: url(#default#VML); }
</Style>
<Script Language="JScript.Encode" Src="graphObjEnc.js"></Script>
<Script Language=JScript.Encode>#@~^EgQAAA==@&6Ox9SWm N{WE mOkKx~c*P @&7xhPV.Cw4Sbxn`^G mCYV.latSEx?m.raYE~]TBG1l~8~*l%8S&B {!lcDSroDnxr~O8bI@&ixh~M.CatJk n`1WU^mYM.CatSJj$Um.bwDJ~]!B+vF,SFBFXFG~2SGO&%WDS J[N1F*&^EB!bi@&@&d +A~VDl24dkU+vC9N!Mlat~r9U^DbwOJB$TS8*!Bq~y,vBfS*O
Obviously this guy doesn't keep up with business news.... AOL has over 20 million subscribers, and over 60 million Instant Messenger users. AFAIK, Last time I installed this for one of my users, AOL had bought Netscape and now comes with the Netscape engine as its built in browser. This means that IE specific pages may end up excluding all those little AOL users. Seems to me it just doesn't make good business sense to purposely exclude a huge chunk of customer base - especially considering how much LARGER AOL is going to get after this Time-Warner merger.
It would be hard to close off the entire web to non-microsoft browsers. All they have to do down in mozilla-land is impliment the tags and browser identifier of IE and the world re-opens. And Im sure that if MS starts to completely ignore W3C standards, and sites on the web start closing off to netscape, thats exactly what the mozilla people will do (at least as a compile-time option maybe).
Tux Games. Your complete source for native Linux games.
> masochist) over Netscape.
Who said I had to use either? I use a variety of browsers, including text based (links). Users of Opera/Mozilla/Galeon/lynx are all gonna be pretty pissed if the web goes this way. The Internet, since it is based on open standards (in theory) shouldn't tie you to a particular vendor. The best browser should support the standards 100%. It shouldn't simply tack on bits that make it no longer a web browser. It starts to become a MS-Net-Info browser...
jh
jh
> Nope. Client-side stuff is for things that happen on the client-side (like menus and
> stuff), and server-side is for getting data from the server and doing things there.
> There's really no overlap, and with today's modern websites that demand snazzy effects,
> there's really no money to support crap like Netscape.
Mmm nice. Server side scripting does have the advantage of not relying on features at the browser end to some extend, so the guy had a point. But if it produces non-standard HTML as its output, then it's not going to work unless the browser supports those 'extensions'. Write good scripts that make no unreasonable assumptions about the other end's browser, and all is dandy.
Just put your anti-netscape opinion back in the closet, and start talking some sense. Snazzy effects can be acheived with javascript/flash, and if the browser doesn't support it, then you can have a less flashy site to fall back on. Then everyone's happy.
jh
jh
jh
jh
The beautifull thing about this is that all of the sites made by this are usually not ADA compliant, and if any governmental agency uses it they are violating federal law.
Maybe we DID take the blue pill. You wouldn't remember anyway.
IT's that 10% that's important as well, irregardless of the comment by the guy that 'it's for intranet and MS directed and not waste time...etc' (paraphrased). In my case I have clients in financial services/insurance industry. True, the normal users use whatever is there, which mostly means MSIE these days, as it's on the machine. It's the EXECUTIVES who get the new gear, and have demands such as 'I first had netscape, PUT ON NETSCAPE, I'm not about to learn something new or change', usually rather emphatically stated. And it's done, pronto. If this guy is selling 'just' intranet services, they'd be out the door before they got very far as soon as an exec found he couldn't use HIS prefered browser, the rest of the employees be damned. This aspalliance.com better learn who they're selling to and that in come cases the customer DEMANDS that they want, not just ready to sit back and take whatever crap someone gives them (which admitedly has gone on too long in this industry.) Old line executives in the REAL money businesses (not the failing dot coms) not only expect that they request, they DEMAND it. I certainly wouldn't have those clients if I pulled a stunt like that, and neither would aspalliance.com. (Maybe that's why i'm still working and most of my clients see this whole 'asp' thing as something they want no part of.)
i'm using netscape 4.7 on a mac...maybe my mac's on crack but i see no content on that page.
Be a moderator, not a brick.
Does IE support streaming JPEGs yet?
> It accepts omniweb, because omniweb masquerades as an MSIE browser. Just check your setting in Omniweb (be sure to pick the advanced settings).
Yes, but I don't think this occured. I changed my browser settings to 'tell all servers client is netscape' and it didn't change the response. He may be testing against particular versions of netscape...
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
The evidence
The beta gave me an error: cannot open files of type text/plain :-D
According to the W3C Validator even the ./ main page is full of HTML errors... If Taco can't/doesn't check his code why do you complain about other developers?
>It's patently obvious to anyone who knows how
>ASP works that this was done by the nice folks
>at aspalliance.com and not by Microsoft
where does anyone say that Microsoft did this and not ASPAlliance? As far as i can see, cliff just says that if this type of thing keeps going on then we may get sites which use browser specific extensions - in this case an MS browser - and the company that will probably come out top are MS, as they have a larger user base, and more proprietary extensions to their browser.
its not having a go at microsoft, but it is warning that before long we may have to have more than one browser on our machines if we want to view the web - instead of the almost needing situation we have at the moment.
== Perl generally does the right thing, unless you want it to do something else ==
I *think* the original poster meant the ASP code gets a bit complicated if you have to check for the clients' browser all around the place. Which is what you'll have to do if you want to make use of new (or rather, something that *was* new when that particular version of a browser shipped...)
M.
Seems to me that the only thing at issue here is that the guy is really lazy. I use ASP and NT on my site (it's a long story)... and I managed to create exception handling scripts to deal with some of Netscape's problems (somehow, table cells in NS6 seems to eat up a couple of pixels more than in NS4 and IE5). I'm coding to standards (using XHTML) and dealing with Netscape specific or IE specific issues on the server side. It's not that hard. Only a sloppy programmer would not do this... TNL
Check out http://www.tnl.net/blog
I hope someday the webmasters will understand the importance of supporting only official standards. Even we, net users are also responsible. We should insist on standard compliency. We should insist webmasters to take WIP, The Web Interoperability Pledge.
US federal sites, and intranet applications may soon be required to meet conditions under Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act which may make it difficult for them to create sites which only work with one browser, although not completely preventing their exploiting features of specific browsers.
What makes designers go browser dependent is aiming for appearance, and because they think they know better ways to implement user interface elements than the browser writers. Most sites could be functional on HTML 2.
Unlike PDF, HTML was not designed to control appearance, but commercial page developers pretend that it was.
I nearly always get frustrated by second line commercial web pages (most of them). Not only does their attempt to be clever usually break for me, but I'm sure that a lot of people have difficulty in working out their user interface conventions.
Have you looked at Amaya. It's open source, so you can contribute your own improvments. Some say it has a quirky user interface, and I tend to use it for proofing, and author directly in HTML.
One problem, though, with HTML, is that it is not a WYSIWYG language, and W....G editors tend to fool people into thinking that the page will look the same in all browsers (even screenreaders?!), and to select elements for their appearance, not their true meaining. Use PDF now, and SVG, in the future, if WYSIWYG is important to you.
I'm much more likely to go for the plain text web site. In the case of the flashy one, I may well have backed out long before the graphics have loaded. If I get past that, I'm likely to get angry at the dead javascript: links. If I stick with the page after that, it is likely to be to try and find webmaster contact information (by which point I'm probably in view source mode), although the chances of webmaster bouncing are high and the chances of any response, let alone a response that acknowledges the problem, is low.
http://listserv.heanet.ie/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9410&L= html-wg&P=R5759
///Peter
Doesn't this all get back to the anti-graphics/GUI, command line-ueber-alles attitude that open source inherited from the lost Unix continent? And this isn't the only hit we'll take because we don't like/do GUI. I read Miguel de Gnome's manifesto on "...Unix Sucks" and he describes a very tight ship over at Microsoft vis-a-vis GUI. Let's face it, Microsoft's IE has us beat bad, and exactly because GUI is such a persona nongrata in the os world that things like this happen. Sure, this discussion is supposed to be about proprietary tags, but, hey, why did someone decide to play proprietary politics in the first place? Probably because non-IE browsers suck, and it's probably not worth their time and effort to porting a hot page design over to the GUI-cretin browsers. Microsoft is rightly trying to turn the browser into a catch-all client, and not just for traditional HTML pages. It's inevitable that some form of a universal, generic client come forth, and--odd as it may be--the browser looks like it. Hence, getting more out of a browser than simple HTML display is an inevitable pursuit. That means Microsoft will sooner or later leave behind the HTML-only bias of HTML standards purists. Eventually, Web pages will be the plug-in, or simply one use among many others. I'm praying for Bill to take pity on us and port IE over to Linux, etc. That's our only hope of ever having a decent browser.
--- WWSD? What Would Strider Do?
Hmm.. Checking my site logs over the last ~611,000 requests:
76% - IE
5% - Netscape
13% - Ipswitch_WhatsUp (wtf is this??)
Then your average mix of other browsers. I'm not much one to care about market share though. I'd fire a web designer who decided to work with only one browser, end of story.
-Matt
Don't take life so seriously; it isn't permanent.
Why all that worry? First you can choose and you can actually use more than one browser. If you like IE/Windows, there will be a bunch of amazing, overfeatured and insightful sites to browse. If you don't you can use Lynx and browse slashdot.
By the way, the original URL is http://www.aspalliance.com/dagon/. And this is really not a problem. Just turn off Java and JavaScript and it will work fine.
The hilarious thing about this, is that the guy probably had to take MORE time to make sure he excludes netscape, rather than just not deal with it at all and let "the inferior netscape" display the page improperly.
From my experiences, these are juvenile webmasters, who use internet explorer themselves, and don't want to be bothered with netscape compatibility, but don't want to be called lazy either, and instead put up a message about how netscape sucks, and everyone is using internet explorer, and netscape/mozilla users should "follow the group"
...is to keep applications and web sites as close as possible to "cross-platform compatible" HTML and scripting standards. If enough browsers will support good technology (DHTML, XHTML...), that allows simple, direct placement and control of web graphics, controls, and whatnot, it will be comparatively easy to create a UI that relies only on this base standard. All processing and special-purpose application work could then be confined to back-end, hidden processes, or sequestered away on specialty sites, where users who need the special functionality can be made aware of the reasons for the deviation from the standard, and of what will be expected of them and their browser. Basically, this is what N-tier should look like.
Unfortunately, people would rather show their fscking 1337 Java skeels than write working, usable code. It's part of the product-differentiation scheme that ALL companies follow: "Yeah, well look what my browser can do." As a developer, you have to resist this urge if you want to reach the greatest number of people with a wide variety of browsers.
What'dya mean there's no BLINK tag!?
Just a quick question, does Opera support JavaScript (I've never used it before)? I just ask because I remember getting a different page with a link through to the main site that complained when I turned off JavaScript. Their site seems bugged all over the place to make the shopper's life hell. >:-D
:-(
I suppose turning off JavaScript is always an option, but when you check out Toyota's site, as you'll notice, they use quite a bit of JavaScript (or so it appears).
I just tried toyota.ca in mozilla 0.7 and it still breaks without an escape link with JavaScript turned on.
I really shouldn't have to toggle JavaScript on and off just to view websites. I guess with more and more popup ads on sites nowadays, I'll just have no choice.
I hope the letter has some impact. I'm really not trying to insult anyone over there - but it really sucks to make your site purposefully inaccessible.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
The latest versions of iCab and OmniWeb allow you to change what the browser identifies itself as. They can fake as Netscape, IE, Mozilla, Lynx, themselves, or anything else you choose. Maybe someone could write a browser that automatically masqueraded as the kind of browser the site wanted to see.
Vasantha Crabb
Exactly--even (most of?) Microsoft's site works with Netscape. I remember the days when they used to try to convince you, right on their front page, that you'd get a richer web experience with IE (4.0, as I recall, right after it came out), but it works fine with Netscape. They may have a few specific IE toys and niceties in there, but it works fine from Netscape. And I don't think they try to convince you anymore.
Alienating a portion of your audience just out of ignorance, unwillingness or inability to learn, or just plain malice towards an alternate browser (|os|product|whatever), is never a wise choice, and is a pretty closed-minded way of doing things.
"I say consider this day seized!" -Hobbes
"Tomorrow we'll seize the day and throttle it!" -Calvin
XSL and data binding are really good examples of Microsoft (only) technologies...
Even on "baloe" (you know which one I mean), it drenches all CPU power. Try Leonidas and be afraid...very afraid..
:) Great site too, allthough some things didn`t work I think..
:)
a sh/
Runs like a charm on this pIII
You should try this one, great design & great style: it`s the crouching tiger hidden dragon fan-site but be sure to have flash 4 installed, and a system not named Baloe
Naah, I don`t think Flash 4 is too bloated, it simply needs more power to run, and eventually, people will have this power and they won`t say it`s too bloated, because it delivers a nice extra touch to your webpage.. from a designers` perspective, I would even goso far as to say flashes capabilities are still rather poor. But then again, somewhere they had to decide where the plugg-in aspect remains important, and where standalone fast animation might be a better choice (through the use of accelerated video etc).. All in all, macromedia tools are heavily used these days because it gives webpages extra identity, makes them stand out, and frankly I think that evolution will only increase rather than decrease.. One can argue about the fact that supporting browsers do not allow plugg-in platforms to take full advantage of hardware and therefore, run through layers stacked on the browser`s canvas. I have no clue how these plugg-in`s work together with browsers but from the looks of it, I think they`re constrained by how the browser allows other clients to draw just about anything on the screen.. Most operations are fade-in fade-out, scaling, masking, moving, etc.. these are all rather easy things which still run slow on machines that definately can run them fast, given that they can take advantage of the raw hardware power in your machine. So I don`t think the plugg-in is to blame here.. but I don`t know for sure.
If you like to see what cool flash demo`s can look like, get a look at these things: ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/parties/2000/bizarre00/fl
With great power comes great electricity bills.
The truth is FLASH simply looks awesome when you`re surfing, and Netscape will generally be able to display FLASH sites without much of a problem.
Artists simply like to do crazy senseless stuff. A good artist can create an amzing experience while doing so. A successfull artist can do the same but with standard tools. Generally, the latter form is harder, constrainted, smells too kapitalistic and therefore is "not-done".
But don`t worry, your friend will eventually come to discover that, he needs to work differently, comply to standards etc, in order to be successfull.. artists generally take longer to get that into their head
I should know since my grandparrents were both semi-successfull painting artists. Not that many people heard about em, but whatever..
With great power comes great electricity bills.
Just use junkbuster as a proxy for your favorite browser. You can masquerade as whichever browser you want and avoid unwanted cookies/ad banners at the same time.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
If you use a Mac, download icab. It supports them all and has versions for MacOS 9 and X. It's currently in beta, but it will cost you about $30 once it's released.
Web pages are created to be seen. If you are John Doe with your webpage on toy trains, or if you are a marketing consultant for a giant company. Your underlying goal is to have that webpage viewed regardless of content.
So, why in the world would you limit your audience by making browser or operating system specific code in your webpage? If your goal is to have that webpage viewed, why would you limit your available audience when you didn't have to?
Perhaps the groups that use other browsers are small in comparison but who cares? If you can make it work for everyone why wouldn't you?
ideal; model tiny; codeseg; org 100h; start: cli; hlt; ret; ENDS; END start
I'm sure this revelation comes as no suprise to anyone, but this the beginning effect of the free browser phenomena. This is exactly what was planned. Both Netscape and Microsoft made attempts to "add functionality" to their browsers that were not standard. Both gave away thier browsers for free in an attempt to become the browser standard. Both wanted to dominate the internet.
Microsoft has won. Like the desktop, let the domination begin! Now they can afford to break HTML and internet standards without losing market share. Soon, much of the internet will begin to bend to the will of Microsoft much like everything else does (Incedentally, console games are next). The free internet (as in speech as well as $$) is coming to an end.
I will continue to be a niche player and use the Mac OS and browse the internet with iCab. I will also continue to root for Linux to unseat Microsoft. I refuse to succumb and fall in line.
Viva la Mac! Viva Linux!
I like the idea of being able to disable various extentions, if only for testing reasons. Unfortunately, Mozilla/Netscape is still caught up in their "Browser For The Masses" quest that got them into this business to begin with. Which leads to a certain arrogant declarations about What Will Be Supported and What Will Not, and also a unwillingness to turn Mozilla into a Hacker's Browser, because most of those features would have to be removed for the real thing. (There's also the issue of support: "Your site won't work after I tweaked 200 random rendering settings!")
Generally, I think they've been right on. Breaking 90% of the DOM scripts for the sake of ideology wasn't one of those moments.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
The asp site has been slashdotted. As a mac user and a PHP programmer, I must admit that pleases me in some sadistic sort of way. (Am I a bad person?)
I can't stand IE on the PCs and try to use netscape when I can. On the mac, however, it is reversed. IE 5 for the mac is pretty good. IE for windows just has too many annoying UI quirks. IE 5 for the mac has lost the rough edges that IE 5 for windows has. (A more discerning UI audience?) It is a little slower than netscape on the mac, but it appears to be more stable. (a pox on the person(s) responsible for the netscape resize bug) The only problem is alot of web sites don't recognize that IE 5 for the mac is a different html animal than IE 5 for the PC, especially javascript that makes assumptions about the DOM. Some sites don't work correctly.
I've had this discussion about requiring a specific browser for business sites. I find that a desire to use the specific features of IE is indicitive of a desire to structure the application like a desktop application, rather than a web application. ("We want drag and drop, so lets require IE") The point is not that everyone is using IE, so we can sacrifice 5% of our customers, but that the sites that try to do this end up with a clumsy web application. Given my wide variety of browser usage, I always argue for browser neutrality.
I have found that bringing a page up in Bobby can make an effective argument for nuetrality with corporate types. It gets the point across that there are people who can't just switch browsers to access their site. Bringing pages up in lynx is always fun, too.
The so-called "Open Source Community" has a very short memory.
Go to the library and look in the archives for some old business magazines with Netscape profiles. Netscape's numero uno objective was to expand it's role and begin to take over the desktop. Their original vision was to create a platform-independent desktop that would allow other companies (like Sun and Oracle) to pull marketshare from Microsoft.
Why do you think McNealy of Sun and Ellison of Oracle are so anti-Microsoft? The network computer is Larry Ellison's stillborn baby which may have survived if Netscape made it. Sun also wanted to roll out thin-client computers on a large scale so it could push out more E3000's to run them.
The ironic thing is that the 'Open Source' zealots of Slashdot who complain endlessly about the subvertive influence of 'evil' organizations like Microsoft, Intel and FBI. Never even noticed that swallowed the Netscape sham hook, line and sinker.
Even more ironic is that many 'Open Source' developers DONATED their time to create AOL 7.0 aka Mozilla 6 for the ultimate 'evil' corporate conglomorate: AOL-TimeWarner.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Where am I going with this? Good question! Since Flash & Shockwave run on a plug-in, it means it doesn't matter which browser or OS is being used: it'll look and work the same. This is a Good Thing. But right now, it's up to Macromedia (or whomever) to write the plug-ins for all the browsers of all the platforms. This is a Bad Thing.
What should happen is that the plug-in APIs are standardized. Then whenever a new "plug-in"-style media is intruduced, the plug-in API would be released under the GPL, so anyone can write a plug-in for any browser running on any OS.
Then again, I'm one of those people who think iCab will dominate the browser market. =)
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MacTacToe - for every problem, an elegant solution
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
My beef is not that every web designer should be compliant with every browser, my beef is with jerks that insult their potential userbase in the believe of being the best web wiz around, while apologizing in the same sentence.
Also flash sites, that don't let you circumvent the 5 minute intro are a sure way to drive my business elsewhere.
Your approach is very commendable and I wouldn't complain that I can't enjoy dancing paper clips or a streaming video from Jerry Falwell (sp?) or Pat Buchannan. I really admire web designer, becuase you are wading through hell in an attempt to get your code straight and from a structured programming perspective HTML is pretty bad.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
There could have been far worse things in your... Err! never mind
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
change your user agent setting to fake the site into thinking you're using IE and see how browser specific it really is. my guess is that the site will be mostly usable.
I looked at the site data for my company's portal page. Roughly 89% of requests were from MSIE, netscape was around 10% with the balance being opera and a bunch of spambots looking for email addresses.
Then I checked out the operating system data, a full 98% being windows, a little over 1% was linux, the balance splits between unidentified UNIX, MacOS and there were about 40 requests from an OS/2 box.
It's not news that we live in a MS world. People just tend to use IE b/c it's already installed on their systems and they don't know they have options to begin with. Hell, the other day I talked to someone who didn't know there were other operating systems for PCs!
Silly slashdot, sigs are for kids!
I tried browsing the site as much as i could and only way to get that warning page was the link on slashdot. and I'm using linux netscape. so there you go.
ound the message used repetitively over and over still nothing grows silen
Sure, he'll get more visitors. And?? I got the error message, and am probably not going back due to his lack of programming skills. But all I did was waste his bandwidth. He gets nothing out of it.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Strictly speaking, it doesn't. BUt that doesn't mean it's not a good idea.
Hyperlinking doesn't really add to the content of the web, but I don't see too many people screaming to bring back gopher.
When used properly, HTML4, XHTML, XSL, XML, CSS, blah blah blah aren't just pretty design tools to be abused by a million no-talent web hacks. They're tools for accessing and presenting content in a clear, usable manner. Does vi add anything to your information that, say, ed doesn't? No. But it makes it easier for you to edit and read your data. CSS allows you, when used well, to standardize your presentation of information across multiple parts of your information space and display it in a logical and hopefully meaningful way.
The abuse happens when people try and use the web as a layout and design tool. I admit, when just doing raw marketing "brochureware" for a client, I'm guilty of that. But when it comes right down to it, for raw content, it's all about usability over design. CSS is a handy tool for enhancing the usability - when it works. It can be made to work and degrade gracefully into browsers that don't support it.
In the end, it's not the tool that does the damage, it's the person using that tool. Is C inherently a bad language? No. Is there crappy C code aplenty in many shipping products? Yes. Is HTML4 a bad spec? No. Are people abusing it? Yes.
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"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
Gets rejected when using Netscape 4.76/Linux, however works perfectly fine with Konqueror :)).
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
IE users visit an average of 39 pages. Netscape users visit an average of 37 pages. This is counting only .asp or .htm/.html pages (not gif or jpg or css).
I'm not writing an IE only site. I never have been. I can guarantee you that my boss would have me write an IE only site if he even understood the concept of there being more than one browser. The guy runs AOL over our T1 line because he doesn't know that there is any other way to get on the web.
I'm not sure how those surveys work. I am webmaster for several e-commerce sites, and our traffic is 97% Internet Explorer. I've seen Opera all of one time. I'm sure that if I showed the logs to my boss he'd tell me to quit wasting time making the pages work in Netscape.
If he's smart, he'll use the stats from his log files. Surveys don't mean anything to him - he only wants to know who comes to his site.
Sure, telnetting may feel silly but sometimes you just don't feel like firing up Outlook Express and going through the whole account setup process just because one of your users is complaining that his email isn't coming in fast enough. I'd rather do "TOP 5,25" to find out where the msg is from and what it's about, than have to wait for the whole 40meg attachment to pull through only to tell the guy on the phone that his cousin sent him a home movie.
And concerning your remark about reinventing the wheel, sometimes that's what you have to do to make a better wheel. Better in my case doesn't mean quicker to develop, it means simpler to use. Try to explain IRC to anyone who's never used IRC and who "needs" the middle mouse button assigned to double-click because they still can't get it quite right the usual way. Well that's the kind of people I have to cater to, that's my job : making our corporate intranet a tool for everyone instead of just a boring useless digital library.
Build a server that only technical people can understand, and only those techs will use it. Build a server that's dumbed down enough for anyone to use without making it too awkward for the expert, and everyone will be served adequately. If you had ever taken a course on UI design, you'd know what I'm taking about and why I'm doing it this way.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I hate to go against 99% of the general opinion here, but browser-specific sites are becoming a necessary evil. I'm not saying what this guy's doing is right in simply blocking off any non-IE browser, he should at least provide alternate content that's free of all his whiz-bang gadgets. However there are enough differences between the browser families to warrant customization for each.
I used to struggle to make my sites look good and work well in both Netscape and IE, which meant using nasty workarounds for many display and script-related affairs. Now I simply create two versions of the same site (or rather, two templates); one whiz-bang template for IE, and one standard yet clean template for Netscape, Opera, Lynx, whatever. The content remains the same, it's the delivery and presentation that differ. It also makes things much easier to debug, since fixing it for one browser won't break it for the other anymore.
I guess it all depends on what you're trying to convey from the site. If it's just a plain old artsy fartsy "Look at me, I'm naked and petrified" site, then cross-browser compatibility should be easy to implement and well worth the effort, but when it comes to efficient web applications, sometimes it's best to focus on IE and ActiveX and leave the rest behind. Java's already proven itself a pain to develop and debug, of course worsened by the poor stability of most JVM's floating around. Portability is a very useful concept, but it's not the solution to all of life's problems. Some of you need to learn that and accept it for now.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
As far as displaying poorly with poorly-written code, well, that's your fault. As for the quirks, I guess that depends on how you use it. For me, netscape has had the fewer quirks. IE will tend to do some pretty random stuff in fixed-width tables.
I've had no problems with IE and tables. NS and percentage-width tables can get funky. And as for "poorly-written" code.... If a page is perfect except for a closing TABLE tag at the end of a page, the browser should be smart enough to know to close out the table (since there's nothing else on the page). IE does this. NS doesn't. (Like I said above, NS 4. I can't speak for NS 6.)
And is it my fault if I use perfectly good, W3C standard CSS2 code which NS4 doesn't display properly? And a response of "then don't use CSS2" doesn't hold water. It's a standard (not some MS-specific tags). They had years to support it. They didn't.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I woudn't hire him, because I like standards. I have a friend who is a professional webdesigner, with emphasis on "designer". So he likes every non-standard thingy he can use (a big Flash fanatic) as long as it looks perfectly as he intended it. I still have to see one of his sites work correctly on Nescape. (I'm a long time Netscape user, and I will not switch to Internet Explorer because I prefer the way Netscape keeps user profiles and bookmarks, and don't get me started on the dangerous ActiveX holes in IE) :-(
Now, I told him that it would be better to comply to the standards and sacrifice a bit of design. His mantra is "The Clients want it this way", then I try to explain him that it is his task to explain the consequences of their decision to his clients and offer alternatives...but his mantra then is "everybody uses Internet Explorer anyway". He is a neat guy, but I don't discuss standards with him anymore: he is just too stubborn
I guess a lot of webdesigners are thinking that way.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Hehe, no offense agains flash....but some flash thingies are so bloated they run really badly on slower machines. Even on "baloe" (you know which one I mean), it drenches all CPU power. Try Leonidas and be afraid...very afraid...
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Actually, this ability to recover from stupid errors is a great equalizer on the web. It means that amateurs can make sites that even if they aren't pretty they are readable. If IE worked like Netscape then there would be less amateur and hobby sites and more "professional" and hence commerical sites. IE lets even a 10 year old with bad coding skills or a mother of 4 put up a site with bugs and all that but its still viewable to their audience (their friends and family etc...) These types of sites are more in the spirit of what the web used to be, tons of little tiny sites, all made as a labor of love and not to make a quick buck.
1. A well designed & implemented web site which works on all browsers is more robust, better planned and easier to maintain.
This is simply a logical fallacy. There is no correlation at all between a site which works in all browsers and a site that is better planned and easier to maintain.
As a matter of fact, it is often much harder to design for multiple browsers. Many sites have given up on the idea of having code that works on all browsers and instead use user-agent detection and switch between specialized code-bases. While this usually doesn't double or triple the size of the code, it significantly increases the size and complexity, and significantly increases the maintenance required.
2. It doesn't take much effort if you know what the hell you are doing!
This is only true if you design for the lowest common denominator. If you design all websites for lynx, then they will probably work in all browsers, but they are less likely to look good in the graphic oriented browsers, that are now the standard.
Basically, those who can't be stuffed to write "generic" sites are lazy non-professionals who are taking advantage of an "easy out" argument.
While I agree that sites "should" be written for multiple browsers this is becoming harder and harder to do. Sites either have to code very simple websites that do not take advantage of almost any new web standards or techniques, or the sites have to maintain multiple code bases.
Until there is a decent selection of browsers out there, that are improving on a competitive level, designing for multiple browsers is just a pain.
I actually did this some time ago when shopping for a local insurance agent.
The site was crap, took forever to load, then stopped because NS crashed on weird HTML/formatting/whatever. Looking at it in IE it was still crap, but done in FP (i believe). Anyhow, I shot a note to the agent, and thought nothing more of it. He called me later that day and verbally abused me, and emailed me saying i should get a 'real' browser to 'experience the internet as it was meant to be'. (almost exact words).
I emailed the note to a friend, who put it on his weblog. The agency got a lot of messages from people chastising him for his arrogance, and he then contacted me the threat of a lawsuit unless we took down the message.
I explained 5 times that since *I* didn't run the weblog, *I* couldn't do anything about it - but he didn't believe me ans said I was 'avoiding the issue' or some such nonsense.
It finally dropped, but he claimed 'lost income' because they 'had to answer all those emails'. Nice one...
creation science book
I am in charge of getting a website up for a small club at my college. I have a freshmen doing my HTML because I can. Trouble is he's a die hard MSFT fanatic. His work looks nice on IE but at times actually crashes Netscape. It all comes down to the way he was taught HTML. He doesn't know any of the Netscape specific tags. He does know how to twist IE to do what he wants. It's like pulling teeth to get him to accept people like to use Netscape. What I want to know is would you hire him to do your website in the real world?
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
That's self-fullfilling stupidity. If you don't support anything but IE, you'll quickly see 99% of your visitors using IE, because other browsers won't get far in the site, and they won't bother coming back. People don't change browsers just to get to your site - they just don't bother visiting again.
The creator of the site has fallen into the common misapprehension that excluding 10% of visitors is acceptable. 10% doesn't sound like a lot, till you realize that it's 10% of a very large number of potential visitors. It's not coincidence that the most successful sites on the web go out of their way to be accessable to all. Let's all club together and buy these people a copy of "Designing Web Usability"...
Not to be an ass but...Almost no freaken sites would pass strict W3C-standards. And if they did. They would look like crap. Even IF standards where adhered to in ANY browser 100%. Yeesh
isn't the internet clogged enough as it is, without everyone having to download their apllications via modem??? sheesh.
i could live a little longer in this prison
Yup, I get that too, although not all the time. It looks more like a checkbox than an input form ("Why yes, I would like a search for something!")
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Sounds like an opportunity to me! Quick, somebody go make a bunch of money while making the world a better place for our children. :)
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
I can't erase mail in ExciteMail, though, and a few other things pop up now and then. Overall, though, I like Opera enough to make it my default here at work (my daughter is back and forth about it at home, so I left that machine defaulting to IE).
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Shouldn't this be in the faq? I asked it myself a couple of weeks ago, but got no response...
Actually XSLT is a subset of XSL. XSLT deals with transformations of documents. XSL, while not a standard like XSLT, was designed to encompass ALL issues of style, not just transformation from one document type to another. You are right on the important part though. Microsoft is implementing XSLT. (I'm just being nitt-picky about the semantics, no offense :)
Xaositec
I see your point. The clarification helps. and the question about Mozilla is right on the money... I know people who know people and should really ask, if for no other reason than to badger the hell out of the Netscape higher-ups... :)
True for now, but when the 21 million AOL users upgrade to the version using Netscape instead of IE and find that many pages don't work, they're going to be a bit upset.
Yeah, but when?
I've seen the upgrade for AOL 6.0 advertised on TV and it doesn't say anything about Netscape.
Additionally, I've got AOL 5.0 loaded at home, and although it upgraded some things, it still uses IE and on the occasion when I pop open IE instead of Netscape outside of AOL, it says IE provided by AOL. Is AOL really going to make use of Netscape? I don't think so.
Face it, people are stupid, and the internet is the place where they all meet.
Or, better yet, how about a compiler, parser, interpreter *never* assume anything. That way, you can just close the table, being explicit about what you want done.
Upon seeing the box was too small, Schrodinger's Elephant breathed a sigh of relief.
I'm not so sure about this. I worked on the development of several ecommerce apps, and I have never seen WebTV get any consideration in the development process. It always gets mentioned in the beginning, but when the numbers come in and the percentages are less then 1% it just gets left out. If the site ends up being WebTV compliant, it's like a little surprise bonus. Has anyone else come across this mentality?
I have not used it yet, as nothing I've heard about it (at this stage) makes me want to deal with the hassle.
I can say that as a tech support person at an ISP I REALLY wish all the sheeple of the world were not being directed to download v6 to cure all their woes. I've had a hell of a time trying to support customers who call saying "I just d/l Netscape6 and now I can't do this, and that doesn't work, and how do I do that other thing?"
It's pretty hard to tell your customers to stay away from the "bleeding edge" when they keep running across things on the web telling them they NEEEEEEED it...
AOL won't switch to Netscape any time soon because so many web sites aren't supporting it right and their users will be miffed. A miffed AOL user isn't pissed at the browser, their pissed at AOL themselves. They can't surf the net without crashing, they'll just go without.
I live life on the edge
HTML is not a compiled langauge. If it was and gave me "Error: expected </b></center> not </center></b> at line 62" it really wouldn't bother me. But because netscape refuses to load because of such small, pretty things: its a pain to develop for.
Maybe Im in the wrong place. Maybe no one here has ever made a mistake like this (man imagine if your C programs compiled when you forgot a brace, and worked up untill that point and then behaved irradically)
Look, I know everyone here is a 1337 455 coder, and these mistakes are trivial. But its annoying as fuck to be working at 4am, and trying to hunt down why an entire page looks screwed up because you wrote this:
<center><b> hello </center> </b>
instead of (the correct way)
<center><b> hello </b> </center>
Its just plain annoying.
We do use Visual Slick Edit (the best damn IDE ever) which when I sometimes have to write a plain .html file (for whatever reason) it does not double check code for things that small.
I could use a wysiwyg editor for the small things, but the majority of nagging "petty" problems that snag netscape up come from the servlets, and again, no editor will double check your java code for html errors in your strings.
The buttom line it is annoying. IE never gives me trouble: netscape does. Thats how I see it, and thats all that matters to me. Go ahead and tell me how to do my job and how easy it to do it better.
I speak English and have been since 80/81. Don't use Your when you mean You're. Even if it is an informal troll, don't use Your when you mean You're. Also avoid run-on sentances.
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Ok seriously, my argument isn't and never has been that I shouldn't have to close tags. Through out my years of web development, netscape has given me many annoyances: IE HASN'T.
My example was/is perfectly valid. I don't remember exactly which version of ns did this, but one of them would mess up an entire page if your closing tags were in the wrong order. It's a stupid mistake on my part: I KNOW. But it is little things like this that annoy the piss out of me.
It's people like you sir, that ruin ./ and the linux/open source community in general. It's this elitest attitude that turns away everyone who isn't up to your coding standards. The first thing you do is spout off how many years experience you have and insult me for problems I've had; that you've obviously never had (so I guess that you/you're was your first one?). You can bugger off now.
... PERL?
~cHris--
Chris Naden
"Sometimes, home is just where you pour your coffee"
The fact is that Microsoft make better software than everyone else
Really, you haven't a clue.
Microsoft write stuff with the pure intention of making as much money as possible. They aren't interested in quality or functionality. They are just interested in making money. That is why they worked so hard on IE. They wanted desperately to kill off their competition. However, if you look at things like Microsoft Word you will see that little has changed since Word 6. Wow! It underlines my spelling mistakes in red and gives me a list of corrections. It annoyingly changes what I write to what it thinks I should have written. Apart from these minor things, only the file format has changed since Word 6. (To force people to pay more money for an upgraded version).
And their software is crap. Admittedly not all of it. But in general there are major flaws in alot of their products. For example, at home I have three machines. Two linux and one Windows. The Linux boxes have never had to be re-installed for 4-5 years. Sure, I have upgrades some of the hardware and software. But the disk hasn't been formatted since the orginal install. Comparing this to the Windows machine which I have re-installed completely about 5 times in the same period because it has become so unstable. And you know what, the only thing that I have on the Windows machine is Windows itself and MS Office. In other words, the only software I have on it is written by Microsoft.
And then you want to try to convince me that they write good software! Everybody knows that Windows means endless re-boots and re-installs. It is just pathetic. Last week I had to re-install windows and with in 3 days of use (again MS s/w only) the machine unexpectedly hangs every time I start IE. What the fcsk!.
The brain dead guys who insist on trying to make out that MS are doing them a favour by writing crappy buggy windows and its "family" of software are just in a dream world. I suggest these people actually try out some of the alternatives instead of being so blinded.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10);'
If I can't view something correctly on the net, I fire up Mozilla to see if it renders any better.
And as far as the topic goes, if I can't view their crappy shopping cart, I'll take my e-money elsewhere.
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
Netscape 4.6 displays tables that are nested 3 deep very very very very very very very very very slowly.
Note that this is correct HTML. And not even THAT complex.
Mozilla fixes this. However, at the speed that mozilla launches, the only hope that they ever get this browser accepted is launching it as a service on Win2000.
Even worse, correct me if I am wrong, it seems that Netscape and IExplorer never did sort out whether to use the "Layer" tag or the (retracted) ILayer tag, or ids and styles to create dynamic html.
This really fucks up everything, if you expect a dropdown menu, which has become very common, for example.
And it has been a long time since I heared anyone complain about frames used in websites. As a rule of thumb, websites that cannot be navigated without frames cannot be viewed by the blind, and cannot be navigated with lynx, when you need a quick look at the site from a linux console. I addition, to have about 80 images without alt-tags cluttered around a page doesn't help.
But nobody in B2B or B2C cares for this, since it is extra, unpaid work, and on the other hand, nobody is asking for simple, single page and single table websites.
This really makes me wonder why anyone would invest in WAP, considering that people don't even manage to produce simple webpages - pages that might require a small content reduction to be viewable on portable phones.
ObWhy is this even on /. ? Everybody knows, nobody cares - get used to it.
End Of Rant.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
This kinda amused me... this page works fine with Netscape but IE spits the dummy if you try and search for anything. I filed a bug report on their site about 2 months ago, they sent me back an auto generated email and they still haven't fixed the bug...
The wonderful little world of the ASPalliance seems to have fallen down. I wonder when it will get up again?
We can all make nice looking pages with a minimum of effort but people just putting in that minimum amount of effort is excluding many thousands of disabled users.
Browser-neutrality is vital to many disabled people who may be using alternative technologies to access the web.
Not closing off tables properly is a prime example. Failing to close off a table can confuse some screen reading software and render the page inaccessible to visually impaired people who use these methods.
Writing accessible pages is *not* rocket science, it has more to do with good coding than anything else.
The standards are published and freely available on the web. Just how long does it take to run a page through the appropriate validator?
I'm not inserting any links to validators, accessibility checking sites or W3C guidlines as anyone who is coding web-pages and doesn't already have the URLs engraved into their very souls shouldn't be coding web pages.
Ian
PS. See my profile for the basis of the above semi-rant.
The fact is, if you've ever done web programming, you know that you'll never be able to use cutting edge stuff and keep compliant. Take a look at XML/XSL. Netscape's support is horrible. Yes, 6 may have a good XML parser but you can't use if for anything. XML in IE has be usable for over a year. And remember back in the day with javascript 1.2 on netscape and not IE? People are always going to side with who is offering the best stuff at the time. Right now, IE is great and has the best standards compliance. Most people I know still use Netscape 4.7 cause 6 is bloated, slow, and one giant Ad machine. Netscape4.7 doesn't support anything! I'm about as likely to make a website fully 4.7 compliant about as much as I'll be programming for Windows 3.1. If you want web compatibility, program to standards, and the browsers either need to catch up or else fade away.
- gtaluvit (prnc. GOT-tuh-LUV-it)
I am by no means the first to utter this sentiment but it is heartfelt. Doncha just wish we could just dump all o' the porn merchants and e-commercializers and go off and start a new internet without them! :-)
Seriously though, at one point I believe this will happen. A new web, not tied to the 'commercialized' version which we now see, excusively for non-profit making organizations and individuals.
Sign the FSF's Anti-DMCA petit
Sorry, the browser you currently use is not supported by this site.
Funny... the message I get is The server is down or not responding...
-----
free the mallocs!
<irony>Well... few of the people I know are using Netscape 5, for that matter...</irony>
But i agree with you. And what's the standards-and-open-source community response to the current state of things? Mozilla?
-----
free the mallocs!
Whilst it is a bother, IMHO, you've got to design so your webpage can be reached by all. Otherwise they'll just go to a webpage that can be reached by their browser. A little bit of extra work might pay off on a good contract/sale,etc. instead of being lost because you can't be bothered.
People can say that 75-90% of the browser market is IE, but they should consider if that's the percentage of people who are going to purchase their product or service, or just a lot of homeusers.
I've seen a few Fortune 500 companies use Netscape for their browser, and you can count that as a loss if they can't view your page.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
My gripe with IE is that it's very forgiving of cruddy code & HTML. I have had to clean up far too many buggered up HTML pages that people said, "It was alright in IE" (Done in both Frontpage & Notepad:). For example, not closing table tags is the most common (don't get me started on how bad IE handles javascript going into directories). Call me fickle, but (IMHO) programming requires a sense of precision. Sooner or later the forgiving nature of IE will cause pages/web apps to end up with mondo security holes, screwy behavior, lost data, etc.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
Sheesh, think before you post such a dumb question.
CSS has well known problems with cross-platform means to specify things like font size. You can specify font sizes in points in CSS:
but a "point" looks like one size on Windows and a different size on Mac.
---
where there's fish, there's cats
Buy.com via Nutscrape 4.xx since they switched to an MS backend? The pages render for shit, this is just the beggining, Windows machines will need both browsers to truly navigate, and Linux (and any other OS for that matter) will just suffer. Man I hate MS.
To fail is human, to blue screen MS!
Can it be prevented? No. Browser wars were won by Microsoft a long time ago and right now it looks like there is not much we can do about it.
> ummm ... ever looked at http://xml.apache.org? I'm developing apps with this stuff every day.
Hm... I didn't know about this particular project, however, I'm afraid that it might still be not enough to counter MS's .NET initiative. XML is becoming the de-facto data exchange standard but with SOAP it might become also part of a truly distributed computing world. I'm not sure that this or other open source project is able to produce quickly tools that would be able to be a significant competition to Visual Studio.NET (especially given their current huge developer base with approx. 6 mln. copies sold).
You are right - but that's why I think that the "battlefield" (if you will) is still open here. In other words it is still possible to defeat Microsoft in this field, although their position is quite strong and I think that underestimating .NET or dismissing it as just a "marketing spin" would be a grave mistake.
But we can forget about browser scene for now - here the outcome is pretty clear at the moment, whether we like it or not. There are niches for Mozilla, Opera and others but IE is a clear winner.
Oh yeah, great... how many web sites in Chinese have you visited today?
With so many proprietary web extensons around, you almost have to write two or three versions for every page you write. Cross-multiply this by the major platforms and Operating Systems, and I'm glad I don't design Web Sites for a living!
I hope the MS hackers from a few months ago replaced the next version of IE code with Mosaic. (or Lynx!) And while you're at it, Please do the same for Netscape, because it sucks worse, OK?
That's simply wrong. How can a labour of love be sloppy, amateurish and broken? It seems to me if these sites are labours of love, the author would at least learn to close his table tags.
Furthermore, you do realize that MS didn't create the web right? That the arriving of IE and MS largely coincided with the commercialization of the internet? That the spirit of what the web used to be is what the web used to be before MS-IE?
It seems the evidence is 100% against what you are saying.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
AOL will start using Netscape if MS ever removes them from the online services offered by Windows. It's a careful balancing act that Microsoft is doing, using it's operating system, yet again, to make other companies do what they want.
Of course, the flip side is that if AOL ever jumps ship on MS, they have enough users to turn the browser war back into a shooting war.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Nice in principle, but the HTML 4 spec is ahead of both NS and IE who don't really need to comply with the standard, because they each see themselves as de facto.
Just because it's valid HTML according to w3c, doesn't mean the big players saw it as important to implement in their browsers.
My boss works on a fucking MAC with NETSCAPE... and every time I do something and look at it on my screen on IE and then on Mozilla AND Netscape, it looks kinda right.. Not perfect, but It looks RIGHT.
But then the stupid fuck decides to take a look @ my work on his stupid ibook on netscape and everything looks like SHIT!! no css on dropdowns, the size is all fucked up... and shit like that..
Now, don't get me wrong, I LIKE mozilla (not netscape so much!), but why can't they make the things look right over different OSes???
>and especially the Open Source community is very >weak when it comes to XML & stuff related to it
ummm ... ever looked at http://xml.apache.org? I'm developing apps with this stuff every day.
It seems pretty obvious that this site is just some dweeb's personal crusade and not a general trend. Is someone fighting some feud with the owner of the site - attempting to /. his server?
Looks pretty fishy to me.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
The rejectNS.html file has the following code:
t .org")>-1)
e /";
...
<Script Language=JavaScript>
if (document.referrer.toLowerCase().indexOf("slashdo
location.href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/i
else
...
I'd say this guy's pro-IE, anti-NS and anti-/. too.
But you know, I never got all the web pages to display right, even when the important ones could all be listed and reviewed in a 200-page book. The web was never browser-neutral, because the html spec. wasn't designed for what it does today, and the W3C is not going to push forward too fast, so we're stuck.
At my job, we need to write ASP's (sorry) that take that into account, and use IE's <object> tag and Netscape's <embed> tag in order to accomodate those customers. Lynx? Forget it, we embed RealPlayer! Maybe you could get Konqueror to work if you can stomach the fact that KDE looks slightly like Windoze, but I doubt it.
The web was never browser-neutral, and might never be so. But as the web advances, more tags will be taken into the HTML standard, and what was browser-specific today will not be tomorrow. I mean, remember the original table tags? They were horrible!
Just relax, everything will work itself out in the world of computers. This is just the beginning.
I recently went to an ASP site and got this message and I just wonder what's really going on. I mean, I LIKE Netscape. I like having an option...and I thought that was part of the reason behind a server side scripting language.
I think if you read this part again you can see where he got the idea that they were implying it was ASP's (and therefore Microsoft's) fault that the page didn't display correctly. The comment about a page not displaying correctly in a CLIENT and linking that to a SERVER scripting environment is questionable at best. I think you would call it "subtle" FUD.
CSS is NOT an "extension". The "font" element is an extension. CSS is a planned STANDARD from the Consortium, finalized in 1996. "font" was acknowledged in HTML 3.2 to keep the W3C from being judged irrelevant. (Don't believe that? Then explain how it is that the W3C stopped producing standards and started doing "Reccomendations" before the release of 3.2?)
If you'd bothered to check facts you would have seen that CSS is Not something that should hurt content. In fact, CSS was specifically designed to preserve the availablity of content, by removing the "font" element (which caused various problems with accessibility and internationalization) and seperating How A Page Looks from How A Page Is Structured. This is a Good Thing. This is how HTML is supposed to work - it's a Markup and a Structure language, not a presentation language. CSS's design was such that a browser could see Content and ignore Presentation if it so chose, while those browsers that wanted Presentation could easily take the rules in the CSS stylesheet and use them, and everyone's happy.
There is ONE, repeat, ONE, only ONE, and in case that didn't get through ONLY ONE reason why CSS hasn't blown the "font" element and all the "body" element's added attributes (color, bgcolor, link, and the like) to the bit bucket where they belong, and that is Netscape 4.x. By effectively just lazily reusing the code for "font" and the "body" attributes (don't tell me it's not true, the evidence is very clear; just see how inheritance of stylesheet properties work on NS4) and then tossing all responsibility to the Mozilla project which has taken near to two and a half years to fix things, Netscape has effectively trashed close to any hope of CSS acceptance. In doing this, Netscape has taken the principal advantage of using CSS - the wider acceptability and compatibility - and trashed it to hell in favor of their own invented elements that turn HTML into a disgusting mess.
I will be so happy when people finally get a clue about this...
disclaimer: I am NOT a Microsoft supporter. IE has made several mistakes too. When browsing I typically use Opera, and I plan on using Mozilla once it's in beta phase. But those pale in comparision to how seriously Netscape 4.x has destroyed this chance at fixing things.
--Jo Hunter
--Jo Hunter
Smile! It makes them wonder what you're up to.
Outlook supports most javascript
And no, you should not HAVE to turn javascipt off, or make your browser identify as something else.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
GAH!
I mean opera not outlook!!!!!!
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
Your just an idiot, I program for the web and have been since 94/95. Close all tags, even if not really needed, close the tags. If the code isn't done right, then its not ns fault, its the coders. If ns has problems even when done corectly then its ns fault. BTW, your example does work on ns and I beleave is also leagle under w3c. Its people like you, and the author of that website that ruin the web.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
No, it tried adding things to the web, it was also netscape that added graphics. The only pages that wouldn;t work on other sites was when frames was used, but they made a way for non frame people can use it too.
Infact everything ns did they made sure it wouldn't screw people who didn't use ns.
MS came in, created tags for the SAME thing. Not to add to it. And there tags are often very much ie where you can't use the page if you don'e have ie. (such as ms modification to the framgs tags)
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
I hate most of the warnings that come from the browsers.
Such as if you want to encrypt something internaly and don't want to pay 500 bucks so verisign can sign off on it, all your users will get a "scary" message. Or the message you get when you post a form on a generic website when it uses your e-mail to send out the post not cgi.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
Yeah- they WERE the bad guys but...
1. Microsoft made Netscapes indiscretions look small (can't have more than one big bad guy).
2. Netscape changed thier ways and now want to be completely standards compliant (can't hold a grudge forever).
3. Netscape open sourced thier browser and is partly funding the developement of mozilla (Major Good Karma).
4. Netscape, the company, is dead (They are just a registered trademark now). One should not speak badly of the dead.
Netscape made mistakes (anybody try NS6?) just like everybody does, but they have have good intentions.
I miss the Karma Whores.
nuff said...
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Are you talking about Anton LeVay Satanists?
Fight censors!
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
I doubt that Microsoft will continue this course of action.
Reading that article about how Microsoft is up to 86% market share (and still rising), I wouldn't be suprised if, in the next couple years, that Microsoft itself starts trying to make life a little easier for Netscape users. Why? Same reason that they've bailed out Apple and other, safe, weak competitors.
99% market share in the browser market isn't that much better than 86% for all practical purposes, and brings the attention of the Federal Government rather sharply.
We lived for years with a segregated on-line society. In those years Compuserve, Genie, AOL, and whatever BBS you subscribed to refused to work together. The big revolution, and big payoff, came when WWW brought everything together. If MS and NS communities can't learn from those proprietary nets that fought and died to the web, they'll go the same way, to the next big thing that again brings the on-line community together. We users will pay for it for a short time, but the dividing camps will eventually pay big in the long run.
- Sig this!
"Let's see, rebuild my site to take all the form elements off layers so Netscape users don't hard crash, or go home on time and play with my kids. . .hmmm. . ."
The only acceptable defense of scientific results is to say that they were the product of the Scientific Method.
In an ideal world, I agree with you. Content is all that we need, and we should all be browsing the web via Lynx and a monochrome display.
/. users object to IE on some manner of Anti-MS principle, rather than analyzing it based on its technical merits.
Unfortunatly, this is not the case. Its not just marketing types who want fancy displays and formatting tools, but the average web user. We like looking at pretty things, and tools like HTML4, XHTML and especially CSS help developers make things pretty.
This person who put up that Anti-Netscape sign, I agree with what he / she is saying, but not the method. Perhaps a warning would be appropriate, but to deny content due to the lack of an MS browser is pretty weak.
Netscape does suck. Its slow, displays things improperly, and crashes alot more than Internet Explorer. I have a strong suspicion that many
However, dispite its shortcomings, nutscrape users should be allowed to surf the net with whatever they desire, and if the site displays it improperly, its just something they have to deal with.
Captain_Frisk
I'd rather it be Netscape. Not because I like Microsoft, but because IE is a better browser. I used to use Netscape exclusively until I stopped ignoring all the annoyances (mainly how much slower it is - and NS6 is even worse!) and realized I may as well go with what works.
As a web designer, also, I run into a lot of cross-browser compatibility issues. Usually the code is smaller easier to read on IE. Ever notice how an input box will be one size on IE and different on Netscape? Now try explaining this to your CEO who uses IE, and wants to make the "Contact Us" input fields line up perfectly with the company letterhead at the top of the page (part of that issue is dependent on the web in general, but it would still be easier if input size=25 meant the same thing on all browsers).
A single web browser would make things easier, but IE's not the one. I think browser makers would be better off trying to conform to IE's DOM and features (why is Netscape still not using document.all[]?) if they want people to use their browsers. I hate the fact that MS defies the standards whenver possible (remember Visual J++?) but it's a big company and sometimes the best way to compete with a company like that is to mimic the feature set. Until a sleek, powerful, open-source, cross-platform, unbloated, fast, and mature (sorry Mozilla) browser comes out, though, I want to see fellow web designers respect their users' right to choose browsers. Yeah, it's more work to make pages compatible with more than one browser setup, but buck up! It's your damn job! Do it!
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
You got that right.
I agree with the sentiment but not the conclusion. Given half a chance, I'll happily reassign bad coders to jobs making coffee or some other socially useful task.
But browsers shouldn't crash when they encounter bad html, any more than compilers should crash if they find a syntax error. It's not a question of weakening standards, it's a question of robustness of the tool. The extent to which they try to render malformed html is another question.
We just changed 401K plans, and our new provider (a large CPA firm) REQUIRES IE. The reason: the implementer thought that having CSS was more important than supporting Netscape. She drank the M$ kool-aid, the whole pitcher. Interestingly, the site is just as much of a human-factors nightmare as if that ten-year-old handcoded it. This kind of crap seems to be happening more and more, and it's bad for everyone. Whining about the way naive users write code won't solve this very real problem. Now imagine what it will be like when government agencies, monopoly utilities, etc, start playing hardball this way. To pay your bills, you'll have to pay Bill. If you can't do e-commerce on it, the utility of your Linux box has just declined significantly.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
But this guy is preventing -- or trying to, and not doing very well -- Netscape users from even seeing what doesn't work.
Yes, as it is a site about IE development, with examples for IE. It would be plain silly to let NS users try and view it, as there would be errors all over the place.
As it is, he's just trying to piss people off
No, he's trying to share some of his knowledge about IE with the rest of the world. Why slate him for doing that?
Mozilla locks up on HTTPS sites for users who don't read the install directions. If you don't install the PSM, Mozilla locks on HTTPS sites. Now that the PSM is going open source, its being included (starting with 0.7 I think) I took 0.7 to the URLs you posted and it worked fine. Yes, Mozilla can be cranky (I sent corrupted resumes to a BUNCH of companies before I realized the build I had was boning attachements), yes Netscape 6 should NEVER have been released on such an unstable base. But the freaking thing is 0.7 BETA. Were you complaining about the v2.3 kernels? No because they were test loads. So is Mozilla. So until its released - give it a rest!
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
And what a funny picture this paints. AOL, the laughing stock of the Internet world, is now being looked at as the savior of the non Micro$oft browsers. Not that I 100% agree, but it is funny. Of course, I think if Netscape had held back NS6 until Mozilla was ready - the release would have gone much better. But people got their first look at NS 6, it sucked, and they won't bother again I'm sure. Too bad.
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
Then came IE, and again it was all thrown into chaos....
The question then is who will fall by the wayside this time....
> I've seen the same thing done by linux sites but with ie users as the targets.
Exactly. But in that case it's not justified because these people are just being anti-MS because they don't like success. Whereas this case has got absolutely nothing to do with being anti-AOL (the fact that even AOL don't use Netscape says a lot about how awful Netscape is), and everything to do with a justified commercial decision, pages like this (ways to torment IE users) have everything to do with jealousy and are unjustified.
It's time non-Microsft users realize that the world has left them behind.
-- Welcome to the new dawn.
That's inaccurate. Opera can pretend to be different browsers by changing the browser name reported to the site, but it's rendering engine doesn't change.
-- Welcome to the new dawn.
I have been trying to use netscape 4.72 since it came out, and i'd really like it to be better, but, unfortunately, it isn't. period.
The first thing that interested me was that I couldn't get to the site mentioned in the original post. I'm at work, and while I use a perfectly good copy of Internet Explorer at home, our "office standard" here is still Communicator 4.
That page is a little bit akin to the "air rage" incidents that are claiming so much attention. Mindless, misdirected, and wrong, but somehow very understandable. Netscape may well have cleaned up its act. The new version may be the very model of Web compatibility. But I'm suggesting there's an awful lot of anger and frustration lurking Out There in the web development community. In fact, I'm carrying plenty of it around myself. Yes, I've actually got a little snippet of JavaScript to detect and redirect browsers -- so that I can retain a little bit of the control over (static) Web pages that's promised by CSS. And every time I feel I have to use it, I have another Maalox moment.
If it's bad for people of my ilk, what do you suppose it's like for an end-user organization who engages the wrong Web team and ends up hearing something like, "Oh. You didn't specify you wanted it to work with Netscape..." Yes, it has happened.
The Web standards are out there. They're reasonable and workable. Without launching into a huge history lesson, I just hope it's not too late. Internet Explorer has been so easy to work with for such a long time that it may be that their standards become the new de facto ones -- replacing one bad set of proprietary standards with another bad set. And it would be a real shame if that happened just because everybody is so ticked off.
DUCT TAPE: The Election Supervisors' Secret Weapon
the standards-compliant Web, as we know it, will die
The standards-compliant web as I know it isn't very standards-compliant. If it dies, won't that make it even more standards-compliant?
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
As a HTML programmer, Netscape is a real pain in the ass. If it followed W3Cs standards like Opera does (and IE mostly does) then I wouldn't have a problem with it. I was looking forward to Moz6 and the use of Moz6s rendering engine in Netscape6, but yet again Moz and Netscape have disappointed me. Netscape have killed themselves by producing a 2nd rate product which does not conform, no wonder 95 odd % of web users use IE or an alternative (like Opera).
Since a large part of this article is about ASP, I just wanted to provide some info on how JSP compares very favorably. Here's a page full of links:
P _v s_ASP/
http://www.serverpages.com/Java_Server_Pages/JS
JSP's main advantages over ASP are:
1. Speed: precompiles to a servlet which becomes a process/thread of the server. (see the last link from Orion for some benchmarks comparing JSP to ASP)
2. Multi-platform: there are many JSP/Servlet engines to choose from (Tomcat, Websphere, Jrun, Orion, etc) which run on platforms as diverse as UNIX, NT, AS/400, as opposed to ASP which just runs on NT/IIS.
Any of you who are claiming that MSIE is standards compliant should try to use a server-side script to send plain text content, properly MIME typed as "text/plain". You'll find that Netscape renders this exactly as it's supposed to -- as plain text. MSIE, on the other hand, is a crapshoot; it tries to second-guess the MIME type, in violation of the HTTP standards, and is quite likely to do something weird like prompt you to save it as a binary file, render it as HTML, or execute it as a Perl script on your machine! (It uses everything from the file extension at the end of the URL to an analysis of the document's contents to make this determination, and varies depending on system configurations and installed applications, and perhaps also the phase of the moon.)
--Dan
--Dan
Web Tips
I don't like web sites which require you to use a certain browser, but only the naive would suggest that Mozilla in its current state is a better browser than IE. And by that, I mean from the end-user's point of view -- not from the view of who supports standards better, etc (which Joe Average doesn't care about as long as the page loads on his browser).
Nothing is better than God. Chicken is better than nothing. Chicken is better than God.
Those who talk about browsers being more harsh on bad HTML being a good thing are fools and don't have a clue.
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
I've seen similar stuff and heard people argue much the sam thing a number of times. What these dorks are failing to recognise is that 10% of the browsing population is A LOT of people these days, and it is blinkered in the extreme to think of this section as insignificant.
Also to be remembered is of the 90% who do use IE, man of them turn off or even not install many of the features, such as Active X controls, java scripting or cookies, mostly for security reasons.
Finally, there's the rising world of IA's. Microsoft's offering in this field uses IE 4.1 for chrissakes. Hardly the cutting edge of their technology.
Netscape users shouldn't complain about being locked out. I tried using Netscape's webmail with Opera 5.0, which supports standards better than Netscape, and got locked out of their site. Complaining that Netscape is locked out is being hypocritical when Netscape locks out a superior browser (Opera supports standards much better than Netscape). I didn't waste my time. I just got a pop mail account from Yahoo, and forgot about Netscape.
public institutions (e.g. universities, etc) based in the US are bound to provide electronic accessibility to the disabled. There haven't been too many lawsuits yet, but there will be more. Browser customization works against accessibility.
I can imagine...
"I'm suing because I was denied access to your site, because my experience was disabled by Netscape!"
I decided that I was going to have a look-see at that page I was going to be locked out of. I reloaded the page, and hit the 'stop' button at just the right time. The page looked fine. It was usable, and in fact, quite pretty (with the formatting)! Aspalliance.com is just stupid.
It's Friday afternoon, and the page is gone! I got a letter from some guy named @@@@ (who I emailed after finding a link on the main page of aspalliance), and got this reply:
Sam, You've sent this email to the company that hosts the aspalliance.com site. We do not manage the content but we have been in contact with the person who does. We are assured that the IE-only redirect page will be removed immediately. Thank you, ~@@@@
(I edited out his name)
I also emailed aspalliance's prez, but got a letter defending the page.
I asked him, "How many times have you been slashdotted today?"
The prez thought this was a threat!
--Sam
The site he has is about IE and ASP devlopment - please give me one good reason as to why should non-IE browsers be supported there?
It isn't just that Netscape isn't supported there. He actually checks if you are using Netscape and prevents you from seeing the content at all. I've gone to plenty of sites that say they will demonstrate things that break in one or more browsers. Hell, there are whole sections of the W3C site specifically designed to break browsers. I don't have a problem with that.
But this guy is preventing -- or trying to, and not doing very well -- Netscape users from even seeing what doesn't work. If he were interested in showing what he can do, or what Netscape can't, he could leave out the redirects and include a warning that Netscape wouldn't display things as intended. As it is, he's just trying to piss people off.
Nope, no sig
No, he's trying to share some of his knowledge about IE with the rest of the world.
He's only sharing his knowledge with the parts of the world that already agree with him. The very first line of every page is an attempt to exclude anyone who hasn't already decided that Netscape is not worth using. (Notice he doesn't check for Internet Explorer and exclude everything else -- the check is specifically excluding Netscape.)
And even if he weren't just excluding Netscape, it's stupid to arbitrarily exclude people from seeing what you post. If anything, this site would be better served by allowing people using other browsers to "see what they're missing" so to speak.
Nope, no sig
I tried them in that order, from the same IP address. Opera can identify itself as Opera, NS or IE, and got rejected as all. Even IE5.0 under Windoze got rejected ("Sorry your browser is not supported by this site"). Is this a hoax or what? P.S. My windoze box uses a Linux box for IP forwarding.
I consider this a good thing. It's easy to reverse-engineer Microsoft's standards from their web browser, so they don't even need to publish them. IE is the dominant browser - like it or not. And anyone who's ever edited a website knows what a purple bitch it is making a site look good on both Netscape and Microsoft. Soon, no-one will bother, and Netscape will be playing catch-up with Microsoft.
A W3C-standards-compliant browser is just an engineer's wet dream - it doesn't mean anything in the real world.
I didn't pay for my operating system either
Huh? The lack of standards compliance is the result of bad implementation of standards support by the browser companies. It is not your right to expect all sites to be compliant with Netscape when a few core tags in multiple versions of the Netscape browser do not work in the simple way they should. Its ironic that Internet Explorer provides so many alternate ways to do the same stuff in standards compliant ways where you have to hack multiple tags in bad ways to achieve the same effect in Netscape.
I agree that commercial sites are losing out by not accounting for Netscapes broken products. But the statements made in so many posts here expecting support as a right is ludicrous. There are many different versions of Netscape, each broken in different ways - its possible to be able to achieve what you want with HTML hacks in one variant only to not be able to get it to work in both. While Netscape may be a joy to use, as someone who has extensive experience putting together sites with complex layouts, its not a joy to build a compliant site for, its a nightmare.
This is not an anti-Netscape troll. I used to prefer Netscape because of the anti-MS propaganda. After working as a web developer, I know that it is a bad product. Expecting support for something that doesn't work right is a privilege, not a right. Having the arrogance to say because someone doesn't afford me that privilege as my right, is not just their loss, it is also yours. I know if I went to a site and it was Netscape only, I would still make the effort to check it out to see if it offered something of value to me - assuming I was there for a specific reason.
cshotton: First, it's safe to assume that sites deployed to support a single browser are a result of a conscious choice. And that choice was likely driven by a technical inability on the developers' part to create a site that was functional across multiple platforms. If it was my site, I'd get new developers because there's no technical excuse of any substance to argue for single browser support.
Hmm, I create a site in compliant HTML.
Heres the only practical reason I can think of why Netscape support should be abandoned - the amount of time it takes to get a site to display the same in (all the reasonably widely used versions of) Netscape as it does most other browsers I test in is very significant. I used to spend half an hour converting a cut up site into a working site (it displays fine in IE and other browsers as it is standards compliant). The rest of the day was typically devoted to getting it to work in Netscape versions while still working in the other browsers. And this was just to get the design to display as it should.
Its interesting that your post got moderated up. Especially considering your entire post appears based on questionable math and an inexperience in actually designing sites yourself. Like most of the posts here, yours comes across as a disillusioned Netscape user who thinks that because Netscape is a better browser to use, the only real issue is that people actually choose to ignore it because of its low market share. As a person who built beautifully laid out web sites designed by a graphic designer, I know that even if I targetted Netscape, I would still have to go through the same nightmare to get it to display as the designer wanted - a nightmare that no other reasonably popular browser presents. I wish it wasn't so, I agree that all browsers should be supported, I could do without the stress involved though.
"All clients" are with IE, "all servers" are with Unix?
:-)
I wonder where the money is
sure, the amateur sites should be there, and sure, the amount of knowledge required to make such a site shouldn't be too high, BUT: large companies _should_ stick to standards when developing webpages, as should webpage-authoring programs such as Dreamweaver, Homesite, Netscape composer and Frontpage. (Consider the latter two as complete (but extremely bad) jokes.) I am looking forward to a standards-compliant web, and I really hope there will be diversity in the browser market so that web authors are _forced_ to adhere to standards to make their pages accessible to everyone. 'Cause that's what it's about, right? If a webpage adheres to standards, everybody can access it. Which should be the ultimate goal for webmasters, and it has been shown to be the ultimate challenge as well, at least with the crappy tools some companies provide them with ...
The fact is, although there may be a revamped Netscape 6 with a new renderer, it is still stuck in 1997 as far as a Document Object Model goes, and CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) support.
IE is very object-oriented. That is how W3C wants it. Netscape is very procedural, and special-case oriented.
For instance, to add an event listener for onMouseMove() you cannot simply put onMouseMove() = functionCall() on any item. You have to apply it only to a body or an anchor tag, and IN ADDITION specify specially in a script to even LISTEN for this event?! Yet for other events you don't, such as for onMouseOver()
I'm tired of Netscape forcing their ideas of how we web developers should code. Who says that I don't need onMouseMove just as much as I need onMouseOver or onLoad? You cannot even specify an onDblClick() event listener without extra work. And extra work costs my clients money. Sheesh! Now you see why some of the companies I freelance for require their clients to use IE, especially for large web-based applications. Now if only we could get an IE for Linux..
-Eric
Statistics:
Netscape 47.54% - MSIE 48.52% - Other 3.93%
He actually has an article called 'The One' with the tagline 'Hard facts that prove which is the best scripting language'. This test "proves" that JScript is the best scripting language, for server and client (out of a set of JScript and VBScript). He also apparently invented the idea of client-side form validation, and I'd wager uses it instead of, not in addition to server side form validation.
The only truly interesting thing about this article, was giving me another person to put on my 'morons' list, so I don't accidentally ever hire this guy for something.
--
"Don't trolls get tired?"
All this is nice and good and all, and if you want to make a page that not everyone can see, that is your right.
/is/ an upcoming market, whether people want to realize it or not, and issues like this will have to be dealt with I think.
In a way I agree with the people saying netscape sucks, mozilla is dead, and IE has "won" and to get over it. Yea, that's great. But I'm sitting here at my Linux box and I don't have IE. Sure, I could buy vmware (~$300) and windows (~$300) and install that, just to browse. Maybe VNC to the NT box in the server room and surf from there.
Why the hell can't I use a browser on my box? Here's what I have available to me:
- lynx (text mode, the choice of purists but pretty useless for the "Web experience" IMHO)
- links (text mode, but with tables and frames and such, but still lacking the web experience)
- netscape - which sucks, yes, but a solid browser that lets me do what I want, and the only mail client I know of for linux that does x509 certs for mail signing and encryption
- mozilla and derivatives such as galeon, skipstone, etc. Nice, but still lacking a smaller memory footprint and other things, but still coming along.
It's very easy to say "just use IE" but I DON'T HAVE FUCKING IE! I have access to IE yes, but if I'm at home I'd have to reboot to windows just to see a few pages that don't render, or whose authors are RUDE enough to not display pages to non-ie browsers.
Yes, I think "rude" is the right word. I'd much rather leave the page as is and let it not look as good in netscape than to totally shut the door. Hey, only like, 3 people even use netscape anymore anyway, right, so why bother to even put the check in to redirect them?
I know that even if IE came out for linux we (the linux/slashdot community) wouldn't use it (or at least admit it), but it would give us some choice. I don't like netscape, and would rather it die as well, but I'm not going to let that happen before I find an alternative. Mozilla is getting there, but much as I'd like to "just use ie" sometimes, I don't have the choice. Linux
I hope.
Some things that people really should consider in this argument.
First off, these guys are big VBScript fans, and most ASP is done in it. However, you can use PerlScript now, and ASP is actually a semi-useful thing when you're stuck with a NT server for one reason or another (loadable COM objects are one of these things). The fact that Netscape doesn't support VBScript (which is incapable of printing an ampersand without a chr() function call) is probably one of hte major reasons that they don't like it.
But lets be honest. Even where I work, our pages are HTML *2.0* compliant, and sometimes Netscape can barely render them properly. DHTML? Schea, right. DHTML is useful when applied properly. Menuing systems in web browsers tend to be much more 'scalable' than serving 4000 copies of an app over a network. I won't even get into the R.A.D. part of the deal (we primarily use perl in our shop, and some php).
Frankly though, if you're going to do pages with lots of flashy whizz-bangy things, use Macromedia Flash. The file format is openly documented, (which means that someone could write a full GPL plugin, someone did a while back but failed to maintain it) it runs on most platforms and browsers, and it does the job better than any DHTML/Scripting/COM kludge ever will. It's also fast, and in low quality mode, fairly resource friendly, considering that it's rendering highly compressed vector and bitmap animation in realtime.
Regardless, though, pages that are written 'just for IE' or 'Just for Netscape' are only a waste of the developers time because they're splitting their market. IE may have the windows users captivated, but, those who use every other browser on earth are still not going to view their site, or bother to remember it later.
So, if you *ARE* going to optimize for a browser, a javascript function to detect the browser type is exteremely easy to write (or you could just google for it), and will allow any user to visit your site. (if written properly, yes, it will handle non-JS browsers as well). Your CGI's can use the user-agent information to do this even easier.
Basically, anyone who's pushing for a single browser nowadays is nailing in their coffin as a future developer. The market is standardizing whether they like it or not simply because everyone and their mother is writing web browsers these days. And, considering that so many systems are using the mozilla core now, which is only stabilizing (i was rather uneasy about this until recently) just now, things are going to get more compliant as long as the mozilla team sticks to their guns.
I've noticed that Mozilla is now 'IE 5.0' compatible in it's user-agent, which is also a nice benefit. That will help everyone.
Netscape wasn't really in the browser business--they needed to get browsers to do "more" [1] to build their server market.
Yes, they did charge for the browser, at least on paper. You could
also download it or find it nearly anywhere for "free evaluation," if
somehow you didn't manage to be in one of the categories that didn't
have to pay. And then they left it to you to pay them if
you felt like it and kept it, with a wink or two. "Really, pay us
[wionk]".
Eventually, prior to assorted illegal activities by ms, they did
have a noticable revenue stream from the browser. But at the time
they were adding that obnoxious stuff (whoever started flashing
gifs should be sent straight to Hell without dying first), it
was really about increassing the market for their server software.
hawk
[1] For a sufficiently clueless definition of "more" or "better"
Even more likely: the person writing the exclusion code didn't understand the problem.
These situations have almost made me leave usenet forever, stop talking to "up and coming" web developers, and bury my head in the past where HTML meant you could view a document from any computer and any browser.
My biggest problem with this is that it isn't that hard to design pages that work *everywhere*. I mean lynx, netscape, opera, etc. You can still have your fancy flash and DHTML (and cross-browser DHTML is not hard), as long as your core stuff is there in the basics.
The fact that 85% of the web users are running WinBoxes with IE5 pre-installed isn't an excuse to alienate the other 15%. It's also stupid unless you like recoding your pages every 6 months for the latest greatest, want to keep working around the bugs and the changes from MS, the whims of the monopoly.
If web developers want to hand the internet over to Bill Gates, the man who didn't see the value of the web until Netscape showed it to him, fine. Just learn to accept all the stupid nuances and new technology it will take to support your dumb decision.
This is timely for me, as I plan on publishing some white papers on inkless.com about making insanely compatible pages. If anyone wants in on it, email me.
It's actually much worse to let them see a broken site. If a user with both browsers comes in and sees it not accept Netscape, they'll just switch and try again.
Get some decent tools, then. You know, one that produce valid HTML 4.01 Strict, and valid CSS2 to go along with it.
There's a lot more to it than that.
Many times sites check for browser, they also check browser version. This is foolish, 'spec when there are STILL sites that report IE 5 as being 'too old a version, please upgrade to IE5'..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
My girlfriend recently shopped around the Web for a mobile phone. Our PC was out of action for a while (turned out an IDE cable had worked loose) so she was using the Dreamcast browser.
Several major sites used client-side features which meant she could not use the site even to browse the products (DreamKey's lack of https support meant that whatever happened she had to make the actual purchase over the phone) -- the sites she couldn't browse went straight out of the window. Those companies lost a sale because of their dependence on esoteric browser features.
Set-top-box net access is growing in the UK, with thinks like the Bush Internet TV, OnDigital's OnNet service, and things like Dreamcast. That potential fot lost sales is growing, and I'm sure that as time goes by, the people who watch the bottom line are going to catch on to this.
I can see a time in the near future when not only do web design contracts stipulate browser independence, but also things like accessibility to the disabled. If you ran a high-street shop, you wouldn't turn blind folks away at the door -- they might buy something. Why would you treat them any different on a web-commerce site?
--
Microsoft owns WebTV!!!
woopsie, there goes that argument.
;)
Joseph Elwell.
I got some better results...
The Java applet loads on the cooperative bank, but all the labels are screwed up... lots of buttons with "Unknown text id >10113" labels.
The Javascript on the Barclaycard site does cause problems. The instance of the browser locks up... it has to be closed. It doesn't appear to affect other sessions though. On the other hand, the site doesn't do Javascript preloads for its mouseovers... poor design.
Still, in an ideal world no script should take out a browser, and no application should be able to crash X. I've had Gnomehack crash X. It is one of my greatest complaints of "Linux stability". The OS is solid... the GUI falls on its face far too often.
BTW, I'm using Win98 on this post... Mozilla 0.6
They work fine for small sites rendering graphics to relatively known platforms. As soon as you try to make the content accessible to a blind person, readable on a cell phone, indexable (and understandable) by a search engine, or in any other way try to decipher the content from the presentation, you run into problems.
The reason I say for small sites too is that by abstracting the content from the presentation, it makes dynamic updates very simple. You don't need a webmaster or HTML guru to put up a site which meets the corporate formatting guidelines.
Currently, clever dynamic page generation gets around that quite well, your backend can see the structure, to create indices and the like, but no machine in the rest of the world can understand what your page is trying to convey. Only humans who have a knack for deciphering magazine-like columns peppered with graphics and the like can read it.
Put yourself in the shoes of the developer: You want to do a web app that does nifty UI stuff (because the standard HTML form controls don't cut it for anything other than the most basic interaction). You also want to do lots of live updating on the page without having to go back to the server, which is a reasonable request since you don't want to slow down the user nor overload your server. Netscape 4 makes it a complete pain to do this stuff well, and its API is almost totally incompatible with IE's. You're obviously going to want to cater to as large a share of the market as possible, so you go for IE, thinking you'll do a Netscape version later. (And even if you do get around to attempting the Netscape version, half of the time you'll give up out of frustration)
The usual argument against all the above is that as a conscientious web developer you should be sticking to established, open standards and not falling into the trap of using browser-specific features implemented by greedy companies who just want to get ahead in the web features game. Ironically, it's been my experience that Netscape had always, up until NS 6, been the worst offender here - for every new tag that IE ever stuck in, Netscape did two. And IE's implementations of existing standards have pretty much always (from IE 3 onwards, anyway) been more compliant than Netscape's. So bear that in mind before you start your usual rant against Micro$haft.
Anyway, the situation regarding sticking to standards is definitely better than it was. XHTML + DOM + ECMAscript + CSS2 gives you a ton of flexibility to do almost anything, and the IE 5 and Mozilla support for these is pretty good. Of course, you still have to do client-specific code if you want to do anything outside the browser (e.g. interacting with the rest of the client machine, which a trusted web app might want to do) and the arguments about how to implement this securely (or whether to implement it at all) are still raging. (Java Plug-In + signed applets is probably your best bet at the moment)
In other words, I believe the situation is going to get better, not worse, especially since the way it tends to work is
and these days, the browser makers actually go as far as submitting a standards proposal for the new stuff too, which is, of course, what they should have been doing in the first place.
As time goes on the standardised browser feature set gets more and more capable, which means less demand for new features, which means things can settle down. I hope.
BTW, for web developers looking for a nice cross-browser (works in NS 4) API to do dynamic stuff with, check out Dan Steinman's DynAPI.
-- Yoz, using too many brackets as usual
Yes, flowing text is nice. But html should have had a "draw in x,y,w,h" command to give the rectangle to format the text into. Perhaps x,y,w,h could be given in percentages of the window size or relative to the bottom of the last rectangle, as well as in pixels. But that and a "fill x,y,w,h" rectangle call would have gotten rid of the need to use tables and CSS and frames and all the other messiness, and probably would have been supported perfectly in Netscape 1.0 and in every other browser in the world (Lynx could even round to the nearest character cell).
I find it interesting that everyone here is assuming that the "90 percent" figure quoted is correct. My experience (on neutral, non-technology sites) has been that the number is closer to 65%, with the curve beginning to flatten out.
--
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
As far as displaying poorly with poorly-written code, well, that's your fault. As for the quirks, I guess that depends on how you use it. For me, netscape has had the fewer quirks. IE will tend to do some pretty random stuff in fixed-width tables.
Engineering and the Ultimate
back to the #1 application on my wish list for *nix. A decent GUI HTML editor. Man, if I could get a suitable replacement for Dreamweaver and Homesite for my FreeBSD box, NT would be something I'd only use on occasion.
The page composer in Mozilla is pretty damned good. I always used to use the composer in Netscape 3.04, as it produced much more acceptable HTML than commercial offerings like SoftQuad's thingy or Frontpage. Plus it ran on Unix. Obviously Netscape 3.04 is too long in the tooth now for most people, but Mozilla's replacement is great.
Chris
Try the W3C's HTML Validator.
Right, and that's why it's really important that the code be valid. Otherwise, the results are, as they say, "undefined" -- you may very well end up shutting out all but a few browsers and never even know it (unless people send you death threats or something ^_^).
It's kinda nice to have a 'strict' browser around. I've seen a lot of web designers make bad errors that don't show up in IE (which is about the most permissive browser out there).
Permissive browsers are good for users, but really bad for designers.
Probably better to use the validator anyway though.
Big thing, though, is that Netscape (<= v4) isn't exactly strict ... it's just downright broken. I make a reasonable effort (write valid & strongly semantic markup, make some minor adjustments) so that broken browsers can at least display the content (regardless of how it looks), but at the end of the day if it's just simply a matter of browser bugs, screw that browser.
For my personal projects (where I just go for rigorous standards-compliance) this usually means:
Oh. HTML Tidy is nice for fixing HTML so you don't have to by hand.
DNA just wants to be free...
That said, sites should attempt some kind of browser agnostic approach; there are some users for whom IE just isn't an option; linux/Unix users (let's ignore IE for Solaris/HPUX; it's even worse than NS), phone users (as someone mentioned elsewhere), etc. You are effectively telling these people they aren't good enough for your site.
If someone pulled that on me, they'd get a mail telling them to wise up and if they didn't, they'd just lost a reader. This is especially true of shop sites; if you are excluded from that site by dint of browser choice, email them to let them know why you won't be shopping there and you won't be recommending it to your friends. Vote with your credit card!
--
What happens is that users of ASP and (to give another example) Cold Fusion tend to use templates to generate the html, and those templates tend to have netscape-breaking bugs in them...The biggest example is that most of the common ASP templates people were using for a while all left off a closing </table> tag, which IE just "fakes" adding one at the end of the page, and netscape decides not to render at all.
Result -- netscape viewing ASP would come up blank, making it look like netscape and not the ASP page was at fault. It never gets noticed in testing because the ASP users normally only test with their one and only browser (that they may not have had a choice in getting). If you're using ASP, you're likely using IE exclusively. Its actually very rare now that someone actually tests their code on multiple browsers.
Even I still haven't fixed all my problems getting www.celticdistrict.com to act right under mozilla...
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
http://www.aspalliance.com/dagon/ reads (in part):
<Script
Src='rejectNS.js' Language='JavaScript'>
</Script>
and
http://www.aspalliance.com/dagon/rejectNS.js reads:
if (!document.all)
location.href="/dagon/rejectNS/rejectNS.html";
Anybody want to comment on how it works ?
--
Why pay for drugs when you can get Linux for free ?
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
I keep doing this, because I prefer Opera most of the time on Linux as well as Windows, and many sites actually prevent use of Opera. I don't mind so much if the site doesn't look great, what's a pain is when someone has taken the trouble to exclude Netscape and Opera from a plain vanilla site.
Amazon.com and its versions in other countries are good arguments for browser independence by the way - no frames, (at least some) ALT tags, and no Javascript, and of course no browser exclusion. And most importantly, they are known by everyone and commercially successful (useful when arguing with PHBs).
However, I've yet to convince clueless sites like www.jamjar.com that they should change their policies, even after stating that I'm not going to be buying a car for them...
As much as the author of the above mentioned web page may be an 'arrogant dweeb' (quoting one of my fellow posters) he's certainly not one of the commercial-savvy dweebs.
:-)
t .org")>-1)
e /";
I mean, his page is being slashdotted. He could have driven to DoubleClick at 200Mph, but instead he chose to do this. I love it
if (document.all)
location.href="http://aspalliance.com/dagon/";
else
if (document.referrer.toLowerCase().indexOf("slashdo
location.href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/i
else
document.write(arrogant message);
Erwin
our new company site is layed out fine in ie, ns6, and even w3m, and lynx lays it out nice and vertical [it uses a lot of tables]. it's only ns4 that makes a complete and utter hash of it. so now i have to spend all kinds of time hacking on the html because of netscape's sloppiness.
it would have been an easy and quick distribution of information if we didn't have to spend time hand-hacking the html to deal with netscape's bugs.
--
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
someone out there, somewhere, has an opinion. they like a certain browser better, and it's not netscape.
there is a page on the web written by someone who doesn't like netscape. and he has strong opinions for jscript.
this must be stopped. the future of mankind is at stake.
--
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
what would be neat is if we could send people the complex content needed for intranet apps in a small portable format that can be executed in an environment that lets people run these applications from unknown sources without worrying about them getting access to the rest of the system outside the browser. these apps could communicate information back to the site as needed instead of having to send low-level traffic about individual widgets back to the site. we could even send the programs as bytecode that could run on any platform with such an implementation.
i just hope netscape doesn't screw it up and create something slow and crashy that only looks good for goofy text effects, or we'll be back to square one, i tell you.
--
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
OK so the designer of that website is an idiot, but Netscape hasn't helped - NS4.7 hasn't been updated for years, and NS6 is a sick joke.
Mozilla breaks javascript (if you tell them about this they refer you to a snotty page about how they are the only browser that works and it's everybody else who is wrong... yeah right), and HTTPS locks it solid every time.
Someone needs to write a decent browser. All I want is something that supports HTML4, XHTML, CSS, SSL, etc. and *doesn't fall over every 2 fsking minutes*. Currently only IE does this. Sad but true. If it wasn't for VMWare I'd have to boot into Windows to browse!
Yep, it's not a troll. It's just offtopic.
I agree with your bitching about Netscape, but I wonder what set it off... Does it have anything to do with the story? I don't see anybody here "rallying behind Netscape" and that certainly wasn't the theme of the original post.
Oops, and you lost me there. MS did what any company would do it in its place? I don't see the creators of AWeb or Opera or iCab or Konquerer doing anything to try to balkanize the web. Don't point at the sins of Netscape and Microsoft and say everyone would do it, because time has already shown that they didn't.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
HTML, in theory, can still be the "universal" markup language, for all platforms, driven by PHP/JSP/ASP/Perl/whatever.
Even then, however, the fact remains that what you aim to present a user looking at an HTML page on their 17" monitor from home is different from what you want to present to a user on a cell phone with a 128x48 pixel screen. Clearly you need to display different things. In fact, what you need to display is so vastly different that it makes sense to code two completely different "pages" for each user, rather than a single one that will work under both, even with slight variations.
While in theory the actual technology to display one or the other doesn't have to change, e.g. HTML for both, in reality it also makes sense for it to change also, for similar reasons. HTML has evolved around needs surrounding display on your typical CRT, and those needs are going to be very different from those for smaller devices.
----------
In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
There just seem to be more and more sites using javascript when plain HTML would work just fine.
Is using HREF="javascript:openWindow('target.html')" someone's idea of a joke? Not quite the same as excluding a browser, but similar needless exclusion of audience.
Is this the fault of the authoring tools or the web page authors, (or both?) (Hint to all you "drag-n-drop" web authors: HREF="target.html" would work fine.)
(I browse with Javascript and Java off because of security concerns, in case you are wondering.)
RocketAware.com - 30,000+ links to reusable open source software and the FAQs, references, and Q&A you need to use it.
Check out the category tree of AskSlashdot!
My site lays out fine in IE/NS/OP.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
If piss poor coders who forget to close off their tables would just f*****n test their pages, we wouldn't have this problem. Better yet, if piss poor coders would just go back to flipping burgers at Jack in the Box, maybe we could have better web pages and worse burgers. If someone can't code HTML correctly, they have no business coding it directly. If that means no ASP career for them, fine. Let them wallow in Frontpage (which itself produces s****y HTML, but that's another whole /. thread).
It is a BAD idea to ever encourage sloppiness. When you do, the sloppy will just figure out how to "push the envelope" on sloppiness.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Actually, that's not all that's there anymore. The guy's put in a special redirect that anyone from slashdot goes to MS' IE page without delay...unless you're not using javascript, which obviously wouldn't occur to anyone using IE in the first place.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
So what? Obviously, they neither want you nor me as a customer.
Same with the "you need JavaScript because we dont know how to program without it"-sites.
Actualy, pages using CSS for layout will be a lot more readable to non CSS-browsers, then table layout and the like. The point of CSS/XML/XHTML, etc is to make developing web pages, and technology related to the web easier to develop. While those things won't make the content better directly, they do allow designers to spend more time thinking about the content, and less about they layout.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
It seems to me that these concerns are more likely to come true if people have to spend money on software, and on high powered expensive hardware to deal with 'the most up-to-date' OS/browser/etc... A web that is increasingly dependent on any software platform that is not free, should be of concern to society as a whole, not just geeks with an axe to grind.
Many of the posts are from people who actively chose to ignore web sites that they can't read in their browser. At some stage we might not have this luxury
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
I guess that makes you one of the four happy IE 2 users.
Oink, Oink!!
He does this client side scripting. Client-side scripting was originally an incompatible thing that Netscape did. If you turn off JavaScript, you can get the original page. This isn't surprising, when you look at the page - it's about client-side scripting. And, frankly, most of its articles are worthless - client side form validation and the like are useless in the enterprise, and just about anywhere else I can think of.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
I do web programming for my job, and our company has started considering charging extra for NS support on more advanced features. "That's evil, you must work for MS!" Actually, the reason we considered this was because of our experience with NS out-right violating the standards. I would write standards-compliant webpages using OReilly's reference books on JavaScript and HTML (which I'm fairly sure aren't going to spread MS's FUD), and then test them. IE would almost always work, NS would almost never work. In order to get things to work for NS, I would have to use NS-specific tags. All of this applies to NS 4.7. I can't speak for Mozilla, because frankly, Mozilla is still in beta, and therefore we can't expect our customers to use it.
So I'd appreciate it if everyone would stop spreading FUD about "MS extensions" to the language, since most "MS extensions" are really the features of standard HTML 4.0 and JavaScript 1.2 that NS refuses to implement. Just because IE is the only browser that supports a certain tag doesn't mean that it's IE-specific; most of the tags (there are a few exceptions, but not nearly as much as NS) are really HTML 4.0 tags that no other browser has gotten around to implementing. The only exception _might_ be Mozilla, but like I said, Mozilla is still betaware. Honestly, I'm dying for Mozilla to be finished, and I'm waiting for Opera to get up to speed (which reminds me, I need to check them out again...) because I'd really like to have an option that works on Linux, and I despise supporting MS. But the fact of the matter is: right now, their browser is the best production browser that I've found.
If you stick to the published specifications, you automatically support every conforming browser out there and it costs much less. This is obvious, really, to everyone except Web designers
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
First, it's safe to assume that sites deployed to support a single browser are a result of a conscious choice. And that choice was likely driven by a technical inability on the developers' part to create a site that was functional across multiple platforms. If it was my site, I'd get new developers because there's no technical excuse of any substance to argue for single browser support.
Second, companies that deploy sites like this are relegating themselves to something on the order of only 25% of the potential market they'd otherwise reach. Here's the logic that escapes people who limit sites to IE5, for example.
Assume that Microsoft platforms account for 80% of the hosts connected to the Internet. Furthermore, assume that the 65-35 split between Microsoft and Netscape browsers persists and that of the remaining approximately 52%, only about half are OS versions or CPUs capable of running IE5 with the others being out of date, running AOL, etc.
Making a conscious decision to exclude 75% of the Internet seems absurd when you do the math. But a room full of lame Web developers can convince non-technical management of a lot of things. Apparently, writing a single browser web site is one of them. Fortunately, companies that pull this stunt probably won't last long in the marketplace.
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
Yesterday, Netscape tried to screw up standards, and it was a bad thing. Today, Microsoft's doing it, and it is still a bad thing. Meanwhile, Netscape has done an about turn and makes a standard-compliant, open-source web browser.
Public companies do whatever they think will be most profitable. They are legally obliged to do so. Sometimes, this means that what they do now contradicts what they did yesterday. It is pointless trying to assign karma to them. The situation *now* is that Netscape is promoting standards compliance and they will not (cannot) abort the Mozilla project. Meanwhile Microsoft has a dangerously high browser market share on top of an operating system monopoly.
I'm not anti-MS or pro-NS. Next time Microsoft is promoting standards compliance in a way from which they cannot easily withdraw, I will support that. Next time Netscape tries to screw standards, I will be against that.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Where have you been? Did we *ever* have a browser-neutral web? Did I miss something? This is what Mozilla is hopefully trying to accomplish. Full standards compliance. What is the big deal? There are all sorts of stupid sites claiming allegiance to a particular browser that will not allow you to view the site if you use a different one. It's just immature, and they get what they deserve - less traffic. This is a non-issue. Or at least an issue that has been around since the first browsers were created.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
if (document.referrer.toLowerCase().indexOf("slashdot .org")>-1) location.href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie /";
The page displays the same way on IE as on Netscape, i.e. if you're coming from /. it will redirect you.
This issue - cross-browser compatibility - has been around forever. From the early days of "This site best viewed with xxxx" to FrontPage sites where JavaScript errors abound, this has been argued and discussed to death.
The most cogent discussions -- see Jakob Nielsen.
The bottom line:
- web sites that customize for a single browser or platform lose readers/customers. It's up to the site/company to decide how many customers they want to lose.
- too much customization will eventually backfire.
- public institutions (e.g. universities, etc) based in the US are bound to provide electronic accessibility to the disabled. There haven't been too many lawsuits yet, but there will be more. Browser customization works against accessibility.
Yawn.
"When I grow up, I'll be stable."
I still don't know what everyone has against using tables-?! They were the first hurdle I overcame when I learned HTML and they've been the foundation of almost every site I've built for the past 3 years of my career. They WORK in damn near every browser. CSS doesn't. :-)
/."
Also, keep in mind that various graphic effects just aren't possible without tables, and if a client wants an assload of graphics, they'll get 'em. I enjoy getting paid.
"I'm not a bitch, I just play one on
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
So reinventing the wheel by rewriting something that already exists 1000 times over is "efficiency?" ABSOLUTELY nothing already exists to fill the role of "Chat, file transfer, user management?"
fire up that bookmark, log in
And how does Java not fill this role? You could save time just by using the Java that already exists rather than trying to write a proprietary program.
Hey, we're both on the same boat here. We both feel that the job must be done as well as possible in the least amount of time. I just feel that using preexisting products when possible is the most efficient method.
And contrary to a lot of other people, it seems, I feel checking mail over telnet is a little silly, unless you roam like hell and don't have a laptop.
"Work nice" or "look nice"? This seems to be a point of confusion in web designing, i.e. the two are synonymous.
Most designers seem to think "look nice" means "look the same", which is simply not true. The only requirement for portability is that the content be available, not the site format.
And if you had any knowledge about designing whatsoever, you'd know that making an accessible sites certainly does not "double development efforts". Doing things the "right way" isn't a matter of project time, it's a matter of education, something which 95% of "web designers" don't have.
It is nothing new for a company and its lapdog companies to adopt exclusionary business practices like this. Shockwave does the same thing, and doesn't even let you click through to get information about Shockwave, unless you play ball or code a liar-proxy.
Big railroads used to do things like this all the time to destroy little railroads. Every few months or years they would patent a new hookup technology, change the hookups on their railcars to the new type, then charge spur-line railroads more than they paid for their railcars to buy the patented, "improved" hookups. Soon enough the little railroad was broke, to be snapped up by the big railroad at bargain prices.
I have to wonder if AOL/TW will make the decision that Netscape Navigator is unprofitable. As soon as they do, IE will be the only client. Once IE is the only client, MS can decide what the only servers are.
--
This is not my sandwich.
try mozilla. it'll cure what ails you.
especially a nightly build.
http://www.mozillazine.org/build_comments/
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
Ok. I'll bite.
I run Linux. Tell me a program (or programs) that come CLOSE to the functionality of Netscape for both Web and Mail that has all of the compliance, alleged robustness, and features of IE.
Here's the requirements:
- Full HTML4 (ins. the rest of the alphabet soup here) compliance.
- Plugin capabilities (Shockwave, Acrobat, etc.)
-IMAP/SMTP/POP3/LDAP/MIME/SMIME based mail program
So, if Netscape is 'so bad', what do I use.
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
I've seen the same problem in some pages that I've made before, when I try to use something like CSS, it just usually doesn't work properly in Netscape.
So I simply gave up, and put a item in the FAQ explaining why I wasn't going to write crappy code just to make it work with Netscape.
Of course the difference is that my pages were all made to be HTML 4 and CSS 1 compliant, so they for the most part work great in Moz. They also work in IE, Opera, Lynx, and apparently are usable on a cellphone (if the person who claimed he tried it can be believed anyway).
The sentiment of not wanting to dumb code down to work in Netscape 4 isn't a new one, and you can expect it to get popular very quickly. The idea of using all this wacky Microsoft stuff to make pages that only work in IE is something thats limited primarily to MS type developers (who tend to do a lot of ASP work), and most likely won't last as the use of set top boxes and cellphones for browsing begins to pick up.
So I wouldn't really worry, market forces will force things to not go that way for very long. Of course if your using Netscape 4 still, then it might be time to worry, since its about time that died off. (now if only they could make Moz not slow, we'd be set.)
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
As ugly and freedom-limiting as this sounds, the only real solution to problems like these is either:
:)
1. Convince the masses to follow you (which isn't easy), or
2. Convince the government to instate laws that force the masses to follow you.
What could help fix part of the problem is:
If IE and Netscape kept a shitlist of sites with Bad HTML or HTML that used proprietary extensions, and warned the user before going there, as well as automatically mailing the owner of the site and informing them that "At Jan 07, 2001, at 03:41:55 PST, 214.56.17.184 may be unable to access your web site because of problematic code and/or proprietary extensions." -- granted, site owners wouldn't like it, but if they had decent HTML code then they (probably) wouldn't get their inboxes spammed
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
The browser world *had* the opportunity to revolutionize computing
by providing a platform for universal distributed computing. The browser,
operating system independent and using universal standards, could have
supplanted the operating system itself as the platform for client applications.
This would have allowed us to escape from the OS wars and start afresh.
Apparently this was Brad Silverberg's (formerly of Microsoft) vision.
BUT IT FAILED. Netscape failed to properly support Java,
making applets nothing but toys (proper support would have included the
ability to store applets on the user's machine, solving the applet
download problem).Netscape also failed to provide a powerful dynamic HTML capability.
Microsoft, ironically, came much closer.
They provided (starting with IE4) powerful dynamic HTML coupled with ECMAScript.
In addition, the provided (albeit subtly) a way to store applets on the
client computer, and even a way to securely store data between sessions. All
of these are *necessary* components of a true distributed platform. However,
their browsers were buggy and the event management was not quite adequate.
Caveat - I have not investigated 5.5.
Unfortunately, because of the estrangement between Microsoft and Java supporters,
we are unlikely to see a suitable Java platform on IE - which would be IMHO
a great distributed platform.
The only good weather is bad weather.
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.
Another Wild-Eyed CANADIAN.
True. A more accurate translation: "I'm a lazy fuck of a web designer who would rather sear your retinas with K00L ActiveX widgets than close a standard tag". That attitude pisses me off every time, and the worst part is that it's so damn common.
For example, JHU uses an employee timecard form written in Perl. The designers recently added NEATO KEEN font coloring for vacation, sick leave, etc. But they didn't bother to /CLOSE most of the new tags in the script. So the result is that my browser of choice (the highly standards-compliant MSIE 5 for MacOS) chokes halfway down the page and says the rest can go to hell. Mozilla 6 also fails to load it.
I emailed the bastards and told them exactly how to fix the problem. Their reply was "Your Remedy ticket #HITS00000013578 has been Closed" which is TechSupport-ese for "fuck off". Too bad for them -- I still get my salary either way.
with mobile phones, web appliances maybe finally looking more viable, WebTV and all that, I think this is just a plain wrong assessment of where we are. The browsing world is getting more diverse, not less. Major commerce sites won't want to lose WebTV users' purchasing power.
I'm pissed off at all sites that don't use standard HTML or scripting when possible. I know that ASP gets much more complicated, but the same principle applies that it isn't too difficult to do standard stuff that can work in most browsers.
One of the most annoying things I saw lately was that, when I went to eBay to complain about being spammed, I decided to take a quick look at their privacy policy. So, I clicked on the link, and it gave me a mostly-blank page. There were a couple of lines about their regs, but that was it. So I clicked on links for their policy from all over the site--same page. Come to realize, from looking at the source. that the page used such badly formatted BS that if wasn't rendering properly. I mean, it was a simple page, they could have used plain old HTML for the whole damned thing, but no, they had to go and muck around. And sadly enough, I was using IE 4.0 at the time, and it wasn't displaying the policy, just the couple of lines intro mentioning the policy which I had no idea was hidden on the page. If you can't even make text that will render on IE 4.0, of all things, then there's something wrong with you. There was nothing there that couldn't have been done in plain HTML.
Naturally, I complained to them. I hope they've fixed something as important as their privacy policy, so that every user can see it. But somehow I doubt it. More and more pages are doing BS like this. For example, the Wired article referenced in the Steve Jobs story below wouldn't render very well, because it wanted me to download an ActiveX object that my security settings wouldn't allow. Maybe on non-IE browsers it doesn't try to slip in the ActiveX, I don't know, but it's annoying that they were using it in the first place...
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Doing HTML/javascript that works on all DHTML-compatible browsers (IE4+, NS4+, Mozilla, etc) is not so hard. There are several free javascriptAPIs that can manipulate layers and stylesheets for all browsers (Most programmers creates their own after a while) so there is defenetly no reason not using one of them.
If you have access to serversidescripting of any kind (ASP,PHP,JSP,etc), then it becomes even easier. Making a serversideAPI to generate the right layer-tag and include the right stylesheet is done in 5 minutes to a professional programmer.
Please dont fall into the microsoft-trapp doing exacly what they want.
I guess we should all forget about making good planes and all ride flying bicycles. If it is good enough for you, it must be good enough for everyone else!
It is patently clear who the retard is.
I agree that right now the browser wars are a joke. However...
If history teaches us anything (esp with technology) it's that things can and do turn on a dime. To completely reverse Netscape's fortunes all it would take is for AOL (who owns Netscape) to switch brands from IE to NS. Why would AOL keep paying developers to work on a "dead" web browser if they didn't plan on using the silly thing some day? Virtually overnight you'd see the browser wars become a dead heat and you'd get "Berst Alerts" over at ZDNet proclaiming that he knew NS was merely sleeping all along. Yesterday's giants are tomorrow's punching bags and everyone who you stepped on while you were on top will make sure to give you their heel on your way down. Other companies would do well to heed that lesson which IBM and NS had to learn the hard way... Unfortunately it appears to be far too late to teach an old dog like MS and IE any new tricks.
G. Washington on Government "it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
Most of the smaller devices are oriented towards vanilla HTML anyway.
This can actually be a good thing. So, IE and Netscape grow appart more and more, this is free economy, right? The users want to be able to browse any site with a single browser. A new player will come along and will release a browser that can do everything that Netscape and IE can do, or at least will do most of the stuff from both and will allow plugins, and if advertised properly, many users will install that browser. Free market.
You can't handle the truth.
What I wonder..is who in the hell doesn't care about 10% of his viewers? They may be a minority...but thats a lot of people to blow off. Personally...I think thats moronic.
Surely that's something that all too many people are sloppy about. The only commercial site I've written, I made the effort to be pedantic, and pushed all the pages through the w3c validator service. If anything was non-standard then it didn't go in.
I'm against using Javascript for essential sections of the page. Anything that is even borderline non-standard, has to merely make the page look in some way nicer, but no detract from the functionality. To make a page simply reject the browser fullstop goes against the cross-platform model that the Internet and its users should subscribe to.
What percentage of pages actually meet the DTD? It'd be a pretty sad figure if you ask me. Admittedly it would help if browsers properly supported the standards... jh
jh
This article is very trollish. A DEEP LINK to an out-of-context web page. Don't know how he got there. When I go to the site with my Mac OS X Server Omniweb, I read it without problem. Do this message appear for every netscape user ? For mozilla too ?
/bots.
On the main point of browser compatibility, it is pretty clear that if the guy want to show client-side scripting that will not work with netscape. On the same vein, XUL is not working well on IE. So what ? Should those XUL sites be lapidated by slashdot ?
Otoh, he is clearly a netscape hater, as he reject netscape but accepts any other browser.
Btw, it is totally unfair to put a slashdot link to a page where there is a mailto: url. The guy is going to get megabytes of junk from clueless
PS: I just checked, mozilla is rejected too. Looked at the site with IE too. The guy is a windows advocate that want people to use VBscript. IMHO, it is its right.
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
...I was reading about this new browser rendering platform that Netscape was working on. It was going to be fully standards compliant, and highly configurable. Sounded like a great concept for leveling out the playing field for browsers so no one company could control the standards.
What we got was Netscape 6, and 3 years of "it's only beta software" excuses from Mozilla. Heck, even in tonight's build (yeah, I still bother to look at them once in a while) there's yet another table layout problem. For crying out loud, I'm not talking about XML, CSS, or even DOM issues. I'm talking about freaking standard HTML tables!
This evening I was working on fixing a Mac all up with a new OS load and installing the software this user needs. While getting everything tweaked in I got my first look at IE 5.0 for the Mac. Rarely, and I mean rarely, am I impressed with stuff on the Mac platform. I just sat there and played with this thing for about an hour. Aside from the fast rendering and the stuff I'm used to seeing on the Win version, the feature set was outstanding. That, and with the fonts loaded up from IE, the pages looked exactly like they do on Windows.
Aside from occasionally checking out a Mozilla build, the only real competition I see going up against IE is KDE's Konqueror. I don't think the KDE folks have a perfect replacement for IE yet, but by gosh they sure are getting there faster than anyone else on the playing field. Unfortunately with it's being tied to just Unix it's influence on web standards is directly tied to the success for Linux and BSD's at the desktop. By the time either get enough market share at that level MS will be the web standard. That's on the very loose assumption that they're not already.
Sorry about being so hard on Mozilla and all. I just feel like the project and their promises really let us all down. Even if a super bitchin' Moz 1.0 does result from all that effort, the world has long since moved on.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
As for the sites starting to be MS only, did anyone notice that all of a sudden a lot of amateur pages are done using Frontpage?
Kinda back to the #1 application on my wish list for *nix. A decent GUI HTML editor. Man, if I could get a suitable replacement for Dreamweaver and Homesite for my FreeBSD box, NT would be something I'd only use on occasion. No, Emacs is not a solution for anyone but the most hardcore of the Meta-Esc-Esc-Ctrl-X F crowd... ack!
So long as MS is putting out this cheap and easy to use editor, they'll be controlling the kind of code that is produced. The browser issue is only half the equation.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Try to open an article from the FAQ (left menu on main page). It'll show the FAQ overview, but will refuse to show the single FAQ article that is currently there, with that lame rejection message.
What's more, the following bit of Javascript code now seems to be added to the head of the rejection page:
if (document.referrer.toLowerCase().indexOf("slashdot .org")>-1) location.href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie /";
Hmmm. Cute.
(BTW, Slashdot seems to insert two spaces into that code for some reason.)
- M., another Netscape/Mac user
<redundant>So, this guy is perfectly okay with locking out 10% of his potential customer base? I would not want him as a web designer.</redundant>
Of course, most of the Slashdot audience could care less, since IE doesn't run to the best of my knowledge under Linux...
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Heh, if you browse www.toyota.ca with any browser but Netscape or IE it won't even let you in the proverbial front door. Just a rejection message and not even a link to the next page. Their entire site was bugged with JavaScript to forward you to this error page if you viewed any page on their site.
/index.html
Yeah, I could disable JavaScript, but their site was very dependent on it.
So I sent them this letter:
"My family and I are devoted Toyota customers. We currently own a '99 Toyota Camry and a '98 Toyota Tercel. We are shopping for a new car to replace '98 Toyota Tercel. We are strongly considering the Toyota Corolla, much due to the Toyota brand name and assurance of a high quality product that name delivers.
However, when I access your site, I receive an error indicating I'm not using a supported browser (www.toyota.ca/errors/error_v4.html). I am
using Mozilla 0.7 [www.mozilla.org]. My ID string should be: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win 9x 4.90; en-US; 0.7) Gecko/20010109.
I can appreciate the difficulty involved in attempting to make your site
compatible with the largest share of browsers [I do a little HTML myself]. I also fully understand your need to inform me, as a customer, of your inability to provide me with a quality browsing experience when using your site.
Unfortunately, your error page has no link to the real site. When I finally guessed at a couple of pages that do exist, just after they have loaded your JavaScript quickly forces me to view that same error page
again.
Adding a link to the real site at the bottom of your unsupported browser page and turning off the forced redirection on all but the
page would be a fix, and would still allow you to tell customers you don't support them. Customers can then decide for themselves if they wish to
get more information about Toyota through a possibly broken site (for their browser), or shop elsewhere, rather than being forced to make the latter decision.
Just a suggestion."
The people at toyota.ca were prompt in their reply. Tony Iafolla replied in under an hour with a personalised message (nice touch) explaining that he will forward my issue on to their website administrators, and that they will reply with more info. It's nice to see a company that cares enough about their customers to read their mail. I remember emailing TrippLite about a UPS Cable and waiting a month to get a reply. Ugggh...
So, who knows, if you actually send a letter, maybe you too can get these pages fixed.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
In order for this horror story of forced IE usage the big media and stores need to adopt microsoft only (or heavily favored) web pages. If joe schmuck at aspalliance uses a microsoft only web page the reaction of netscape users is likely to be go shove it.
Yes, even technically unsophisticated users will have this reaction. These people don't want to have to upgrade they expect the technically literate to fix it at their end. It is only when sites they need to access do this that their might be a change.
But if I run a real commercial site what percentage of my cost is in html coding? Probably far less than 5% and for significantly less than double that amount I can get 10% more buisness. For simple economic reasons I will still support netscape. Moreover the harm is probably larger than just a 10% loss of sales. Many sites on the internet are close to indistinguishable from their competitors, for instance the price difference between bn.com and amazon.com in books probably isn't that significant to most people so if they find they can't access amazon from their friends computer or the computer down the hall they very well might switch...thus not counted as part of the 10% netscape users they still are negatively influenced.
Moreover, as everyone who has bought a microsoft computer in the past 5 years has gotten a free IE the use of netscape is a sign of greater computer savy, or at least of longer internet usage. These people are therefore probably more likely to purchase goods and recieve their information off the web thus making that 10% cost even more.
Finally the standardization effect cannot be ignored. If more of my friends use amazon than bn I too am likely to use amazon. Therefore giving away 10% of your business to your competitor may very well result in a much larger loss
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
well, I know that AOL is using IE because then it gets included in the online services offered by MS in Windows.
So is AOL going to give up this bit of marketing advantadge to be able to use the browser product that they own?
They haven't so far.
I suspect that they will not until MS obsoletes Windows, or else intergrates Windows into later versions of MSN, as part of the MSN operating system that will be the consumer version of the .NET initiative.
MS says that .NET is going to be oriented to the small business. But do you really think that they will ignore the consumer market?
the idea of MSN compatibility requirements makes me shudder.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Especially the don't want to offend part. Sort of as if I say to my customers:
YMMV, but I perceive such an attitude as extremely arrogant. Maybe a lot of people like to function in a whiz-bang, multimedia, MP3infested, 30zillion color, streaming world.
There are other people out there, who primarily use the web for content, that might even browse in ascii and have absolutely valid reasons.This guy is yelling into my face that I'm an asshole, just because I prefer not to waste my time with megs of downloads of stupid shit, like ActiveX controls that corrupt my system or dancing coffee cups, written in Java, OK?
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Ive often wondered if the http/browser/httpd paradigm isnt the right thing for Internet based interactive programs. What the *&!@*& is wrong with X? Why go through this cluge with html: Its stateless & inherently problematic ((browsers rendering/implementing differently) as we seem to be learning).
Wouldnt a 'X Like' system be more appropriate?
I realize that this is probably impossible now, but lack of standards compliance is ultimately the fault of the people who create the unfriendly pages, not some insidious conspiracy by Microsoft/AOLTimezilla/whoever. If some e-commerce site makes a transgression, the best way to fight it is not buy stuff from that site, and e-mail them telling them why they're not going to get your custom.
Sorry, I probably should have put all that in rant tags.
While his views are often a bit extreme, the oft-quoted Jakob Neilsen has it right. The web is not a design tool, it's an information tool. Web sites are getting simpler in design now, as the content on them increases. I used to work for a biotech company, and the website started small and was elaborately designed (for the time, anyway). After we managed to get about 14,000 technical documents online, suddenly our designs became simpler and more efficient - we needed ease of management and our users needed ease-of-location. Trying to maintain multiple browser-specific versions and fancy designs became just too much work for such little return. IN the end, it's all about the content, not the wrapping. To paraphrase Jakob; "when you go to the theater, do you want people to comment on the play or the costumes?"
As for the Browser war...Microsoft won, maybe not fairly, but they did. While Netscape kept adding and adding widgets to their browser like collaboration services and mail systems and such, Microsoft went quietly about building a series of browsers that worked in a mostly logical way. While Netscape was upgrading Communicator, IE was adding reasonably consistent support for CSS. While Netscape worked on built-in editors and a fancy mail client, IE made table support more logical (mix-and-match pixels and percentages, you say? Empty cells appear as empty cells and not ugly white blocks? Huh?) The Gecko layout engine addresses many of these issues but it's a bit late for that now.
Yes, it's depressing. But don't fret - there are still enough tags that work across all browsers and work for all users (including the disabled) and do a fine job of conveying information. They may be boring, but they do their job.
I encourage anyone who deals with developing for the web to research web usability. Not only do you learn how to make a website that works for people, but you can pick up some fascinating tidbits about the way people deal with information. www.useit.com is a place to start. See also the basic but sturdy ORA book "Information Architecture for the WWW", Neilsen's "Designing Web Usability" and the new one from Jeffrey Veen whose title escapes me currently.
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"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
When I went to that page, I was quickly referred to Microsoft's IE page.
t .org")>-1)
/ ie /";
I managed to stop the redirect, and this is what I found:
if (document.referrer.toLowerCase().indexOf("slashdo
location.href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows
else
document.write(''+'<Link Rel="StyleSheet" HRef="../article.css" Type="text/css">'+
'<Title>Sorry, Non-Internet Explorer compatible browsers are not supported!</Title>'+
<snip>
blah blah blah
</snip>
</Script>
I guess he thinks that will keep him from getting Slashdotted.
I will never have an interesting signature.
- The Sigless Wonder
Sorry, but things like CSS2 are W3C standards that NS 4 had years to support but didn't. (NS6 claims to support them, but I haven't had a chance to test it yet.) Meanwhile IE4+ supported them just fine. (Ok, maybe not 100%, more like 90%. But it was better than NS4's 0%.)
As far as designing web pages go, it's a real pain to try to make a page compatible for NS. It's a stickler for 100% perfect code (how many of us has forgotten a closing TR tag that ruins a page in NS). And in many cases, it's quirks can drive you nuts. (Tried tracking down a style-sheet problem once. Two hours later I discovered that NS doesn't like for the first character of a style-sheet to be a number. IE displayed it just fine.)
In spite of all that, my philosophy is: I might develop towards IE users, but I try to make my pages degrade nicely for NS users. NS users might not get the page 100% the way I want it shown (which is the way IE users see it), but they will get a decent readable page.
As far as the guy who's rejecting 25% of his potential site visitors because they aren't using IE, I'd be willing to bet that this type of behavior won't spread to e-commerce sites. No "e-store" in their right mind would turn away 25% of their customers just because their browser wasn't up to par. They might incorporate some whiz-bang new features that only IE users can see. (Same as some of them have features that only people with certain plug-ins can see.) But they'll make sure that people using other browsers can still browse and buy from their store. Either that or they'll lose the business of NS users.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
It does fascinate me, though, this "can't be bothered with 10% stuff". I occasionally send notes to the business people at commercial sites, pointing out this attitude on the part of the technical folks. I've worked retail -- "I ignore 10% of the customers because they're just too hard for me" means a pink slip in any brick-and-morter store, and I see no reason why online should be any different.
It's one thing to try and fail, another not even to try.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
And, as our records showed, approximately 60% of our project time was spent on cross browser issues.
This is nuts. IE, while generally easier to work with, is way too forgiving on HTML blunders and way too flexible on javascript syntax. NS would be nice for its strictness if it didn't have so many damn bugs (often requiring irksome work-arounds).
I won't even go into the DOM problem, but I do be leave we can fault ourselves (through our collective opportunity to influence W3C) for that, since no good standard emerged when the market was ready for it.
Having been a part of the organization that created Cello, the first web browser for MS Windows (so we believe), I often root for the outsider, and, hopefully, that's where my savior browser will come from. Opera just plain didn't work with many of the javascript twinkies on extradesk that passed the IE/NS torture test just fine. I think the truth is that making the ultimate browser such mammoth task that I may be asking too much. In the throes of my IE/NS punishment, I fantasized about getting the Cello source and starting over, but my few threads of remaining sanity stopped me...
who's moderating the meta-moderators?
Slightly adapted story from chinese literature,
and direct answer to all posts for this story:
Once upon a time an immigrant applied for a job at
Microsoft as a floor cleaner. The interview went
well and finally they went to arrange the details.
The interviewer told him: "Please write down your
e-mail address and we will send you the documents"
The immigrant replied: "I don't have a computer"
The interviewer gasped and said: "You don't have
any computer? Geee you can't work for us then we
are Microsoft!"
The immigrant went away and from his last three
bucks he bought tomatos and sold them. He did this
day after day, week after week, month after month
until he had earned enough to hire employees, buy
a storehouse, his business did go well.
Years later, he went to see a retirement advisor
to help invest his money wisely. The advisor came
up with a plan and finally said: "So give me your
e-mail address and I will send you the documents"
The immigrant replied: "I don't have a computer."
The advisor couldn't believe that and asked: "How
did you ever get that rich without a computer?"
To that he replied: "If I did have a computer,
I would be cleaning the floor at Microsoft now".
Well, first of all this is an issue with site designers. I write ASP code quite fluently, and it doesn't take much effort to ensure you are compatible with most browsers out there, as the ASP is executed server-side and only HTML is tossed back to the clients. Just a case of poor programming on the website.
.NET compact runtime includes more than MacOS or Windows CE.
Contrary to popular opinion, Microsoft is actually going to be very proactive in this area with the upcoming ASP.NET. Now we can go over all the nice features like native x86 compilation of scripts, support for just about any lanauge (PHP, perl, etc. included), and more, but the real feature has to do with the new development environment in Visual Studio.NET:
Basically, when I design a website on VS.NET, I just create it like I would a normal Windows application. I just drag & drop controls, position text, and do everything else I want to with the same ease that RAD tool developers have now. Then, I double-click a button for example and start adding code to that button. Let's say that button will cause a piece of text to be rotated 90 degrees ok? Just because I happen to like Perl, I'll write that one in perl. Now what happens when someone with IE5 or NS6 views the site? fully interactive DHTML.
But what if you are using Netscape 4? or IE2? Or another browser that doesn't have Javascript or DHTML support? No problem either. "HOW???" you say? Easy: The server automatically casts the forms down to the level of HTML & such that the client supports. That's right: I don't have to program custom IE and NS tags or screw with viewing the page in every single browser. The server takes care of that for me.
BTW: I can't say much on what platforms will be able to run ASP.NET in terms of hosting, other than to say that the list of alternate platforms that will have the
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The IHA Forums
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Can this be prevented?
Yes, just turn off the worthless and lame JavaScript. Only *real* Java is a powerful enough client side system to be worth enabling. All JS does is add unnecessary bloat to a web client, and everything it can do (OK, not including DHTML) can be done far more simply on the server side.
Coincidentally, turn off JavaScript, and viewing that site no longer leads to the anti NS rant.
Does my bum look big in this?
Yes, Microsoft is trying to muscle their way into that, weaving an intricate web of dependencies among their authoring tools, MS Office, servers, and content they provide, but whether their nefarious plans work out is still an open question. And if they do, the antitrust suit will get new fuel.
What people appear to have lost sight of here is that dagon is primarily an IE (and ASP) developer.
He develops IE applications, mainly (I believe I'm right in saying) for intranets, where IE is guaranteed as the browser.
The stuff he does is impossible to do in Netscape 4, and Mozilla/NS6 have such a small market share there is not much point in supporting them at the current time.
The site he has is about IE and ASP devlopment - please give me one good reason as to why should non-IE browsers be supported there?
So stop calling him an idiot, and look at what the site is about. Mainly IE development. IE developers generally use IE as the browser. Yes? OK then. Please leave him alone. Thankyou.
It's patently obvious to anyone who knows how ASP works that this was done by the nice folks at aspalliance.com and not by Microsoft. You can use ASP to build netscape and opera friendly sites with no problem. You can also use mod_perl and apache on linux to build sites that reject netscape clients and only allow ie. I've seen the same thing done by linux sites but with ie users as the targets. It's not new and it's not likely to become popular as it alienates customers. Finally you'll note that the URL is http://www.aspalliance.com/dagon/rejectNS/rejectNS .html
Dagon is a demonic fish god that was worshiped by the heathen cananites. This smacks of the actions of a lone satanist rather than a major corporation. Although I would expect satanists to like mozilla, the mascot is a demonic fire-breathing lizard after all.
For those using the One True Browser (Lynx), it is necessary to view
the source to even see the message. I expect this also applies to those using those silly graphical browsers who have enough sense to browse with javascript off . . .
Yes, I'm sure there currently are, and always will be, standards compliance issues, but by the time AOL switches to Mozilla these will be for the most esoteric and cutting edge features, so for most sites, they will hopefully not be too bad. Even at this point, the latest Mozilla and IE support is supposed to be excellent.
Note that it's only AOL's use of Mozilla that will make Mozilla mean anything. Without AOL adopting Mozilla as its default browser, Mozilla will be relegated to the likes of Netscape, Opera and Lynx... no, I'm not bashing Lynx and Opera. It's just the truth that they will simply not be on any large commercial site's radar screens. They will not do anything to stop the tide of sites converting to IE only.
Some say that web access for other devices will help this situation, but I doubt it. The display needs and platforms for PDAs, cell phones, and whatever are so different that companies will code entirely different interfaces for those devices, instead of hoping that their HTML will work across all possible devices. This actually makes sense. Architecturally the "right thing" is to do the usual content/presentation separation, e.g. XML as the data stream and JSP/ASP/PHP for standard web display, WAP for wireless, etc.
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In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
Ditto here.
I used to run a couple small websites. One day I forgot to close a table, causing the table to not display under Netscape. IE rendered the table just fine, assuming that since the page/HTML section was over, I was likely not adding more to it.
I got six or seven e-mails about this, all of them nasty and insulting. My logs showed that fewer than a dozen Netscape visitors had even visited!
I fixed the error, but included some code to suggest an IE download to Netscape users. Insults poured in, someone attempted to DoS the site, and I even received a snail mail letter with some rather nasty material (feces?) smeared on it.
Frankly, I don't know what conclusion to draw here. At least people seem to have calmed down about the browser wars -- things like the story's hilighted site are less the norm, though I'll wager his Netscape bashing has tripled his site traffic overnight thanks to Slashdot's troll story.
I'm having no problems browsing the site from Netscape 4.6 on my Mac. That's about as non-MS as I could manage at the moment. Are you sure about your results, or did you just pick a page from the search engine to get slashdotted?
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
It appears that your operating system is not supported by shockwave.com. We support the following operating systems: Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows NT 4.0 (or later), and Mac OS 8.1 (or later).
Have a look at what you get if you try to call up shockwave.com with a linux box.
In my book the guy's a fucking arrogant dweeb.
He has certainly every right in the world to target whoever he wants, but he might consider a message that doesn't blurt to the world that he's full of it.
But then I mostly use Lynx most of the time anyway.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
It's patently obvious to anyone who knows how ASP works that this was done by the nice folks at aspalliance.com and not by Microsoft. You can use ASP to build netscape and opera friendly sites with no problem. You can also use mod_perl and apache on linux to build sites that reject netscape clients and only allow ie.
S .html
I've seen the same thing done by linux sites but with ie users as the targets. It's not new and it's not likely to become popular as it alienates customers.
Finally you'll note that the URL is http://www.aspalliance.com/dagon/rejectNS/rejectN
Dagon is a demonic fish god that was worshiped by the heathen cananites. This smacks of the actions of a lone satanist rather than a major corporation. Although I would expect satanists to like mozilla, the mascot is a demonic fire-breathing lizard after all.
--Shoeboy
Off topic: it's amazing but I've known people who work with and for MSFT and they really do believe the claims the company makes for inventing and having exclusives on various technologies.
That's right it special cases people who come from slashdot .... so I suspect people are seeing several different things on this page (Konqueror just ignores this stuff and continues on to the main page)
I have argued many times with web developers about ensuring that web sites will work with any browser. It was easier to win the argument when I was the boss, but I'm still managing to prevail as a consultant :) Some simple reasons are:
:)
:)
1. A well designed & implemented web site which works on all browsers is more robust, better planned and easier to maintain.
2. It doesn't take much effort if you know what the hell you are doing!
3. Alienating even 5% of your potential audience is not a good idea if it doesn't take much more effort to make it right for "everyone" (don't forget, one happy person tells another, one pissed off person tells as many as they can
4. The "top sites" are coding for all browsers - if we use them as examples of good design, why not extend that to implementation as well?
Basically, those who can't be stuffed to write "generic" sites are lazy non-professionals who are taking advantage of an "easy out" argument.
Unfortunately, I do not see much progress towards a more balanced client-side of the web. Most office & personal installations are using IE (hey, it comes with the OS, installs out of the box, seems well integrated, hmmmm - bit of a no brainer - I just want it to work, I don't care who makes the engine - etc etc etc). The ones using non-IE browsers are those using alternate platforms - usually people with Unix workstations or a grudge against Microsoft
Until the non-Microsoft browsers are less than 0.5% of audience, though, I will keep recommending that people code for them. One can only hope that they will claw back enough marketshare to be taken seriously...
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
I have been a web designer for approximately 7 years now. That is a long time. I have seen what the web is, and what a web designer is, change several times.Like back when all transparent graphics made the same grey as the default background of Mosaic because if the browser didn't support transparency it probably didnt support backgrounds either. And we were taught to never count out the text only users. Alt tags!!! Hell back then we didn't assume anything about layout. We didn't have tables or other methods. The best we had was we could run the text next to a graphic on either the left or right side. Oh and Lists...
So anyway, in all that time I have learned that it does not matter what browser 90% uses, or what browser has the most features, or best features, or whatnot. What matters is that when your client calls, and says "A reporter I wanted to cover our new web opening called, and he says it doesn't work" or "THe vice president in charge of marketting says your site crashes his browser" or "My college buddy says that your page looks like crap on a Sun using Netscape 3.0 beta 7 with a 1600x1200 screen (because the background image is a 1x1000 image...)" All of this has happened. Infact I had one of the earlier uses of Javascript to do roll over menus for one of the top Internet Providers, and they had me remove it from 300 pages (well ok search and replace made that work really easily) because it crashed a Netscape 3.0 beta user on Sun (a really small impact but) who was covering the company for Newsweek.
Folks like to claim that 10% is a small percent of the user base in the world. 10% of the 100 million users in america is 10 million. That is a very very big group you are alienating.No one would in their right mind give up 10 million potential customers merely because of a browser choice. Any web producer who suggests they can will lose to the one that says it is no problem to support both. Basicly I can say as an experienced web developer that I deliver 10% more client eyes automatically than someone who makes it IE browser dependent.
Javascript has it's place. ASP's are certainly used a great deal by companies that DON'T find it difficult to produce for Netscape. Hell. My Mozilla doesn't have problems talking to Microsoft websites.:) They certainly don't want to lose my business...
In the long run, the web is not the best manner to do alot of things we want to do, and PC's aren't the natural client for them. Handheld browsers, consumer set top boxes, PLAYSTATIONS, and other NON MICROSOFT products are going to dominate the user base, just as AOL began to do 5 years ago. You all don't remember what a panic it used to be "Our page won't show right on AOL browsers! %!@$@!$" before they started using more standards.
Let me remind you all that Microsoft was late to the internet party. They had their own proprietary page format they were going to use for Microsoft and then slam bam, they had to change directions. That allowed Netscape to grow so large they forgot to make good products, and forced Microsoft to accept all sorts of standards. I can assure you that Amazon can't afford to run a server with software that cuts off 10% marketshare. That 10% will go right to the one who doesn't.
Lets talk about it from a sheer number argument. There are 10 sites. There are 100 users. 90 use IE, 10 use other... All the sites but 1 say, Well IE is the only way to go... Each site is equally good besides that. Ok... Well each site gets 9 IE users....(including the 1 that supports other browsers) but the 1 supporting the other browsers gets the OTHER 10... Which site survives longest?
So while I can see arguments why one might want to use Microsoft only technology in a web page having some virtue (Well yeah it only works for 90% but it lets me enhance it enough to make a big difference to my usability...) there is no excuse for not delivering some service to any class browser. I have basicly rejected employee applicants because their sample websites were all graphics for instance. No search engine would find anything ont heir site. Or blind folks. Or Text only browsers. ETc...
And that is another thing. The ASP Alliance site is rejecting search engines if it only allows IE browsers. It's content is an island.
If it has any.
DLG
This isn't a troll. It's a vent.
I'm SO SICK of the open source community rallying behind Netscape as if it were the second coming, just because they are anti-Microsoft.
Netscape was HATED by the online community in the mid-90's. Don't you remember the protest pages, people turning their pages black-on-black with netscape-specific tags, with little comments "If you can't read this page, you're using Netscape."
Netscape tried to do the exact same thing MS does. They offered their software for free, and then tried to screw up an existing standard by securing market share and then making their own extensions more popular than the standard.
Netscape is just as guilty of shady practices as Microsoft. You can't be anti-MS for these reasons and be pro-Netscape. Some of you people are just so blind with your anti-MS fervor that you don't realize MS did what any company would do in its place -- even your beloved Netscape.
I stopped using Netscape 5 years ago and I'll never use it again.
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
Will the browser-neutral web soon become a thing of the past? Yes, by about 1996, I would say.
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Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.