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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?
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.
Well it certainly works for e-commerce sites. Businesses are't going to stay in business long if they blatantly tell their customer base to go piss up a rope. If a site doesn't work with my browser I simply buy from someone else. Usually the price difference is negligible (or even lower!) anyway. A bad web site that doesn't work well with a variety of cross-platform browsers just urks me to no end. The web is supposed to be platform independent!!! That's the WHOLE FSCKING POINT! If we wanted to tie it to one OS, Microsoft could've designed some proprietary application that browses over Netbios or some such ungodly protocol and uses whatever-their-buzzword-of-the-day technology is. Ah well, what can you do? Bitch and moan I suppose, or just go elsewhere. The owners of the business should be informed that they lost a customer because of the proprietary nature of their web site though as well.
I think I can assume from this that you have never developed a web site with a reasonably complex layout.
Web sites are starting to remind me of the ransom note syndrome Mac users caught in the 80's when they discovered fonts in word processors.
When a web site is meant to display news, informational articles or an online catalog, the questions designers need to ask is "Do we really need a dancing clown, balloons, and a marching band on EVERY page? Will the user even notice if this single pixel is one shade darker.
If for some reason, those answers are yes, the next question should be 'Is there any decent reason at all not to strip all that stuff out of an alternate version so the rest of the world can at least see something and place a best viewed with wizz-bang version 1034.2763?'. The odds are, that answer will be no.
Part of the problem is design tools. I sometimes get output from design tools to show what the output of a script looks like. 9 times out of ten, I can strip out over 50% of the HTML in VI and get a page that the designer agrees looks exactly the same in the browser, loads and renders faster, and looks at least decent in other browsers.
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?
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Microsoft owns WebTV!!!
woopsie, there goes that argument.
;)
Joseph Elwell.
I'd buy 10% of the users to his site use non-IE. It's an ASP information site, so, yes, the majority of users use IE. I've seen the same numbers on my ASP site.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
I'm sure there is nothing on the page which couldn't be rendered using code which is compatible with all browsers. Web developers are obsessed with stupid things like Javascript, CSS and the like. That's where most of the gut-wrenching compatability issues come in.
The point is not so much that Microsoft has won, but that crafting a site for IE-only is nothing more than stroking one's ego by showing off cool widgets.
Turn off the crappy HTML extensions and let people read the contents of your page... assuming there is content at all.
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.
Sorry I've struck a nerve, I'm well aware of what CSS was supposed to do. The reality is that it hasn't made the web any less ugly... yet.
The end result is that people use CSS and make their documents unreadable to Netscape users. HTML worked fine... the only problem was that people couldn't stop trying to use it to do desktop publishing.
When people start adopting CSS, the same trash will start all over again, people will start adopting the equivalent of a Netscape blink tag, only it will come from Opera, Mozilla, Netscape, or IE. All to overcome some perceived problem rendering information which could just as easily be presented in plain text.
The only advantage is that then maybe people will be able to actually see the information in plain text, trimming off all this cruft introduced since HTML 2.0.
You're just ticked off that compatability issues and market forces prevented CSS from becoming what it was/is promised to be. I agree it is a shame, but ignoring the current state of the web and using CSS is going to cause readers nothing but headaches.
It is a good alternate method to render data, but Microsoft (and I believe a few others recently) are the only ones who currently support it. It is almost there. I haven't done CSS development since 1.0, but I've followed the (major) developments of it on and off.. and the end results I see are analogous to the problems encountered doing pixel-perfect tables. Finding the lowest common denominator between all the browsers has more to do with hacking and experience than anything to do with standards.
But as for your response, you're telling me that it is all those pesky Netscape users who won't let you use CSS to render information... On one hand you say that standards are important, and that CSS provides clear rendering of information, but on the other hand, you're probably using tables to hack the web into a glossy magazine.
All these features provide zero improvements to the quality or readability of content... more often than not they detract from it. You're right though, CSS is a step in the right direction, but that doesn't mean that it should be embraced at the expense of giving one ill-reputed company a nearly complete stranglehold on the marketplace.
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
If html had simply had a "go to pixel x,y" command we would not be in this horrible mess of incompatable browsers and we would have quick-rendering pages without huge messes of nested tables. I'm sorry, but this attitude is entirely responsible for the hell we are in now.
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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
I don't know much about how to register user agents, but for example in the Opera browser you can choose your user agent. In Opera 5.x I actually believe that the default user agent is MSIE5.0.
I know it is still just a minority and then again - Opera 5.x has been downloaded more than 2 million times in the first month.
And no, I have no interests in Opera Software whatsoever.
Greetings Joergen
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.
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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.
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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)
My experience (I administer various popular websites with thousands of visitors a day each) is as follows:
Freeweb/Warez/Fun Sites:
- 69-70% MSIE 5.X
- 9,3-12% Mozilla 4.X
- 4,4-11% MSIE 4.X
- 2,6-3,8% Searchengines/Other
- 0,8-0,9% Mozilla 3.X
- 0,5-0,8% Mozilla 5.X
- 0-1,8% MSIE 2.X
- 0% MSIE 3.X
News/E-Commerce sites:- 65-66% MSIE 5.X
- 19,6-20% Mozilla 4.X
- 8,9-10% MSIE 4.X
- 1,5-1,9% Searchengines/Other
- 0,3-1,4% Mozilla 3.X
- 0,3% MSIE 3.X
- 0,2-0,3% Mozilla 5.X
- 0% MSIE 2.X
(Data is taken from Weblogs of January 2001)So you can see: MSIE has at most 76% Marketshare and Netscape reaches 22% when it comes to e-commerce sites (and e-commerce sites tend to enable access to ALL potential customers, as their goal is to sell goods to EVERYONE).
ms
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.
Err, British. Tim(othy) Berners-Lee. ;-)
But hey, most people reading this think that all British people are English...
James F.
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
Hey stupid, I didn't say ANYTHING about whether or not html is TECHNICALLY a good way to do wysiwig, you just made that assumption yourself. HTML is crap for wysiwig, we all know that - but my point stands - the majority of people wanted something closer to wysiwig than html was, but html was the only thing available - thus html became a sort of de-facto standard for doing it, and hence all the crap thats been tethered onto it to make it more wysiwig-design-friendly. That is just the way it turned out (perhaps, since you seem to know so much about engineering, you will have heard about "de facto" standards?) There are hundreds of sub-standard standards in common use simply because people happened to adopt them, not because they were technically the best for the job. And no matter how much you whine about it, you are NOT going to change it, because people just *naturally* chose html. So why not just accept that that is what people have chosen, and improve it, rather than spend the rest of your life whining on a soap-box to people who aren't going to listen anyway? You're wasting your time. Get over it - html is not just a general markup language anymore, and YOU CAN'T CHANGE THAT.
"HTML's purpose is not WYSIWYG publishing. Get over it"
HTML's original intended may have been to be a general markup language, but it certainly isn't just that anymore. Things *are* what they *become*, no matter what they were originally intended to be. Get over it.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
The biggest problem with these new protocols (actually that's not a protocol problem but rather a data format, WML vs HTML rather than whateverP vs http) is that there is not content available yet while there are zillions of HTML pages.
So whenever you want to setup something you want to market as webish (Mobile phones, TV, Microwave oven, etc.) you'll have to face the problem to display HTML sites to your device. AFAIK there are only two solutions around, either build a huge conversion platform or embed a html browser in your device. In both case if a web site wants to be seen by your device users it'll have to be any browser compliant or develop a specific version for your device.
I guess that makes you one of the four happy IE 2 users.
Oink, Oink!!
Konqueror has problems, too. There are many sites that I can't fill out forms on, for example, I can't log into SlashDot using Konqueror. I think it's in the javascript support.
--
Clear, Dark Skies
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.
So. What do I run under Linux?
Help me out here... There IS no IE for Linux.
-- 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.
Ummm, the article concludes that jscript kills vbscript for an ASP scripting language. Of course, you could just use Perl or any of the other 14 different WSH-compatible scripting engines . . .
---
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
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 mostly browse with java and javascript disabled, as even sites I frequent (like CNN) are likely to pop up a window here and there, which just pisses me off. So when I come across a site that won't let me get past the front page because all the links are java scripts that simply perform the link...well, I "quickly head for the exit", too. It's the first warning sign that the site will do things I don't want it to do...like popping up advertisement windows.
But I'm also guilty...I have junkbuster set to tell sites that I'm using IE so I don't get bogus error messages. Some sites are definately designed to screw Netscape users, while I have yet to run across one that complained I was using IE. It is arrogant and stupid of them to design websites this way. The most important thing is content, not the way it's displayed. While some sites don't display that well with my method, at least they display instead of giving me a blank screen or something.
----------
Stupid sexy Flanders.
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 couldn't disagree with you more.
As a web developer, I find that even with complex layouts, the key is not how cool I think it looks and the user expereince MUST come first, so if you need to design a site that only works on one browser, you are limiting your client base. If your site doesn't work under AOL's integrated IE (which some stuff doesn't you should be checking) that is a HUGE client base to loose.
If you are using browser dependent code you, need to find a different way around it. Don't expect the user to switch to your platform because you want to develop in it, expect the user to go elswhere for services.
The _only_ exception to this rule is on a corporate intranet, where the organization has the right (as they own the hardware) to say, you must use IE, AOL, Netscape, Lynx, Amaya, WebTV or whatever.
I don't want to start a flame war here, but lets be realistic, the web isn't about what you design, its about what the average user gets out of it.
AF-Design, web development.
Please think about what that statement means before you allege naivety. I fact, I find it naive for people to assume that plain old HTML is adequate for the task of document preparation, in general.
If HTML can be used for any purpose, why did HTML 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0 emerge? Why is MathML for? What is CSS for? Why, if the purpose of this HTML standard is so malleable, that people chose to define new standards?
You use a hammer to hammer nails and a screwdriver to screw screws. You would laugh at any person trying to do one with the other. It is not "naive". It is classic case of people not understanding the tool.
To the original poster who complained about not having control over document layout, I say again: Go ahead and push for some new standard that defines document layout. Perhaps a ready one like PDF would be nice. Then go get netscape, MS and others to write browsers for them. Complaining about how browsers don't render things similarly simply means that you have not read the RFCs. It says very clearly that browsers are allowed to render layouts with differences. But that is not a law from high. By all means change it formally if you want to.
BTW, why are the high numbered posters in slashdot getting so asinine?
You have also conceded the point that they have the attitude of mere users. This is software, not a hammer. Software is changeable, configurable and malleable. It is not a hammer, which obviously is limited by its shape and weight. The people who are after document preparation can obviously do a world of good by proposing a standard which meets their goals. This gives Netscape and MS a target to code for. Thus they legitimize their goals, and make it so that existing standards aren't already as complicated as they are. And guess what -- Adobe already has a de-jure standard. All they need to do is to take it an additional step, research their needs and formalize it. Instead, these people whine and bitch about how HTML -- which is expressedly not made for such a task -- cannot meet their exacting standards.
I could agree with the statement that tools are for "people". But "People" is a plurality, not a singular group of people. I wonder if you are aware of that, and its implications.
Anyway, it is an interesting exercise to see someone attempt to argue selfishness away.
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.
Why should we keep shoehorning a bunch of UNIX socket calls, HTTP and HTML to suit web designers tastes? Go read the RFCs and tell me it is adequate for these purposes! Go and read the f*cking RFC for a URL, and ask the question: why aren't the shockwave coders not proposing their own swave://blah.net/ protocol and instead making http: do everything?
If a bicycle sprouted wings and tail does it become an airplane? Or did people sit down an reinvent a plane based upon the principles of flight that the Wright brothers thought up? At some point, do we keep grafting on complex things onto an ancient procotol, or do we rethink our technologies and come out with something perhaps not totally fresh, but better engineered?
And guess what? I am not even denigrating the fields of WYSIWYG publishing. It is a respectable goal in its own right. It is arrogant pricks like you who can't see an engineering argument when it hits you in the face. According to this attitude: There is no such thing as good design and engineering -- it is all arrogant posturing!
Saying "who has the time to wait ..." is exactly the problem. These people working on internet time cannot expect the rest of the world to cater to their demands. Why should the W3C make up things to cater to them?
Do you not realize that HTML (whichever standard) is not perfect, and in developing a standard, the W3C is not striving for total perfection? The standard is already a compromise between the needs of pure markup, and the needs of presentation, the needs of the blind, the needs of graceful degradation etc. In arguing in the manner that you have, you are forgetting exactly about this compromise. Do you think the W3C only cares about perfection and not practicality? If you think so, why don't you become a memeber and try to influence their direction?
Coming out with a suitable document format is indeed better for a whole host of reasons. Ignoring it is just that - it produces a chaotic mess. This mess, which this slashdot article is exemplifies, is a result of people who ignore the standards, and are unwilling to see the compromises that the W3C made. If they are not happy, they should be aware that people like me who abhor flashy websites are also not happy.
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
Besides - isn't it the content, that matters, not fancy layout and using the latest (often overly hyped) technologies?
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.
Everyone so far has failed to remember that AOL signed a deal with MS to use IE until this year. Now given that AOL and Microsoft don't like each other at all and that AOL has spent money on Mozilla, don't you think that AOL will switch as soon as the deal runs out this year.
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.
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.
----
----
"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
-
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.
I think I can assume from this that you have never developed a web site with a reasonably complex layout. While netscape may be a very usable web browser, getting stuff to lay out the way it should can be a nightmare. A few Netscape users seem to think that having their browser supported by every web site is their right. Its not as easy as that. Unlike you I have had to make sites browser compatible. Richard.
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.
----------
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...
Other technologies exists for that purpose. HTML's purpose is not WYSIWYG publishing. Get over it.
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.