Slashdot Mirror
Web Standards Project: Upgrade, Or Miss Out
DShadow writes: "The Web Standards Project launched yesterday a Browser Upgrade Campaign. They feel that the Web is being held back by users who use older versions of browsers. Their solution is twofold. First, they are asking web developers to drop support for old (pre- IE5.5/NS6/Opera5) browsers and code only using the most recent standards. Secondly, they are asking developers to add a bit of JavaScript to web pages that forces browsers to redirect to the a WSP page explaining this. Now, I'm all for using modern technology and phasing out support for the old stuff, but to say that I'd be annoyed when websites start telling me to go away and upgrade my browser (Netscape 4.6) because they don't want to support it would be an understatement. I'll upgrade when I'm ready to, and not a moment sooner." It took me a few reads to realize that they're serious.
Nobody said that it was.
I have an "old" version of lynx which displays standards compliant pages very well. It's only Netscape 4.x and a few others that make a mess of style sheets.
On the web the 'publishing' site has little control over the presentation of the page. I can turn off, Javascript, turn off images, change the background, overide CSS etc - and that's without going into screen resolution of colour issues. When I had a slow modem I did this to get to the content more quickly.
I agree that there are many types of web pages - information pages (linux,
Bottom line: I think too many designers treat web design as if it were print design - even if they use flash they don't know what resolution and colour my monitor will produce. I agree that design is important, but the design should be informed by the nature of the delivery medium.
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I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
There's a difference between running 20-year-old hardware and software and running current, modern software on current, modern hardware that doesn't happen to fit the Fortune 10's idea of what you should be using. When my Sun is 20 years old, I won't expect any support for it either. But I think it's not unreasonable to expect it now.
KISS? Maintaining 8 different versions of HTML for each page of content is keeping it simple? Keeping web technology stuck at the level of 1996 forever is preferred? Give me a break! This sounds like folks saying that they don't understand why we need graphics for games. Yes, "Adventure" was a great game, but Quake III is never going to work properly on a Mac Classic.
Tunnel vision? Progress never occurs if you stick with the solutions of the past. Should we ditch older ways because they are older? Of course not. You're right in that many pages abuse the new specs for their gee-whiz factor. On the other hand, Netscape 4.x is NOT something to hold dear and precious. Lynx at least has a specific purpose and niche (text-only display). Netscape 4.x only serves to slow the world down.
As soon as people stop seeing NS and IE as web browsers and start seeing them as web application platforms, DHTML and CSS stop being the enemy and start to get real problems solved. There is more to DHTML than image rollovers.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Yeah, sorry.. I just spent way too long wrestling with symlinks to get cdparanoia working :p
/dev/cua/0 - update software to use /dev/ttyS0
Is it just me or does this error message look a little.. odd?
Feb 18 18:17:10 localhost kernel: tty_io.c: process 646 (pppd) used obsolete
Is there some sort of obsolescence temporal loop going on here or what?
-- That which does not kill us has made its last mistake..
Since website's core objective is to deliver information, and looking at the directions of "alternate" technologies, the best way of moving forward would be to push for a clean separation between content and presentation - not just on an HTML/CSS level. More like an XML/XSL level.
Then we kill off all the cross-browser incompatibilities in one swoop by delivering the XML to the client, and the client then decides on the presentation by a customised XSL (since they'd only be interested in the content and buying on-line anyways).
XHTML is already a small step in this direction - since it should be a valid XML document.
Its the information that makes the web what it is - not the cool effects.
Yeat ANOTHER person who still doesn't' get it. Getting browsers to support standards has got nothing to do with java/flash/images/sound.
Tables are great. They help my browser format large amounts of information so that I can understand your data. But please don't use dozens of nested tables just to make some graphic show up at exactly coordinate x, y.
Graphics can help your site make sense and help me to understand your message and naviate easier. But please don't pollute my browser with hundreds of micro-images just to achieve some special effect that could be replaced with a simple navigation bar on the side.
Thats another good reason to use a browser that supports standards. So web designers don't have to place 1000's of micro images, or build complex, multi-collum, interlocking, rowspan style tables -- Just to place something at x,y
Getting browsers to support standards has got nothing to do with fancy looking sites, images or sound etc..
The point is to give web designers proper web developing tools so they can make good sites. That are usable, have good content, but still have a bit of style--but not having to resort to extreams in doing so.
I can tell you right now. If slashdot made their HTML, HTML 4.0, and CSS 1.0 compliant. It would deffinitly load alot faster. And would be much more easier to manage. Aswell as having benifits to the user. (except those using 4.0 or less browers).
If you want clean and useful content. Then up-grade to a standards compliant web brower.
Anybody who refuses to upgrade a browser should be just as resilient to, say, kernel upgrades. It's just plain stupid. USE MODERN VERSIONS.
There was some confusion a ways up in this thread about Netscape for SGI IRIX. Here are three useful links:
. 76/unix/supported/irix65/
SGI's build of 4.75 (4.76 should be there soon):
http://www.sgi.com/products/evaluation/
Netscape's build of 4.76:
ftp://ftp.netscape.com/pub/communicator/english/4
Mozilla, etc, for SGI IRIX:
http://reality.sgi.com/rhess_engr/mozilla/irix/
Thats true. I was upgrading Netscape from 3.0 to 4.76 on a realative's computer a few months ago. My download timed out several times (forcing me to get SmartDownload so I could resume). Then, when it was done, it turned out his small hard disk didn't have enough space for the installer, InstallShield's unpacking process, and the final product. What a pain! If it wasn't for the continual javascript errors and the poor rendering of modern pages, I would have let it be and saved about five hours of time!
The clash of honour calls, to stand when others fall.
I've tried to upgrade to Netscape 6.0
So use Mozilla brand NS6 instead of Netscape brand NS6. Mozilla 0.8 is already several proverbial kilometers ahead of NS4 in terms of HTML/CSS/DOM standards conformance and stability.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Do everyone a favour:
*learn how to present web graphics correctly. 154k for a shit front page like that is a joke.
*learn how to make a site navigable rather than having imagemaps that give no clue where to click on them
*is your front page your special way of keeping people away? theres no way I can get into your site apart from reading the source and typing the url in myself (using IE5.5)
* learn that not everybody can or even wants to resize their window and download your damn font to see your page.
Your site is a great example of the state of the web, any monkey can put up a web site...
no sig.
From the original article:
As we say here in London: Bollocks. It is possible to have fun with over-the-top scripts at the same time as Lynx-enhancing the site. See www.nmd.org.uk for one example.
Ooops. mods pls delete other response.
From the original referenced article:
As we say here in London: Bollocks. It is possible to have fun with over-the-top scripts at the same time as Lynx-enhancing the site and making it fully compatible even with dumb screen-readers. See www.nmd.org.uk for one example.
I'm serious here, folks. With the demise of Netscape, even more people will start thinking that "Internet" equals running IE, and Windows. Perhaps a little Linux and Mac thrown in, but the rest of us have just been told to shut the fuck up, roll over and die. We've been served our 'declaration of war', and it's at webstandards.org. I propose a 'Ban Internet Explorer' day. Anyone of us who runs a webserver on any flavour of unix would be asked to, for one day, exclude IE-users from these websites, redirecting them to a page that tells *our* side of the story. We've lost the browser-battle, but we may not have lost the war yet.
Examples please
In any case, forcing people to upgrade can be compared to using monopoly power to sell stuff.
What Part of Compliance Don't You Understand? Some of those Slashdot users really don't get it. Maybe one would have to be a web designer to truly see the whole picture. What picture? This one. The issue of urging users upgrade to more standards-compliant browsers isn't about making pages inaccessible. It's quite the opposite. Standards compliant HTML will work fine in almost any browser. If I typed out my research paper in XHTML 1.1 (or whatever) I bet Mosaic 1.0 could still view it. Why? Because the spec was written for backwards compliance. Display information isn't a problem if good HTML is used.
The real problem is all of those nasty bugs in older browsers. Internet Explorer 3 claims to support CSS 1.0 but it really doesn't. So what those Slashdot people are telling me is that IE 3.0 is perfectly capable of displaying CSS 1.0 compliant pages. Well IE 3.0 isn't as compliant as it sounds. It has bugs. Now, it's the software company's responsibility to get the word out to their users and make them upgrade to a more stable and compliant client.
"Oh it doesn't look right in my 5 year old crap browser." Times are a-changin'. Sure, you can use a black and white TV to view any color-based channels, but don't complain that it doesn't look right. There are many color TVs available everywhere. So ha.
Another example would be Perl. Sure, HTML isn't a programming language, but I'll make it fit. I bet most modern Perl scripts don't care about squat when it comes to Perl 4. Why? Everyone writes for Perl 5. Every system should come with Perl 5. What? Don't have it? Upgrade! Recompile! Do something! It's the user's job to keep up. Being an end-user doesn't give one the excuse of being completely ignorant, helpless, and stupid.
Has anyone ever heard of auto-install? Sure, there probably isn't one for the browser of choice on a Unix-based system, but guess what? Most Unix users are educated enough to take it upon themselves to go upgrade manually. Mom and Pop Wintel users can go ahead and press that big ol' button that says auto-update, that's all it takes. And I don't want to hear any of that crap, "Oh my computer can't support the newer browsers, they're too bulky." What are they talking about? Can a full-fledged home-style desktop computer be so old that it can't support newer applications? Guess what, time to upgrade. Normal people wouldn't stand for large performance hits and would thus be willing to shell out some money for a newer computer. If you're computer can't handle the Big Two, then use Opera. Hell, use Lynx! Just quit your bitchin'. I bet most people aren't web designers. That's why they don't get it... It's just sad.
Uhh this makes me so angry. No one is seeing the big issue... It's just sad. It really is. And I want to do this kind of thing for a living. But then, whene I become successful at my job and accomplish my goals of a well-oiled Internet, I'll be out of a job.
Then you of all people should be happy about the new browsers' abilities with XML. Pure content - no layout. Isn't that what you're asking for? Can older browsers handle it? No? I guess we need the newer browsers then...
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
I don't even enable Javascript in my browser.
Since I have a lousy 26400-28800 modem
56K modems are cheap now, even non-winmodems. Check pricewatch.com.
I only want INFORMATION. I don't need pictures.
Try appreciating Corbis.com or Artchive.com (or Goatse.cx ;> ) with images turned off. The images are the content.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Not necessarily. It is also very likely that with all the crap that goes into the WWW protocols these days we are also likely to revert back to something more simple. WWW is all about communication and in my opinion, communication is much more efficient when it reaches the masses. The written word is still the best means for communication by far and I would much rather be able to read my webpages than have to decifer images.
The idea of redirecting based on "old" browsers is insane. I use W3M quite a lot, do I lose the right to look at pages?
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Actually to them it IS an art. It is a graphical art and they want to create exactly what they see in their head and be able to recreate that on as many types of browsers as possible. But due to all the broken implementations in every browser they have to include all sorts of hacks to make it all work and they build a house of cards. They know it and it keeps them up at night but thats what they have to do.
London? The British are on the Internet? Oh shit, there goes the neighborhood. :-)
I back you 100% on this. I feel that the WWW has degraded rather than progressed and it's exactly this---the lack of decent content. I don't care about how pretty a document looks, when I am trying to find information I want it quick and I want it now. I don't want to have to wait for some lame Flash/Java app to download. I am interested in text, not images.
What is needed is a reference browser to view pages in. Its great that my page validated 100% but too bad it looks like shit in every browser in existance. The W3C should make this reference availible to all, even if it is slow and a pain to use, as long as it works.
You can cut IE "ombilical link to MS" in the options. First remove the default favorites since they are redirects that report back first to Microsoft before moving you to the destination... then go to the options and uncheck "check for newer IE versions automatically".
Should do the trick.
I'm forced sometimes by clients to make sure that nothing goes past a certain limit (since they believe their own clients are on PDA, 640x480 monitors, etc.)
Then they have no freaking idea, what they are talking about. Unless you DEFINE a fixed-size table, or make non-breakable piece of text that won't fit otherwise, any browser will do its best to display it without horizontal scrolling, but once you define it, browser will stop trying to do that, and will honor your limit, no matter how impossible it is.
With PDAs they are even more wrong -- Browse-it (formerly Proxiweb -- the only decent browser for PDAs that exists now) it either displays tables like they are supposed to be displayed (usually horizontally-scrollable on Palm because Palm has a small screen) or allows user to "unroll" them and place everything sequentially, but fit without horizontal scrolling. Slashdot, even its normal version, fits fine in "unrolled" mode, and is readable in normal mode, however your 600 pixels limit will do absolutely nothing for any PDA with this browser -- browser knows that it can't fit that table with any readable fonts anyway, and will have to ignore the limit.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
The only problem is that 90% of the audience of a commerical site isn't like you. If the site looks like crap, then the business looks shady and they will click away to someone who's site looks good. Plus its hard to take pride in your own web site if you think i looks bad to most people.
An old tagline from my Offline Express (BBS offline mail reader) days:
We've upped our standards, so up yours.
Three dits, four dits, two dits, dah!
Radio, radio, rah rah rah!
I'll upgrade when I'm ready to, and not a moment soner [sic].
Fine you do that, trust me, when web sites won't display with your current browser, you'll want to upgrade. Problem solved.
I'm all for web standards, but this is a little too far. As a web developer, I understand that coding for backwards compatibility is a pain, but very necessary right now. A 14 meg download for Mozilla or IE5 is still not very easy for people with dialup access.
Still, it is a pain to make your pages look good on Netscape 4.x. Their spotty implementation of CSS and other small bugs have always been an irritation to me.
As I said, though, this is definatly not the way.
I can see both sides of this one. I mean, sure, I'd be pretty pissed-off if I was constantly getting nagged to upgrade, but as a designer, I can't count the number of times when I've been ready to kill over the way older browsers screw up my designs.
A lot of good design work is held back by the need to support older browsers.
You may complain that being forced to upgrade isn't right, and I'd agree to a certain degree. But the sheer amount of work people have to put in to support old and buggy browsers when devloping web sites is tremendous. Just imagine a world where all browsers support the standards. At some point you have to get rid of the kruft, and this is at least one way to do it. If anyone has any better suggestions I'm listening...
Yeah I should have been clearer. But SVG renderers combined with good DOM support should displace flash because SVG is entirely open.
"moo" - cow 3, 1906
"Style" is for people who don't grok ideas.
Tell that to Leonardo da Vinci. He was a painter, sculptor, architect, musician, engineer, inventor, and scientist, and probably the best example of someone who understood both sides and was excellent at both. Both content and style are important. Anything presented on a visual medium cannot be successful without both.
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47% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
It's so very simple. Just code for the newest browsers... Don't bother if it looks like shit on older browsers. Atleast they should be able to vaguly read it, instead of just getting a stupid javascript that tells them to upgrade... --Humming
I'm too stupid to preview.
That's the most depressing part of the whole browser war. Netscape 4 has the world's crappiest renderer (at least out of what's still in use), but they managed to do a very good job with the UI - especially in Windows, it's fast, functional, and responsive.
So if you switch from Netscape 4 to Mozilla, all of a sudden the UI doesn't quite live up (it's getting closer though), and no sites look right either because everyone designed them around NS4's bugs.
Someday when NS4 is a distant horrible memory, we'll all look back and shake our heads....
Peter.
You know what I hate? Wait, what do you like? I hate that!
The story is about webbrowsers so I thought it was ok to focus on the browsers and leave operating system advocacy out of it. I don't care whether Linux or Windows is the better operating system. What I do care about is this: Will the WaSP initiative work? Will the majority of users switch browsers anytime soon? And if they do, which one will it be?
Yes, you can try to educate the world. Problem is, it won't work by insulting people and looking down on them.
Any web site that relies on the presence of the complex web features is broken. Sites should be able to render fine with no JavaScript, no DOM, no pixel-accurate positioning, and no graphics even. If they want to offer a graphically overburdened site in addition to a plain one, that's fine, but that should be an option.
I disagree and here's why: the demands of web applications are beyond simple features. People are building businesses on the web and are do quite well. One can do some pretty useful stuff with JavaScript and DHTML, from as simple as form validation to as complex as dynamically changing the content on the page.
The point is that the web is a new platform that has a lot of potential. There is no good reason to limit that potential to just displaying static pages.
Sure there are growing pains, and this initiative is a result of those. But it's really about targeting. If you want to target just IE4+ users, you've got most of the market (somewhere around 70% I would guess). If you want to target wireless, create an extension for that. Saying you should not provide good graphics on your site because those with a Palm VII can't view them is like saying you shouldn't put the score box in the corner of the screen for TV sporting events because people with 13" TVs can't read it very well and it takes away from the view of the actual game.
I do agree with you that in general, people should not be forced to upgrade because, as you pointed out, there are very good reasons. But I do not believe that we should totally stop the progress of the web because of broken browsers.
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47% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
No reference implementation? Damn! I guess I was hallucinating when I've seen the Amaya browser touted on the W3C site *for years*.
Standards are a scam? Well then I'm sure that you're angry that there is a standard C, a standard C++, standard peripheral connectors (PCI, USB, etc.), and on and on. Or do you pine for the days when game manufacturers had to write specific support for each sound card. Why was JavaScript taken on by ECMA? Because they wanted to make a common ground so that people wouldn't have to make a JavaScript version and a JScript version of the same damned logic.
Get a clue folks! 99% of the people surfing the web today DON'T use a text-only browser. I don't dispute the greatness of Lynx. I use it occassionally on my server. But we are not necessarily the target audience for disney.com. Case in point, if your company is a graphics arts shop, why in the hell would you code for Lynx?
Your "defacto standards" are bunk! 0.5% of all sites on the web would work in that environment. How is that a defacto standard? Major browsers have supported Java since Netscape broke the ice in 2.0. How is this a major issue?
Do you seriously believe that substance will win over style? Can someone point out a case where this has happened on a medium-to-large scale *ever*? If your ideals for the web were ever followed, the web would not have ever existed. You have just described gopher! The fact that the web is so popular and gopher is effectively dead is proof positive that your suppositions are emphatically wrong.
If you want to use Lynx, go right ahead. I'm not stopping you, but stop whining because others don't want to cater to your personal whims. If enough people want Lynx-compliant pages, more people wil code Lynx-compliant pages. If people aren't coding Lynx-compliant pages, it means that Lynx users are a gross minority. Being in the minority is not a bad thing. But it entails that most things will not be catered to you.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Yeah, the world is filled with nice rich people from the US, Canada, Europe, and so on. Nevermind the people outside of that area who might need the information. If they can't afford a 1GHz machine, screw them. Of course, those people are less likely to be consumers, and thus, the fancy javascript and flash ads won't be needed for them anyway, right? Posted using links..
This crap really pisses me off. We've bastardized the whole intent of web pages for all of this new CRAP that we dont really need. It just _LOOKS_ pretty? WTF is wrong with this? Doesn't anyone else see this like fucking lock in? How long after it comes out will we have to use NS7? or 8? HOW LONG IS IT GOING TO BE UNTIL WE ALL HAVE TO USE IE? This is bullshit. I dont know about the rest of you, but needing to have a P3 or an athlon just to view a fucking web page is absurd. :P. So heres a message I wrote to wasp@webstandards.org:
Anyway, sorry to make this such a long message, but I dont have a web server I would be willing to put up to the slashdot effect
WaSP,
I am writing to you in hopes that you will reconsider your position on your "Web standards" browser upgrading project.
Since the incarnation of web browsers, people have been always been pushing for "the next new thing" to be incorporated and integrated into web browsers. The current trend seems to be toward visual and audio content delivered within the web browser. We now have things such as Flash introductions, streaming video, audio, Javascript, Style Sheets, and countless other 'features' that have been added as standards within browsers.
The browsers of today are more bloated implementing but a fraction of these 'features' than their counterparts from five years ago could have even dreamed to include. None of these were the original intent of web browsers, nor could they even be imagined at the design and implementation of the protocols used in their delivery. These protocols have been bastardized for 'the new media' as so-called visionaries call it, and we are starting to heavily feel the problems this raises.
My point being that fighting to force people to upgrade and further load their systems with recent versions of these large browsers is a large detriment to the entire community. The 'web browser' should be, and was intended to be, used to convey information in the form of a text and some images in an easy to format and standardized way. Loading all of this 'new media' crap onto web browsers only hurts new users.
It is not time to create and enforce new standards for webpage creation and viewing. The time has come to stop putting layer upon layer of junk into our web browsers. A new standard needs to be introduced, for new media, audio/visual communications, embedded java applets, and whatever else can be thought up. I would hope you could see this as well, and may consider aiding organizations in the development of a new such protocol, and not aiding the initiative some large corporations have to lock-in users to specific infrastructures.
I thank you for your time and hope you consider these ideas.
Anyone else agree with me? Maybe someone could start some sort of online petition to resist this crap and let us use normal browsers like lynx.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
How can those bone heads expect anyone to upgrade to any of those broken browsers mentioned. I have to use NS4.7 because it seems to be the only one that works well enough for everything. I use is exclusively to surf and do serious work. I only use IE when I have to access a page that requires it's newer HTML rendering functions. IE5.x breaks (Crashes irrecoverably) in less than an hour if you open a new window as a child process. You have to open completely independet parents, and then sometimes the child processes open blank and don't recover without closing the instance of that parent and starting a new one! NS6 is better (in that respect only), but there are all kinds of key combos that still don't work, it's slower than two Christmases from now, and it's choc full o' crap hardly anyone needs. Even the mail manager works less well than in 4.x. If I used the mouse for everything I do, I'd still be at work right now. AOL bites and keeps on biting. At least Mozilla cuts some of the clutter.
When is AOL gonna pull their craniums out of their anusess and not release broken packages (NS6). What was all that pre release junk? Just because Microsmurf got IE5.x out first doesn't mean you should send out junk. I doubt Mozilla would withold any of their beta feedback. It's a good thing they (AOL) farmed out their own browser to Microsmurfs all that time so they could demand completeness and reliability. Maybe one day they will demand the same from their own people.
IE5 seems to be able to handle the computer keyboard, invented in the early 40's if my history is correct. Surely someone (or maybe two of them) at AOL could put that together and at least kludge it onto NS6. IE5.5 and NS6 are supposedly super XMLed out their respective wazoos, so you'd think most gadgets therin should work. Heck, if my servers crashed as much as Windows or IE5.x, (insert MS product here) I'd quit the computer industry completely or reinvent computer indrustry reliability myself.
I don't mind when Source Forge code breaks, it's not supposed to be perfect. It's even entertaining to try and find the bugs. But these multiBILLION dollar companies can't do better than all the freeware do gooders? Come on man! No wonder MS sees open source as a threat. Open source does a better quality and more reliable job.
The surfer at home or work that uses these products every day just sees broken features. So what that it's free code. The free biscotti samples at Starbuck's better damn well be as good as the whole one I buy, or there's will be no subsequent sale.
AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!
All I can Say is
Has anyone seen all that's changed with new versions of browsers? It's all a result of stupid visuals that end users will use as a result of the browser wars.
Most of the time I use Netscape 4.7 - Because I don't need all that pretty shit that comes along in v6.0
I'm a web designer. I design for version 3.0 browsers and 800 x 800 (liquid tables - expands to 1024 x 768 etc...).
Oh and when I use my Mac OS X PB box at work I use omniweb sometimes...
I hope nobody listens to this idea because not all the minority browsers will be "current".
The Mozilla Organization discussed over a year ago that they would not support NS 4.x code. Why? Simply because NS 4.x is an abberation in browser history. If they worked on getting the tag to work in Mozilla/NS6, it means that work on CSS, DOM, XML et al would suffer. And to what end? So that developers would be more willing to write tags? NS 4.x is crap. It was crap when it was released. It is certainly crap years later. Quoting Linux kernel config -- "Let's kill this beast now."
It's better to let some things die... Netscape 4.x however could use some help putting a bullet in its head.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
That way, they'll spend their time whinging at Microsoft because feature X doesn't work under Windows 2000 any more, or feature Y let in Mr Nasty Crackerman, instead of telling us how to run our lives... that way they'll be acheiving their own kinds of fulfillment and not really bothering anyone else. No, not even ``what, me listen?'' Afred E. Gates and co.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Didn't you know that ``four point Unreadable'' font is the new internet standard?
Welcome to planet Microsoft. Please do not adjust your reality. Any errors you see are merely incompatibilities left over from the original reality, and will be dealt with in the next release. Or the one after. Soon, anyway. Or maybe we need to reformat and reinstall your mind. Please choose one option while we play shell games with the labels on the buttons. Did you know that your licence to use Microsoft's patented OK button has expired? Please choose one of the following options to update your licence: [Cancel]
Sorry, I'll be good now.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
--
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"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
If browser developers stopped giving their browsers away for free, and made 'new' standards to which we would all have to conform to, so all current browsers would be obsolete ... ... and don't tell me they wouldn't consider it.
That's almost the exact opposite of the aim of the campaign (did you read the linked article at all?).
The aim of the campaign is to have people writing standards compliant websites, using (X?)HTML and CSS. Also, lynx happens to make a very neat job of displaying such pages.
It's an open development, if the bug's that important to you, submit a patch. Don't know how to code? It's been years since Mozilla opened the code. You've had time to learn. Or did you simply want to benefit from the community without giving something back?
Take a class on C++ and dig in. No one's stopping you. The sooner you start after that bug, the sooner it will be fixed. Isn't this the free source creedo?
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Please do me a favour and stay off my homepage.
You don't need to worry. Pretty soon his browser won't be able to visit your page, right? (The one with all the gaudy eye candy that he doesn't want to see.)
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
No it isn't, It isn't easy to write good HTML. Becasue it dosn't work the way you want it to half the time.
Since where have you been a communications/design/engineer/gui expert?
If you think there is more to design than flashy looking web-pages then you are very wrong.
I can tell when a web-page has been designed by a professional designer because it is easy to use, and i get what I want do with no hassels.
These new standards arn't flashy, look pretty features, There are tools, that in the right hands, can make web-site much more useful/easier to use/whatever... for everybody.
SO please got to uni and spend a few years leaning about design, and communication skills before accusing new standards of just being new tools for designers to make things look pretty.
There has, in fact, been no truly useful addition to HTML since the first few years of development. It has only had gobs of useless and annoying eye-candy piled on top of (obscuring and interfering with) the content and navigation.
Please back that up with acctualy facts, examples, or atleast opinions. And plese dont confuse browser features, with browser standards.
Have you ever been to www.w3.org?
- Pop-ups - they can all go die
- Masked links - I like to see where I'm going
- Scrolling text in the toolbar - Like above, they block the destination of links
- Cross-site scripting (onload=...)
- and so much more
I'll grant you, Javascript has it's uses, but designers usually just use it for useless annoying crap.Java is generally used for more productive purposes, but it likes to crash Netscape and it's a recurring security problem on IE.
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Try /usr/ports/x11-fonts/webfonts (have to cvsup ports to current first though, or merely grab webfonts and cabextract) and not only do you get those neat monotype fonts that all sites seem to require, but also aliases specificaly for netscape that help SIGNIFICANTLY. I think you'll need XFree86 4.0.x too though.
I recently visited a site that dumped you to an error page if you were using anything but IE5 or higher on Windows. It's my employer's 401K provider, so they have a captive audience. The "market" will not sort this out, unless you personally are the buyer. The same goes for health insurance, public services, and other cases where the user of the service isn't the same as the person who pays the bill. Employers or the government will usually contract for for the cheapest service they can get away with. Quality of service for user is a secondary priority.
Remember the old phone company joke: "We don't care. We don't have to."
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
I've been using Mozilla, mostly various nightly builds and now Mozilla 0.8 for months as my main browser. Crashes have been extremely rare. I'm running Debian 2.2. Mozilla 0.8 is pretty quick compared to older builds also.
ALL MY BASE ARE BELONG TO TEN
...oh, wait, there's a couple of sixteens over here... and a whole mess of eights on the PDP-11 in the corner...
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
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Something with a screen full of some sort of dancing animal accompanied by annoying music and sound effects might be a good way to start.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
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``We're sorry, but we have forsaken mere text and moved on to greater things. We hope to follow in the footsteps of Microsoft's Wizard technology and forsake information altogether.
``If you have trouble seeing, please purchase a 200DPI 48-inch monitor and corresponding RAM farm. If you are blind, stiff shit. We aren't, and we can't be bothered coding for it. And don't try using deafness as an excuse to avoid our digital muzak!''
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
There was no leftover configuration on that system. Trust me on that. Besides, deleting files by hand is exactly what I don't want to do when the installer could warn me and even do it for me. Again, the test is for seeing what problems "users" will run into, not if the browser can be forced to work.
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marginheight and marginwidth and the W3C is doing nothing about it? Have you been asleep? This is one of the areas where CSS solves the problem. Rather than getting into the whole pissing contest about which attribute is preferred, they moved this styling concern into *shudder* the CSS styling spec.
/>
body { margin: 0px; }
That's it. That's the solution. You put that into an external stylesheet and you have an entire site that does the same thing -- something that HTML cannot do on its own. And you know what? It conforms to W3C validation. What's the holdup? NS 4.x and the other CSS-ignorant clients.
Width of text fields? We're screwed... Oh wait! THAT'S RIGHT! It's already solved in CSS.
input.wide { width: 60px; }
- with -
<input type="text" class="wide"
FYI: IE's text fields are smaller by default than Netscape's.
W3C should clean up the HTML standard? That's what they've been doing! That's precisely what XHTML Strict is intended to do. What else can they do? Rewrite HTML specs so that they work in all browsers? Impossible! Browser incompatibilities are the cause of the problem, not the HTML. The fact that they render different than the spec specifies is not the fault of the spec. What else can the spec do? Recode the browser at runtime?
The W3C wasn't responsible for the old standards, is actively working to solve problems with the new standards, and trying to reduce the amount of ambiguity in the web. This will not be done with HTML alone. Take a look at the work being done at www.w3.org because you've obviously never spent any time there.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
If you knew anything about web design, you'd know that recent standards (CSS, XSL, etc) are aimed at separating CONTENT from STYLE. And if you knew anything at all about web design, programming, or simply didn't have your head firmly implanted into your colon, you'd know that was a good thing.
:(
When you separate content from style, then it's easy to change the presentation of the content by changing the style (since it was cleanly separated in the first place, it's easy to do).
That was the original goal of HTML- describe content in a LOGICAL manner (paragraphs, tables, etc) and leave the style representation up to the user agent (ie, browser).
Probably the biggest flaw of HTML was that it gave web developers TOO much control over appearance. Give 'em an inch, they'll take a foot. Soon, so much visual-presentation was being crammed into HTML that it was hopelessly polluted and style and content were being hopelessly intermingled everywhere.
The new standards aim to fix that. But I don't know why I'm explaining it to you, since someone stupid enough to make the comments you made in the first place is probably too stupid to understand the explanation as well.
http://www.bootyproject.org
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Although the intent of this seems to be to phase out non-compliant browsers, I think this unfortunately gives more incentive for websites to be coded so that only the big 2 browsers may view the content. With Netscape currently residing in the intensive care unit Microsoft must be loving this.
Sadly, there are a few browsers that are fully standards compliant that will be left out in the cold because they don't ID themselves as Microsoft or Netscape and aren't even given the chance to render the page. Not only has this practice has been given the blessing of the Web Standards Project but they're telling web developers how to do it. Rather than be turned away at the door, people will download IE (or Netscape if it can recover from the excrement that is Netscape 6) and forget about it. As we all know, humanity tends to behave like electricity and take the path of least resistance and that's what these people are betting on. This is a shame because my browser of choice (iCab) is fully standards compliant and succesfully renders most pages using less than 4MB of RAM while the other two easily gobble up 10+MB.
Once again, Microsoft is poised to dominate yet another area of computing.
Opera runs fine on a 486; even a 486SX/25 with 8 MB was usable (just). On a P133, Opera should just fly - see www.opera.com. It is now free if you don't mind banner ads, or $39 to register and turn them off.
I too HATE java and javascript. I feel that if you want to do something cool on your page, it should be done on the server end. That is why I favor things like PHP and CGI over java and java-script. It's bad enought that these new browsers crash and run really slow to begin with, why should I have to process your web page on my end! Also, if there is a page that will not work without javascript, I will not go to that page. Rest assured that the same will apply for people's pages in general. If the page will not load without a newer browser, I will not go to that page. There is always somewhere else to go!
Opera makes it very easy to overide the web page's CSS settings - just click one button to flip to a user-controlled CSS.
On x86 linux, sigh, /ME wants an ARM so I can throw away all of my fans. Using complex Java is unlucky, generally cuts me back to 30-90 minutes between deaths, but JavaScript and ordinary HTML, such as it is, seem to be endlessly reliable. Running 3 snapshots, one 0.6, one 0.7 and one post-0.7 on 3 different boxes (2xAMD-K6-300, 1xIntel-Celery-800).
But if Sparc is as easy to make for as you claim elsewhere (and I see Mozilla runs on Mac), you should be able to fetch a Mozilla source snapshot and do make to produce your own. Surely only stuff like file IO and threading would risk being at all Solaris-specific?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
A "standard" that changes ever two minutes (as the HTML standard, for example, has), is not a standard, its a bad joke. Standards should be to foster consistency, not to redefine everything for every fad and frivelous whim.
I'd like to see a movement that was not only minimalistic, but blatantly rebelled against all the over complicated nuances of the "standards" -- all the idiocy added to HTML, which should be a simple language for marking up text with hyperlinks, and a few images and basic formatting -- and should be efficient, to.
What ever happened to "Best Viewed with a Budgie"?
This will make lynx work better. it will improve access for the disabled. Maybe you could read the links before posting.
The problem is not old browsers per se, it is the buggy, partial implementations of NS4. Web pages written to current standard degrade gracefully in merely old browsers, that ignore tags and css which they can't handle. The problem is that NS4.* thinks it can handle, say, css positioning, and mungs it up horribly. Or crashes if you put a radio button inside a div with a solid border. Sometimes.
Thanks to NS4, we have pages laid out with tables, which confuse the shit out of assistive technology. We have visual effects achieved with blockquote tags and such, because that is the only safe thing that works. Accessibility is going to go way up when we can write standards based web pages.
Hopefully the (standard compliant) webpage will include a pointer to the DTD of the HTML version it is using. The browser can then render the page according to that DTD.
Is this how it's all going to look when it's redesigned? I think it should, it's so much better than the current frontpage where I had to read the source to work out how to get any further.
Oh, I use IE and I have only a few cookies around.
It seems that you don't know how to configure your browser huh?
I hate M$ but IE is the best browser available now, try harder next time when you recommend Mozilla.
And if you have to check for browser version and provide different code for different browsers, find another way to do what you want, or don't do it at all.
Some of us aren't interested in investing in the new hardware needed for the latest browser software, but that doesn't mean we aren't exactly your market demographic...
--
Ahh, I know the problem...
Eddies in the space-time continuum...
Dunno who Eddie is, but he causes sooo much hassle.
The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. (Marx)
The page talks about the fact that all the updated browsers are html4 compliant, etc...
Did I miss something in the last 12-18 months?
VK3TST
-- "People aren't stupid. Usually." -- jd
My basic point, I guess, is that I'm tired of putting up with second-rate apps just because Linux is "free". That might sound a bit incendiary, but can anyone name a "free" GNU/Linux/whatever application that, if ported to Windows, would actually be competitive with other Windows apps as a shrink-wrapped product?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Yes, the majority of web site design is definitely garbage. I find it really pathetic when major sites don't function properly in any browser.
Hello-o! What's the goal? Good browsers for Linux? Wiping out Microsoft? Arguing in the open that every Microsoft user is a dimwitted sucker?
The Linux market probably can't support really good browsers unless we actually pay for them.
So you wipeout MS? What then? Will you replace it with a Stallman-esque open source monopoly?
MS users terminally stupid? Unlikely, but I'm sure calling them names in public is a great way to get them, and their corporate bosses, to take a look at non-MS alternatives.
All I want is a Linux browser that works at least as well as IE 5.5 in Windows. I really don't care if Microsoft is bad, good or indifferent. I can't speak for you, but in my case no current Linux browser comes close.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
All the browsers nazis need to do is go code up their own high performance browser in 1 meg of memory. Actually Opera is kinda close to that, but not quite all the way.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
It bogs down the machine's ressources
It is used for totally useless fluff in 99% of the time, stuff that can STILL be done with plain-vanilla HTML
--
Actually guys, I was the author of the software development system for the radio tags at RF Code (formally ECode), www.rfcode.com. They are the only manufactorers of these tags as the patent is held by coowner, Jim Rodgers [btw, inventor of graphics tablet, among 50 billion other things, the guy is a modern day Tesla and I shit you not about that]. Here are the facts: 1. The tags are at 50 cents. Too expensive to buy billions, we used a Microchip PIC (www.microchip.com) 2. They are 32 bits, not 96, 1 bit is reserved for other uses. 3. Range of frequency is up to 8 feet, not hundreds or millions. I'm sure this will get better, but because they are battery free, you have to broadcast energy in the air to read them, and their return signal is VERY weak. Too much energy broadcasted would blow out your pacemaker. 4. They are used to ID or for inventory ONLY, unusable in detecting them in your home from the street. They are no different than a serial number, if yer going to bitch about ID'ing things, how come you haven't bitched about serial numbers!??!!?!? 5. They can be 'bin-ed' together, that is, hundreds can be piled ontop of one another and read independently [the only system in the world that can do that]. 6. If yer going to steal something from Walmart with their white tags, steal more than 1 item because those tags cancel each other out :-) (not that I know this by doing it, but in theory it should work).
7. You should all fear my code :-) hahaha
Aloha from Hawaii,
Bwilcutt
In spite of the W3C's guidance, de facto standards are determined by the market. Granted, that market might be a tad less than completely open, but there you go. Does anyone seriously think that someone earning their livelihood on the web will even consider doing anything that blocks potential customers?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
People have lots of legitimate reasons for not upgrading. Their hardware may not support it. They may not be able to pay for it. They may be on a slow connection or wireless device. And they may need special accessibility features.
That sounds great, but the reality is you can't remain backwards compatible forever. There is plenty of linux software that requires newer version of the kernel or core libraries to run. Does anyone complain about that? WSP's approach may be a bit draconian, but I think the idea of an upgrade campaign is a good one.
Sites should be able to render fine with no JavaScript, no DOM
You may think you are pushing the "right" thing here, but there are implications that I don't think you don't realize. The JavaScript and DOM stuff is not just for fancy effects and little extras. It's about gradually getting away from this insane practice of refreshing the entire page anytime any element on it needs to change. It wastes gobs of bandwidth and is really disorienting.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Have they not heard of XML? It is great. You generate all your dynamic content as XML and based on the browser-type, apply an XLS transform. You can slowly build up support for all the non-standards based, and content-type limited browsers (WAP, iMode,...). The hardest part is figuring out the exact version if which browser needs XSL.
(!mySig())
The only reason they are breaking so easily is that they arn't supported properly by older browsers. And fancy colums and fonts still don't have anything to do with it sorry.
But would you buy from a site that had a hard to understand site, that gives you the run around, just trying to find one small peice of info on there site?
If you webt to the site in the artical, you'd notice that it has hardly any images. but it is still very clean, and easy to use.
Design isn't about making things looking nice, of course, thst still encoraged depending on you target audience etc... It's about communication. And that bascily means, laying out the site so people can understand it. Not nessesarily having lots of images an flash animations.
should read:
If you think there is nothing more to design than flashy looking web-pages then you are very wrong.
One of the things I've always prided my work on is trying to make it work with ALL browsers. Not just new browsers, or graphical browsers. Technologies such as CSS are great for browsers that support it, but it's still a relatively simple task to write additional code for browsers that don't. Conditional SSI makes this job very easy, as well as updating of the page. SSI of course, being server side is completely browser independant as well.
I just see no need to do this. My site needs a redesign because the menus have grown to large and Netscape for Win is kinda slow with the transparency, but the new design will most definetely still take full use of new browsers, without locking the old browsers out. There is not now, nor will there EVER be an excuse to do that. Not as far as I am concerned.
Opera has this (kinda) built in. You can choose to either identify as Opera 5, Mozilla 3, 4 or 5, or MSIE 5.
Javascript gives you:
* Rollovers!
* Popup windows!
* Links that don't display their URL!
* A slower browser!
Pluses:
* Forms that change as you fill them in.
* Javascript games
I keep Javascript off. Most sites can handle that.
Dude, get with the times! It's not /dev/hda any more, it's
h is 0/that0/hahahahimwastingyourtime0/disc
:(
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/somethingiforget0/t
All I can say is thank God for devfsd.. my brain can't handle these new device names very well
-- That which does not kill us has made its last mistake..
Now while i can't help but agree with those of you who've made the point of saying that flashy, eye-catching presentations are what appeal to the average human, I also must comment on how many of you have missed the point of the Web. The Web isn't just a place to peddle your wares (and warez)... it's a reflection of our world. In short, there are many of us who use the web to present information to whomever wants it, and we don't necessarily need the flashy cartoons and pop-ups and whatnot to do that. Many of us want to keep our message simple. By forcing us to "upgrade" our information, it takes away a little bit of our freedom of personal expression. And haven't we lost enough of that already? I'm Kent Brockman....
all your beer are belong to us
I'd love to see this advice followed, but I am certain that it won't be.
It won't be followed, because of the amount of redundant content that needs to be maintained on the plain version of a site. First off, this automatically doubles the workload of the poor site designer who now has to maintain two (or more) versions of each page (I've worked with designers who have had sites to maintain with several thousand pages of static HTML). Secondly, you're bound to see errors and inconsistencies between versions, and the plain versions will likely get neglected, making them much less useful than a crippled version of the fancy page. From a marketing standpoint, maintaining these pages for a dwindling number of people using older browsers simply won't make sense.
It would be far better, I think, to put effort into making sure that the newer technologies fail gracefully when interpreted by older browsers. This has always been a design consideration with HTML, as well as frames, javascript, and CSS. It means that if you interpret an XHTML4+CSS page in an HTML2 browser, you should at least get something you can read, even if you miss out on the cool fonts and such.
HTML was designed in order to be able to separate content (in the html file) from presentation (in the browser). As long as we stick to this separation, then older browsers will automatically generate their own plaintext versions of your pages.
The article was not suggesting that we all move to cool, new, completely incompatible-with-html technologies like flash, which would leave older browsers completely lost, but just to stick to official W3C standards, which should at least be renderable by any browser out there.
Living better through chemicals
Why doesnt WSP create there own browser with features that they need?
Because it takes a long time to write a browser that can do things like CSS completely and correctly. But once it's done, the results are far superior.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
There's nothing wrong with Lynx, as the user is not expecting to see graphics or formatting. CSS degrades graceful in this case. The problem is with graphical browsers that have broken implementations of rendering standards that they supposedly support.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Some users (like vision impaired -- or people using small handhelds) need to be able to get text only content.
CSS helps accessibility significantly if done right -- separating the content from the display. CSS2 has whole sections about accessibility.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
I don't care about your midi sound effects.
I don't care about your Java "enhancements".
I don't care about your Flash animation.
I don't care about your animated GIFs.
None of these have anything to do with what the WSP is talking about.
But please don't use dozens of nested tables just to make some graphic show up at exactly coordinate x, y.
CSS (one of the standards in question) addresses this exactly.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
I am a technical Support agent For RCN.. I get calls all day with people that have older browsers. All they get is Java Script Errors... Big Deal.. Tell them to Upgrade. But here is the Problem. IE is a good Browser. But the New aol 6.0 SUCKS... ITS A MEMORY hog, and very buggy.. not to mention that it is owned by aol. I have recieved calls form people using communicator 4.7 that have problems accessing netscape sites. The reason being that AOL wants people to use 6.0
So what is wrong with this picture.
However, I think that browser makers could need a good, hard kick in the groin as a big "no, you cannot set standards". Their browsers are broken. Why? Because, in order to enforce vendor specific $#17, they break perfectly working stuff.
There's no easy solution to this since you cannot prohibit anyone making dud browsers. What is needed is a public awareness of things, and you must not hope that any AOL guy does understand anything beyond "click here to view pr0n". (No offence meant, someone had to take it.)
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
--
--
This web site will cure all your ailments.
While Java is a big, clunky piece of doo, JScript is a big, clunky piece of doo. Oooops. Perhaps it is the same afterall.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
Ah, I see... you're a *selective* criminal =)
Seriously, though, sorry for the accusation, but it does seem rather trollish considering mp3.com's true standing.
--
--
"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
Well score one for your ego. You could also use Lynx forever I guess, but there's not much incentive for hundreds of thousands of web programmers to accommodate your eccentricity.
Well put. That is the best articulation of my personal surfing preferences I have ever seen written or heard vocalized, including everything I have ever said or written on the subject.
Thank you glitch!
So go back to some MS IE for the moment and wait until mozilla is working fine.
people with no patience for problems should not even bother with bleeding-edge software, especially if they dont intend to help or do anything about it.
using mozilla is an honour, and we should all be bowing down to the mozilla developers, because they are supporting the minority that microsoft will not.
DShadow didn't understand the WASP editorial. They are asking Web developers to help push a transition to a Web that wholy conforms to W3 standards _while acknowledging_ that there is a time and a place to use the tactics proposed, which include different levels of force/annoyance/subtlety. Of course you wouldn't risk losing customers on a comercial site, even while you can still subtly remind them that their experience would be a whole lot better if they did upgrade.
While Alexa may report that users are stupid, many of them have been very capable of upgrading their browsers multiple times before, and now it's time to convince them that there is a compelling reason to do it once more. In most cases they can still see all the content, but their experience will be significantly better if they have any standards-capable browser.
This is NOT about style (as in fashion) or flash (either Macromedia's or simple eye-candy). Content alone is good, but content plus good design is a thousand times better (read Tufte). I doubt you would read certain camel book if it were printed in continuous form paper on a 9-pin dot matrix printer.
We've lost too much time and money on senseless hacks to make content workable in all platforms and this transition will result in faster/cheaper turn-around times for web projects when we're free of older browsers. I'm sure users and clients will like that a lot.
You won't upgrade? fine, you'll go get your content some place else, like you always have. But you did upgrade before, and will again. We want that time to come sooner, rather than later.
Next time, fly Britshit Earways, Air Chance, Butchansa or SABENA*...
* Such A Bad Experience, Never Again.
--
...and contributing to them is a Jedi's duty in the stand against the dark side.
So kick aside the workarounds, praise Zeldman, quit the moaning and let's get our GPL Browser finished. Victory is at hand!
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Given that people will click on anything that arrives in their Outlook inbox, engineer a Melissa variant that promises a picture of, say, a hot babe like David Siegel going mano-a-mano with a splash page. Once opened the mail deletes your "primitive' browser and opens up an ftp connection to a standards-compliant browser like IE5.5 (the notion that IE5.5 is standards compliant caused some hilarity here - okay the HTML and CSS is better but try doing something in XSL...) and downloads it.
At the rate the Anna trojan was hitting our mailserver on thursday Netscape 4 would be a distant memory in 48 hours. Except, of course for all those weird people on Linux or Mac OS, but they obviously don't really like font embedding so they can just get off the Web.
Sheesh. No wonder people hate web designers.
-- need more time?
I use the _latest_ version of Lynx as my browser.
What about me?
--cw
Wow, I didn't know that Slashdot had flash!!!!
I guess I'm gonna have to upgrade from Mosaic...
--
Maybe most people on Slashdot are brainiacs from the planet kryton-7 that need straight info, but the question was whether Flash sucks, which is an opinion rather than a fact, but I'll try to sway your opinion anyway.
Here's my point: Flash may suck for your purpose and may be used improperly by people (developers) that are trying to help you fulfill your info-culling desires, but it does not suck for everyone. Flash may have no value to you if all you want is info, but I enjoy creating animations and looking at other peoples.
I agree with the killer-car analogy though, it *is* misused on some pages, by developers, but by no means does it *suck*. (I just hate when people spew their opinion onto the board without backing it up and I also happened to disagree that Flash sucks because a lot of people love it. :) Personally, I think it's the future of the web because the web is turning into something like TV.
And therein lies the humour....
gettid?
The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. (Marx)
Netscpae 4.6 on Mac OS handles tables differently than Netscpae 4.6 on UNIX / Win32
Really??!
NS 4.76 on Mac is my main browser, and all the tables I've done look fine everywhere, AFAICT. Can you do me a big favour and say what the difference is? It would certainly help me and others in the future...
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
The font resize tip also works with my Logitech Pilot+ (aka FirstMouse). I expect it works with all mice with a wheel.
Their web pages are not fully compliant.
For one trivial but important example, they do not always use quotes to contain attributes, which they should if they are "following the latest standards".
But hey, I guess they are just one in a long line of groups who demand "Don't do as I do, do as I say"...
--
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
WaSP seems to have a mantra of acces for everyone. Deaf, disabled. blind. Yet they expect people with older browsers to upgrade regardless. In the US, that may not be such a bi problem, although you'd probably get a good argument from the schools. But how about people in developing countries where the techology is just not available. Is the WaSp advocating for all web users, or just the "modern" user?
I don't have a problem with them designing their own site this way. It makes sense for their audience. But as a professional web developer, it tells me that the staff at WaSP has forgotten what it's like to develop for real users and they've become lost in their own world. The web is a lot more than developers.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
mattdm: I'd suggest that the redirection page should be a plain-text version of the content, with a footnote note that compliance with certain standards is required to view the fancy web page.
cicadia: It won't be followed, because of the amount of redundant content that needs to be maintained on the plain version of a site
I think the original poster was advocating a plain-text redirection page, and not a duplicate plain version of a fancy site. :-) But I agree with your argument itself. It would be far to time-consuming and unworkable to make web designers maintain 2 complete versions of a site.
- Jetgirl
"Keep it together, keepittogether..."
This would have been better presented as a "Don't Use Broken Browsers" campaign.
There is no problem using HTML 4 or CSS in Netscape 3, or even Mosaic as far as I'm aware, since the standards are designed in such a way that standards-compliant content "degrades gracefully" in older browsers. It may not look pretty, but it will be legible.
In other words, there is no problem with browsers that don't implement the latest and greatest standards, the problem is that (with respect to CSS at least) Nav4.x, IE 4.x and 3.x, implemented them brokenly. As I've said many times before, this is either due to such staggering incompetance that it's a wonder anybody at Microsoft or Netscape can tie their own shoelaces, or it's a result of a deliberate strategy on the part of both parties to hijack or at least derail the standards process, fully aware of the harm that would do to users and developers.
Now perhaps the WSP is just being diplomatic now that Netscape is doing the right thing (more or less), but saying "upgrade or else", is just going to elicit the sort of resposes seen here. The WSP ought to be as clear as it has been in the past in saying certain browsers are a menace, just don't use them.
>Umm have you ever been to www.flashkit.com or any
>of the other flash sites? They have a huge
>community built up around the idea that artistic
>design is actually worth something and actually
>conveys some kind of information to the end user.
So what? Pedophiles have large (albeit anonymous) communities built up around the idea that children are sex objects. A community does not automatically make an idea good.
To tell the truth, I'm not sure which group I'd sooner avoid...
As much as I like web sites adhering to standards, I much prefer the views of the anybrowser.org campaign. They go a step further than webstandards and ask that people create web pages that are as simple as practical and less sophisticated and much more accessible to people that have some sort of dissability. I think it is a bit impertinent for webstandards.org to ask people to upgrade their browsers. It is a case of innovation versus compibility.
I use Amaya to create my web page so I can be assured I'm sticking to standards and it never has any problems rendering in any browser. I also use the ALT paramater for my images. I don't put anything too fancy on my page.
Imagine a bookshop not letting you buy their books until you'd completed a literature degree. Do you think people would go to another store?
Actually, the proper analogy would be:
Imagine a bookshop not letting you buy their books until you've figured out how to use the revolving door to get in.
Seems fair to me.
Graphics are not always there just to fill in gaps
Yes a lot of websites use graphics carelessly and without thinking about them and it may seem that way at times, but visual representation of any information wether its a companys corporate history or wether it is specs for a motherboard is very important.
Majority of our sensory information is gathered by our eyes. This is a fact. A designers job is to make a connection between the information and the user. The way that is done is by tailoring that information to be gathered in a manner the designer wants.
Oh and someone who codes HTML is NOT a web DESIGNER.
The problem is that people constantly bitch about how they are sick of graphics on the web. Well If your brains sensors can only pick up information when it is isolated from any other elements, well, that is a problem with your brain. The problem should not be that there are graphics on the web. I mean what is a font on a web page it itself is a graphic. Yes little pixels being drawn on a screen are actually graphics. You shouldnt be complaining about design existing. You should be complaining that the design isnt right.
Why ?
Because design is needed. Even in a plain text page design would be needed. I know people who can work wonders with just using a single font type on a black and white screen.
I don't care about your ego.
Sounds like you're the one with the ego problem because you seem to be such a dull person that you seem as if you cannot handle the fact that some people have artistic ability. You say you have a problem with graphics which really means you have a problem with "designed" sites, but its really the technology that which you seem to be winging about.
Get your issues right buddy.
I don't care about your fancy layout.
Okay, so next time I make a site, I will just put the menu to the left, top, bottom and right of pages I make and I'll split the content up to be in 6 areas within the one page for you because you do not care for layout. I don't care about your animated GIFs.
Why because your brain cannot absorb non static visual information?
I don't care about your eye candy.
Nor do I, it's an old photoshop plugin and the effects can be created without the plugin anyday
I don't care about your exact positioning "needs".
That's like car engineers putting the steering wheel in the back seat because things can be positioned wherever and according to you will work wherever they are put
I don't care about your midi sound effects.
Either you are deaf or biased against MIDI, would you like an embedded mp3 stream in a Flash file if thats the only way you can handle your sound?
Anyhow, get a proper MIDI implementation then complain about MIDI.
I don't care about your Java "enhancements".
The concept of Java in a website is not for added interactivity or to make it media rich, but as to add functionality to a website which will work on any platform on the clients side. The issue here is that when Java started getting used on the web at first, traditional programmers jumped at it and used it for all sorts of interactive abilities that were available to them in desktop programming for GUIs.
I don't care about your Flash animation.
What kind of animation WOULD you care about?
Flash is a great way of delivering vector based animation and interactivity on the web. If you cannot process more than just text scrolling on a screen, it is not my fault. Flash is great for interactivity, but what I do hate are sites with useless flash intros and one of those "skip intro" links. I mean, how many of those are there with frames which just speed up as it gets closer to the end of the animation.
I finished working on a web site for a famous film director a few months ago, and the site is pretty much not accessible unless you have shockwave, flash and DHTML. There has been nothing but praise for the site (Mystery Clock Cinema). People like yourself who are against multimedia online have said things such as "I normally hate flash and extra graphics on the web, but this has made me think twice" etc...
The director chose that to be his limiting factor because he didn't want to compromise his artistic freedom.
This clearly to me is a case of people encountering bad uses of technology and theories and counting it as a permanent strike against it just because of the form theyre used to encountering it in.
One thing I would like to know however.
What about entertainment? Seriously, not every website is there to inform. The web is also used to entertain and engage. If you think you and your non design is enough to entertain for good then so be it. The web is converging with TV in front of your own eyes. There will be a day soon where if you don't look good enough to go on the screen, you simply won't!
You really don't understand Linux's abilities (and surprisingly not many people do since no one mentioned it in the replies yet). These boxes would have made perfect X terminals. The only thing they need to run is the X server itself; everything else runs on the app server. You could have donated them *one* mid-class machine and it would serve perfectly for several labs of X terminals. Also, since all applications run on the server, the clients never need upgrading (they are basically glorified monitors attached to the network). This would have helped the school a lot. When the server becomes too slow, they can just add another one and transfer some of the load to it. This is much cheaper than upgrading every computer in the lab.
My university has 5 labs of X terminals, except they are thin clients, not reused PCs. The advantage there is that these little boxes have no HDs (= no moving parts except for the tiny fan), and are really small and cheap.
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
According to the system requirements, Mozilla requires a P233 or greater processor...so it must not be for everyone.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
The upgrade is about standards.
The new browsers FINALLY support standards recommended years ago. This allows individuals on any platform (your Linux, my Mac, their Windows) to see and use web pages equally. Netscape 4 is old tech with horrible standards support. Netscape 6 is much better and gets props for displaying identically for every platform. If you have issues w/ N6 or can't/won't use IE 5.5, go get Opera. It is important or otherwise we end up "MS Internet 3.0, optimized for IE 6.5 on Windows XP SP 2" that works bugger-all on anything else not affiliated...
Other than ActiveX security updates, I honestly don't have a reason to move my browsing to IE, or any other browser for that matter.
And herein lies the discussion. The WSP is trying to point out that although you may not realize it, Netscape's 4.x rendering capabilities (particularly CSS) are horribly broken, which is causing people to continue to create very kludges pages with various workarounds and hacks. If we can get everyone onto a browser with solid W3C standards support (Mozilla, Opera, IE, etc.), than we can do away with things like 5-level deep tables and single-pixel spacers. If you don't like the Mozilla UI, download something that uses Gecko (the rendering engine) but uses native widgets.
Like it or not layout is important to lots of people. You're not going to change that. So we can either do it in a clean, efficient manner (CSS), or we can do it in a ugly, bulky manner (HTML + Font tags + Tables + etc).
Dreaming up standards faster than developers can implement them is just plain annoying.
This doesn't have any basis in fact. CSS1 was solidified at the end of 1996. Netscape 4 doesn't even come close to matching those standards from five years ago. Some people are already moving on to XML/CSS.
How about let's all get HTML 3.0 done correctly across browsers and platforms, THEN worry about the wonders of CSS and XML?
You're totally missing the point. HTML 3.x is not an interim step on your way to CSS/XML -- it's a totally different direction. HTML 3.x is heavy on inline commands to achieve formatting. This is totally backwards. HTML4 strict throws out a lot of the extraneous stuff from HTML 3.x. A web document should be just that -- a document. Leave the formatting to CSS, which is far more flexible.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
View your webiste with lynx. Is it workable? or do you see [IMAGE] [IMAGE] [IMAGE] [IMAGE] [FRAME] IMAGEMAP] ...?
Well, just as public AND PRIVATE business which are open to the public are REQUIRED to install ramps, bathroom handrails, and accomodate guide dogs preemptive of "no animals allowed" policies, so too should publically accessible business web sites be required to support text-only.
Keep fucking the disabled over and expect a big, expensive, precedent setting lawsuit to "impact" your stock holders and cost you that sweet CIO job.
All because you don't want to play fair. It'll happen. You'll see. You'll lose. And you'll pay. So why not do the RIGHT thing now?
I think we need to get rid of all non-white, non-male web surfers out there. They are trully complicating our lives by making us write material for a more broad spectrum. Bah on that. After we've effectively eliminated the rubish of our society from the web, we could then easilly make everybody install some distro of Linux or BSD will out a problem because we'll all be the same, and we'll all think in the same terms. Finally, we'll be one happy bunch of like minded people, running like software, in the persuit of exactly the same goals. This thing called "difference" and "variety" will be a thing of the past. Come to think of it, I say we get rid of old people too. They don't conform to my standards of a perfect, wrinkle-free, next generation human being. Instead of supporting them any more, send them to Balleys and your local plastic surgeon. Bah on old people!
Sure. A new browser that works right will be fine. The problem is, there are not such browsers, yet. This webstandards.org promotion to upgrade browser is futile while there are no better browsers to upgrade to ... or more specifically, while the ones they are suggesting are in fact downgrades for things they aren't considering to be issues (but I am).
I do think some (not all) newer standards will improve things, and that browsers that implement those standards correctly are essential. My point is that we are not there, yet.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
AFAICT, they're not. They're pointing out that it is not the old standards that are the problem, it's the old sucky implementations of these standards (or whatever they implemented) that we need to get rid of.
Now, I think this proposal is very radical, indeed, I think it might be too radical. However, if you design pages after the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (which you should), the backward compatibility issues will be few, I think.
There are some very annoying things, like the font-size stuff in IE3. If I remember correctly, it scales the font relative to the default font of the element instead of relative to the parent element, which is what the spec says. Getting this incredibly bad browser out of circulation would of course be great. However, one needs to weigh the importance of using the font size extensively to the importance of getting IE3 out of the market.
Further, HTML4.01 Strict is a far better standard IMHO than HTML3.2. HTML3.2 was dictated pretty much by the panics that went on in the browser wars. HTML4.0 Strict gets back to the "separate style from content", which is a really Good Thing [tm]. HTML has a few problems, I think, mainly in the rather strange distinction between block level elements and inline level elements, but the separatation style from content is still something Good and Important.
And, BTW, WASP used Amazon as an example of sites that can't participate because they can't have a design that chase off a single user. Well, Amazon has a design which certainly chases me off as it is now...
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
I think users should push back the other way --- Javascript in particular is being seriously abused in enough really annoying ways that I keep it turned off, and few of the "legitimate" uses of it actually do anything a regular link wouldn't. I'd much rather see a stable browser than one with more unwanted bells and whistles.
... barleycorns, noggins, slugs, calories, horsepower, BTUs, ... oh, and colour TV :)
that use Javascript to write frames. When your JS is turned off you get a stupid message saying you should 'upgrade' to NS3 or above. Then when you turn JS on and revisit the page half the time the stupid webmaster has stuffed up the html and you get a blank page anyway!
Don't webmasters test their code?
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Everything is a great site. I node on occasion. But that's one site. The web has room for that, plus a universe of other types of content. Everything can be very satisfying, but it just doesn't do the trick sometimes. My main problem is that it's too self-referential. Surfing the web in "Lynx mode" is tunnel vision.
If I have be able to run NS6 or IE 5.5, that reduces the number of computers I have capable of web access from 3 to 1. (My parents' 486-100 and my brother's P120 laptop are suddenly useless, webwise. Sorry Mom!)
So out of IE 5.5, NS6 and Opera -- none will load on a 486? Are you sure about that?
NS 3 is lightweight
Ironically CSS (which Netscape 3 doesn't do at all) permits the use of much more lightweight pages with formatting shifted to simple CSS rules.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Think Linus will go for it?
"I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious." - Albert Einstein
I see thing from a slightly different perspective than you. I do the occasional website for non-profits, community organistions, and so on. These people don't have the resources to have a developer spending days formulating "if browser=X" code and worrying about which subset of the standards are "browser-safe". In such a situation, especially now that users have the option of both downgrading and upgrading, you can't afford to take on the cost of your audience using broken browsers.
I agree that redirecting people away from your content is not the best solution. A simple "This site is worst viewed using Nav4.x, IE 4.x, or IE3.x" message and a link to the WSP's site is appropriate, assuming your users are all grown-ups.
The WWW was defined by the first web-browsers. There has, in fact, been no truly useful addition to HTML since the first few years of development. It has only had gobs of useless and annoying eye-candy piled on top of (obscuring and interfering with) the content and navigation.
I'm sorry, but you clearly don't have sufficient information on the topic to make such a statement. If you'd bother to read anything at w3c.org, you'd realize that virtually all the work origanzation is doing revolves around focusing on structure of the document, and abstracting formatting from the structure.
Heavy use of Java, ActiveX, etc. are not what WSP is advocating. They're advocating using browsers that actually allow you to create modern documents with real structure, not a bunch of hacks. Pages created for more standards-compliant browsers can acutally be much smaller and more efficient than those using pre-1996 standards (yes, CSS was ratified in 1996).
Furthermore, the W3C standard approvals process is a public and open one. This isn't like Microsoft were they just invent something, slam it in a browser and don't tell anyone how to reproduce it elsewhere.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Yep, I downloaded and tried the new 0.8 this week, in fact.
It's still so far from usable as to be an absolute joke. It does render well, but is missing functionality that's important in the real world (seemingly little things like URL completion, bookmarks that work, and roaming profiles.)
On top of that, when I tried the mail, it failed to acknowledge any of my messages between some time in October of 1999 and yesterday. That's just scary. (Fortunately, it doesn't appear that it damaged my mail files.)
Mozilla's gone from my box now, and good riddance. Mozilla had a chance, but is now completely irrelevant, as Netscape may soon be as well. I *hate* IE with a passion, but will probably switch to it in the next couple of months simply because I can't afford to marginalize myself relative to my peers. (But I refuse to use Outlook/Exchange for mail - that's where the real line in the sand is for me...)
It's sad nothing else handles bookmarks worth a flip...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
But before you continue flaming me, do a little research yourself. Talking web browsers (which there are about three) and Lynx are about it for those folks with vision problems. Lynx doesn't understand style sheets.
The whole point of the upgrade campaign was to punish Microsoft and Netscape. That's fine by me, but killing off the Lynx users is not acceptable collateral damage.
> Imagine a bookshop not letting you buy their books until you'd completed a literature degree.
Not sure your analogy sticks. We're not talking about requiring people to get a Computer Science degree before viewing web pages. It's much easier to imagine a bookstore not letting you buy their books until you get a bank account -- and this is a more fitting anology.
This is a strawman reply. I really shouldn't reply to such a stupid post, but I will, out of the sake of informing others.
I have 18 years experience coding in C. I've developed libraries and written kernel patches. I've also done the same for assembly language. But that doesn't mean I can write a patch to fix just any bug that comes along in any project. In order to do that, I also have to have a strong knowledge of how the existing organization of the project works. And learning that is exponentially proportional to the product of the size of the project and how poorly it is designed.
It would take me perhaps a few months to achieve the knowledge that the existing developers have in the project. That would be a waste of time because I am not a part of that team, and have no intentions to ever be. My time is best spent elsewhere.
The team members, however, having this knowledge base already, could, in theory, implement this patch rather quickly. If it is indeed something easy to do, why not just do it now and get it over with?
I will suggest to you that the organization of Mozilla falls somewhere between messed up and fubarred. Now that's just my opinion based on looking at several pieces of the code. And I do think that's a major reason why Mozilla has been so late, runs so slow, and is riddled with bugs. IMHO, their whole development approach is wrong.
As for giving something back, I already do. I do write code and I do make it available under GPL and LGPL terms. And I design for clarity and reliability, and I also fix bugs. I don't see this in the Mozilla project.
If I wanted to work on browser development (and I don't, because graphical applications is not my area of interest) it seems to me I would be far better off ignoring Mozilla and starting from scratch.
They often-replied statement "submit a patch" is what I'm complaining about. If you failed to research how easy or difficult this would be, then you have no business posting it. Still, people do that all the time. But it's nothing more than a strawman.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Say RedHat scores a big breakthrough gets 80% of that 90% Linux marketshare. Can they be considered a monopoly if the source code and other Linux distributions are still available? Can RedHat be considered a monopoly if the source code for and various distributions of BSD are still freely available?
Open source tends to work against monopolistic behavior because there is always another good (and sometimes equally free) solution available, which tends to work against any attempts by a vendor to force you into using their operating systems or applications...
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You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
If it's all that easy, then quit bitching and compile mozilla yourself.
"We obviously need a new moderation category: (-1, Woo-fucking-hoo)" --Mr. AC
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A mind is a terrible thing to taste.
"A mind is a terrible thing to taste."
Did you file bugs against these in bugzilla?
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Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
Don't get me wrong... I really want to see mozilla succeed but it's got as long ways to go before people start spouting off:
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A mind is a terrible thing to taste.
"A mind is a terrible thing to taste."
If more people used browsers that understood the newer standards, including stuff like CSS, developers may be more inclined to ensure that their sites work for all (CSS used for all the fluff, so it degrades nicely) - rather than spending their time trying for incompatibility between the many different browsers. CSS could well be the main thing, not least because the major browsers (IE, Mozilla, not sure about Opera) allow the user to override CSS settings if desired.
Not even close. Having just been through CSS hell trying to get even the simplest things working correctly on a new site, I can tell you that the client end isn't the problem - it's the authoring end. I've yet to find a tool that really has the knowledge required to build things like they ought to be built, and it's silly to think that only "professional web designers" (those that care about the arcanities of CSS) are building web pages today.
Compare the effort required to get something as simple as a good-looking (graphical) heirarchical nav menu working in JavaScript vs. CSS/DHTML and then decide which makes more sense if your time is worth anything. I wasted several hours, then usashamedly opted for JavaScript. Until that knowledge is embedded in the authoring tools, it's just not going to make it into most of the pages out there, since I (and many others) simply won't take the time to deal with today's morass of web "standards", a situation that leaves us at something of an impasse, doesn't it?
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Mozilla bashing is so fun.
However, there is no reason why the web site cannot also put as much of the specification into the <body> tag as the HTML standard allows. In this way, those who cannot use CSS for some reason (and there area plenty) can disable CSS, or use a browser that ignores it, or filters it out from their firewall, and still get as good of a page as HTML by itself allows. Doing otherwise is leaning on one standard (CSS) and using another incompletely (HTML).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Support all browsers where if the current version is x.y, you include support for browsers (x-1).0.
well, at least i'll still be able to use that copy of netscape 5 kicking around on the imac...
oh, right.
this would be a great idea if version numbers were still under the control of developers and not the marketing team. linux 7.1, anyone?
--saint----
I'm no lover of Netscape 4.X. And IMHO it is a P.O.S. I don't use it if I can at all avoid it. But Mozilla and Netscape 6 have many of the same overall design flaws that NS 4 has. These are NOT valid upgrade targets. Maybe some of the newer offbeat browsers could be. How about evaluating them for standards compliance. I'm all for the standards, but I'm dead set against shitty browser design.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
However, web browsers which comply with the DOM standard have a consistent interface to form objects, and so the JavaScript will work correctly.
This is the kind of thing this campaign is designed to fix. (Though I still have reservations.)
I still use Netscape v3.04, yes, version THREE, because I *prefer8 how it operates, and I have javascript and image loading turned off to boot. And ya know what? It works perfectly well with _every_ site THAT ACTUALLY HAS ANYTHING WORTH *gasp* =READING=.
Which should tell you something about content vs pointless glitz that requires the latest and greatest, not to mention a T3 connexion to get it downloaded within your lifetime.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I work for a web design shop and browser compatability is the one thing that ends taking the most amount of time for our UI guy. Well that and supporting Macs. .1% for lynx, opera and others.
Slashdot readers are the people that use computers, not the people that are used BY computers, which is the mass market websites are looking for. .1% of the market. No freakin' way. You'd be outta business.
Lynx, we haven't supported lynx on a project we've done in ages, people on slashdot love lynx. Yeah. You ever seen a log report for a website recently? atleast 80% IE, split 50/50 IE4/IE5. That was a couple months ago, I'll assume it's high on the IE 5 tip now. Netscape 19.9 percent and
If you're a business working on a large project are you going to tell your UI guy to spend a weeks worth of his time and your money to support
For dynamic website, using Cold Fusion at my web shop, graphical interface with forms and javascript for usability are a requirement, not an option. Or clients want it and they're customers want it. We don't seem to ever get a single email that says, you're site sucks because that javascript that makes the page change when i select something from a drop down menu works.
And on the admin side of all our sites we REQUIRE they're using IE5+ on a PC. Otherwise we won't support them. Our admin sides are about 5 times flashier than the front end of the sites and that's because of more javascript.
I'm all about making the web a beautiful place, and I'm glad I get to help do that. Lynx is not beautiful, it's quick and dirty for when you need info. You think the sites that lynx users look at now are going to bow down to the standards commity and change there sites? No way. Lynx will have it's market and do what it does. Everyone else will advance.
That's all I gotta say about this. I'm all for it, and I can vouch for my co-workers when I say that they're all for it too!
Would you call a 2MB download big?
Well go get Opera 5.02 (the newest Windows version) - without Java it's no more than that! Furthermore Java is not one of those standards - ECMAScript/Javascript is part of DOM (I think...).
And yes, Opera supports most of the standards like CSS1 & CSS2 with pretty few exceptions. Opera also has integrated a validation function - just right-click on any webpage choose "Frame/Validate HTML" and it sends the current page to the W3C validator!
Greetings Joergen
These people seem sincere and well-meaning. The trouble is, I probably don't want the kind of web they're making. Look at it like this:
[ Client ] <---> [ WebServer ] <---> [ DataStore ]
In most cases, I'm trying to extract data from the data store. I want the web server to be as transparent as possible. However, the web designers want to demonstrate their cleverness by throwing in all sorts of graphics, javascript, etc. In the current regime, I can just barely use lynx on about 80% of sites. People making serious sites don't make javascript mandatory for navigation.
This group is asking to change that. ECMAscript, to take only the most offensive part of their platform, is now a 'standard'. So even though I'd like a standard-compliant, less hackish web, I don't really want the web designers having more and more control over the platform I use.
I wonder if someone can come up with a 'safe' javascript interpreter for Lynx and LWP. It would make javascript interfaces accessible to Lynx and to scripts, without giving the javascript author any real control over the client platform.
I think CSS is a pretty decent idea, though. I can just refuse to download or use the recommended CSS stylesheet. Then I'm left with more structural markup that I can render however I choose. Everyone wins - the web designer gets to design his heart out, and the user never has to look at the 'design'.
Amaya never worked. How many times do I need to go back and try it again until one that does work is released? I've already tried it 6 times. I refuse to do so more than once a year now (next opportunity comes up in June 2001).
Of course a graphic arts company isn't expected to code for Lynx for their graphical development. However, for their "investor information" page, I expect TEXT, so Lynx should basically work there.
IMHO Standards are a great thing (when not abused). Graphical and layout standards are fine. But some web developers need a clue about what the USERS find acceptable. The majority of the population doesn't care about whizbang Flash displays. For the most part, only other graphical artists (and wannabes) care about it.
There are markets for substance and markets for style. I just think that too many graphical artists are putting themselves too high on a pedestal with regard to what most people care about. Graphical layout is good. Graphical abuse is bad.
The original topic of all this is supposed to be about upgrading browsers. I just want to find one that actually is an upgrade (and Amaya is certainly not).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Don't be such a backwards loser. Style matters, style is vitally important. You think otherwise, ask Coca-Cola or Levis. Or Apple.
Which doesn't excuse the barrage of poor structuring that plagues the web today. Or the places where the style is badly implemented. But thinking that people (even you, whatever you want to believe) don't care about looks is horribly misguided.
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Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
You have hit the nail on the head. What I was saying is this: if every UA followed strict HTML standards, the web would (effectively) break. And, my point is thus: if everyone followed strict HTML standards, the web would work "brilliantly" and we could get away from this whole "upgrade your browser" fiasco!
Oh, how nice it would be...
Wrong. No standards body should ever release a standard without at least two fully functional reference implementations. With only one reference implementation, you have to refer to ambiguous human language to try and determine which behaviours of it are part of the standard, and which are implementation details. With multiple reference implementations, you can say that whatever is the same between them is standard, whatever varies is not.
I searched bugzilla. The user interface interface misfeature and the Java bug had both been reported already. I know to little about the exact circumstances of the crash without Java to search for or even report that bug.
The one 'legitimate' use for javascript is checking form field values before allowing the user to submit a form. Unfortunately, this sucks just as much as the above-mentioned abuses. Why? Because a) Javascript developed for IE doesn't always work the same on Netscape and b) When the limits on the parameter are changed, there are now two places to update them. While in theory, you could auto-generate the javascript to keep up with the current constraints, in practice it's usually broken.
On a deeper level, it breaks the truly wonderful things about web programming. Validating a web interface is easy - write a Perl script to try all legal transactions with a range of form field values, both permitted and not. Record results. However, you can't validate javascript checking these easily, which is probably why it's frequently broken on edge cases.
I am that "Web Designer" you talk about, and I have griped about the issues at hand. I wish everyone was using an adequate browser when viewing the internet. And I find myself hardly wishing for more eyecandy as much as I wish that simple HTML worked consistently. For example, I consider tables to be basic HTML since they've been around since as long as I can remember. But I'm still waiting for tables to display absolutely correctly in all circumstances. And I'm not refering to eye-candy little one pixel glitches. I'm talking about a whole page being displaced and throwing half the graphics on the page onto another column simply because tables work when nested inside one tag but not when nested inside an obscure combination of three tags. These are the stupid little things why people need compliant browsers.
I haven't read a comment as long as yours that is as poorly researched or knowledgeable. The things you quote about basic and "Good" html is amusing. It seems you've never really tried to publish real HTML, aside from this fanciful "de facto" standards list. It's interesting that your list magically ends up with nothing more than plain text. That would set the web back years... say, to the year 1984 or so.
That's really what the web is all about, after all: serving the lowest common denominator; refuting "web standards" in favor of plain text; limiting and choosing that everyone will view things and express things in a simplistic way that one person chooses. That's the web that I grew up with.
You certainly are allowed to use whatever browser you would like to use, but again, I have to say that a new browser doesn't have to be bloated and big!
Try Opera, you can download it with and without Java - without, it's a 2MB download and it's damn fast too!
Greetings Joergen
If those folks making browsers put one out that has compelling enough features, those same folks WILL download and use it.
:)
Yep, I know. The only problem is that people complain if browser makers add too many extraneous features. The MacIE team sort of split the difference by revamping the UI and making it more customizable. That got people downloading, whereas a rewritten rendering engine alone would not.
The UI is important stuff, and at this time I don't know of another browser that replaces NS 4.x to a reasonable extent.
I suppose this is a matter of opinion as I really don't like it much at all. There might be a little less choice on the Unix side of the world, but from what I can tell, IE, Opera, and the Gecko-based browsers look pretty reasonable for Windows users. Personally, I'm on OSX, and IE5 fits my needs nicely, and had some of the best standards support around.
Clean efficient browsers are needed BEFORE designers can take advantage of these new tools, not the other way around.
So, do you feel it is more important to have a "clean efficient" browser (which I assume means strong on standards, low on frills), or compelling features to get people to download, as you mention above? Either way, we can't really afford to wait around any longer. Either we push W3C standards now, or sit by and watch Microsoft take over with Active*.
Yes, CSS has been around a while. XML is just now getting itself solidified. Thing is though, nobody, and I mean nobody, has been able to produce a web browser that is 100% compliant with all that encompasses CSS1 and CSS2.
CSS2 really isn't that big of an issue right now. I'd settle for CSS1. MacIE5 was probably the first shipping browser to do 100% of CSS1, and Mozilla is probably right there as well. I don't know much about Opera, but hear it's good.
Is full compliance with CSS even possible? There's been a lot of folks throwing in a ton of time trying to get there, yet nobody is.
Yes, MacIE5 did 100% of CSS1, HTML4 and PNG. This was all over the web.
[HTML 3.x is heavy on inline commands to achieve formatting. This is totally backwards.] Yes it is, but it totally worked.
You and I must have been working with different browsers.
I found myself constantly battling to get things to work the way they were supposed to, especially anything in terms of alignment. And in the end, you had a very clunky, difficult to maintain page. CSSP elminates many of these issues.
It really should be the browsers leading the way, with designers following. The other way around is simply a chaotic mess.
I could not possibly disagree with this more. It was the browser makers that forked DHTML and created their own proprietary standards that caused all the nightmares we've had to endure over the past several years. The fact that some sites require IE is a direct result of this.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Doesn't work on all sites, doesn't override CSS. Did a test just this second on IE.
Doesn't work on Netscape 4.75. And let me tell you that I really, really have large problems with many sites because they are too f***ing lazy to do _their_ job.
It isn't my problem that you can't do your job right. I'll just point it out, and make a hell of it until you fix the problem.
--
The Speedy Viking
http://zez.org/
The Speedy Viking
How come Amazon.com works great on all browsers I've used? Yes, even Lynx.
Why is it that this is so? Because they seem to care about their customers time and money. They feel that any small pain for them offsets the pain of thousands of customers.
They are doing the right thing, the require the customers to have a credit card handy, nothing else when shopping with them. They understand business!
Everyone who requires someone to hop through rings of fire before presenting their credit card will never get the credit card.
Eat that, web standards project.
(BTW, standards is a good thing, but face reality people.)
--
The Speedy Viking
http://zez.org/
The Speedy Viking
It all comes down to a question of what percentage of your audience is using a particular browser, and is that a significant enough percentage to justify the costs of supporting it?
There is a common mistake made here, which is to not read between the lines of statistics. if you go by stats such as Proteus then you will see that Netscape 3.0 is down to roughly 5% of the average audience. But ask yourself whether your client has an average audience? We did a project for a large educational publisher in the Uk, you need to take into account that a school is far more likely to be using older hardware and software than a corporation (for example).
Forcing people to upgrade will piss them off, with some really old hardware and software this may not be possible (if you're running Mac OS 7.5 or earlier you wont be able to install the latest version of IE and Netscape - are you going to force them to upgrade their OS as well - how about making them buy a new computer whilst you're at it?). Lets be realistic - if you speak to telephone support from most software companies they will tell you that they support the current version + the last full release before that (ie Filemaker support v4 and v5), if you call them with a problem with version 3.0 they tell you to upgrade and then call them back. A policy such as this would be more realistic as it gives people a reasonable amount of time to upgrade when they want to - but avoids getting tied to old technology in the future.
I've been used to getting finincial information through my Fidelity Investment account. When you have an account, they supply good news and stock charting info.
About two months ago, they updated their web site, and whenever I try to get to these pages, I'm greeted with a "browser not supported" message which says: upgrade to Netscape or IE 4.x or better.
I use Netscape 4.x at home, 6.x at work; both under Linux. When I told them I was using the proper version of Netscape, they said they only support the WinDoh's version of Netscape.
It's merely the browser string that their objecting to: they don't even let my browser try to render these pages.
No amount of complaining helps. I'm moving my account.
When I die, please cast my ashes upon Bill Gates -- for once, make him clean up after me!
Hey,hey, no reason to make it personal.
Javascript is not going to do evil things to your computer, just to the objects on the page. You can't get to Alt-F4 or (whatever window closing keyboard shortcut you use) to close a pop-up window? Please, what's the worst that javascript can do to you?
Your subject is correct, but i think the control freak am not i, but the designer. For example blocking right-clicks is not funny. If i want to open a link in a new window, i want to do just that, not have a dialop appear telling me i should keep my fingers away. That is misusing Javascript an not my idea of surfing the web.
So tell me one use of Javascript, that benefits the USER apart from validating form-data.
You probably use Netscrape on Losix anyway, which has an absolutely horrible to code for document object model compared to that of Microsoft's, so you probably get errors and strange behavior all the time anyway
In fact i am using quite a lot of different browsers for different tasks on different OSs, including Mozilla, Netscape 4.7 and IE on Windows(98SE/2000) and Mozilla, Netscape 4.7 and Konqueror on Linux. And you can tell me what you like, but the fastest by far is Netscape 4.7 on Windows.
The basic dichototmy is that Tim Berners-Lee (if you haven't heard of him, get someone else to moderate your comment down :-) was aiming for representation of the structure of the content in HTML, while leaving the presentation of that structure up to the browser.
Most websites are aiming to control the presentation, using bastardisations of the original intent of the standard like explicit font declarations and using TABLE tags to control layout (when did you last see TABLE used to present tabular data?). HTML is simply not suited to pixel level control of the display.
What we need going forward, and quickly, is a strong definition from a body like the W3C on a pixel-level rich content, fully interactive, client-server (not transactional like HTTP) standard that eveyrone can implement. The Web, Mark II. Obvious ideas would be basing it on applets or Flash.
Right now, the real risk is that the W3C is going to become toothless; the real standard now is not HTML-anything, it's "what works in IE and mostly ok in Netscape" and it will rapidly become "what works in IE" only. Projects like Mozilla will quickly become catch-up imitators of IE the way StarOffice is of MS-Office.
Too many times I've opened a site that uses all the fancy features of IE5/NS6 and actually contains no really useful information.
It is the sites that use basic HTML (even hand coded) that I often find the best and most useful information.
Content and usability are king. If you can find a compelling reason to use DHTML, then use it. Otherwise, forget it, stick to basic code.
CrzyLune
I got into what could comically be referred to as a "conversation" with one of their consultants, trying to find out why NS6 is so laudable when:
I prepared an example of #3 above to prove my point, and I asked him what, then, is the basis for the praise for NS6. His response was to criticize my example for not beginning with a doctype declaration (gads!), to be utterly wrong about certain details about the colgroup element which are very explicitly spelled out in the HTML 4.01 specs, and then to justify his irrelevant compliants about my example with a little double talk ("well, I pointed out that out because you can't complain if you can't even create an entirely legal HTML page").
Despite all that, I managed to get out of him that the whole reason for praising NS6 is that the open-source nature of the Mozilla project is likely to ensure that bugs with any standards support will get ironed out relatively quickly. I agree with everything in the last sentence from "open-source" to the end, but I pointed out that it's erroneous to lump NS6 and Mozilla together as the same thing.
While you and I may download the latest Mozilla nightly build to fix some obscure bug with e.g. style sheet properties not being inherited from table rows to table cells, John Q. User is not likely to download another huge version of Netscape 6.x anytime soon. So thanks to to NS6, people like me have *another* browser whose bugs I have to work around when designing pages, and this isn't anything that's particularly revolutionary.
In short, I'm not entirely convinced that WaSP is anything more than a handful of geeks that issue press releases every now and then to try to make a headline on Slashdot.
--
Have you been to ATI's web site recently? If you use Mozilla, like I do, all you get is:
Internet Browser:
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.x or greater
Netscape Navigator 4.x
We currently we do not support Netscape Navigator 6.x
(unless you turn Javascript off, of course). Obviously they've decided that they don't care about selling to the people who use Mozilla.
Guess again! Not everyone builds websites for the same reason. Of course, a commercial site will want to port to as many browsers as they can reasonably. Others can do what the hell they feel like. This is the Internet, right?
However, development on the web has got in a mess. Why? It's because the Mozilla project dumped most of the old Netscape codebase, and dropped some compatibility features. That's left a lot of people with a frozen release.
Now, one of the big complaints about Netscape 6, (apart from performance, which Moore's law will take care of in time) is that is standards compliant is all very well but it handles spaghetti HTML worse than other browsers.
All the WaSP are saying is that some people who don't have a pressing commercial need to do otherwise should just write clean HTML. It's not a question of forcing people to upgrade: it's just redressing the balance.
Yeah, I figured that was a real possibility. Anybody I know want to own up to authorship?
So what's wrong with Netscape 3.0? Sure, it might not load any pages with any kind of javascript on it anymore, but really, don't you think thats MY problem? If I don't access your site because you choose to make it more complex than I am able to access, then that is YOUR problem and shame on you for not providing an adaquate alternative. Certainly, you don't HAVE to, and if I REALLY need to see your page, I will. Older browsers have certain features that make them ideal. They take up less space, they're a LOT less bloated, they load faster, and in some cases, they're a lot less bug ridden.
You're just inviting the alternative, which is to only support IE5+ on Windows because that's 93%+ of the market share, and f**k the rest of the world.
You can't buy leaded fuel at normal stations in the USA, nor even now in Europe, but it doesn't stop people running vintage cars. They just have to make their own arrangements.
To suggest the web should be held back by the 0.001% of people out there with a Sun 3/20 or whatever is ludicrous.
The alternative, of course, is to have a (relatively) small (corporate) group of people (Guess Who?) get together and say...
In the case of the Web Standards Project, we're talking about an org that's had a consistent level of support from developers since its inception. They're hardly a crackpot voice in the wilderness.
When you consider that the W3C includes people who've been driving the process from Day 1 (Berners-Lee, Raggett et. al.) it's just wrong to suggest that they're not relevant. Spew your accusations of empire-building all you like, but the fact remains that people have to be involved who are genuinely interested in doing the Right Thing, who will try to point innovation in directions that are actually worth a damn.
That's what Amaya is for.
I've yet to understand how the W3C Technical Recommendations could be considered ambiguous. It is true that "Recommendation" is the highest weight they can get, but that's because the W3C acknowledges that it's a junior partner in the process to achieve standards-compliance. Which BTW brings us right back to where we started... enter the Web Standards Project.
When everything is said and done Web standards are about separation of style and content. It's hardly "impractical" to achieve this on the Web... I grant that it's virgin territory (because previous widely-used markup languages such as TeX and SGML did take presentation into account) but to say that it's impractical is to quit before you've really begun.
The W3C and to a lesser extent the Web Standards Project are pretty explicit about their goals, and the Nirvana they're trying to achieve is a separation of style and content. The need to support the chimerae of legacy clients is holding back the march toward this goal.
You are correct - because the first browsers (primarily Netscape 1.1) were trying to answer the developer market. Right now the developer market is too busy trying to work within the constraints of backwards-compatible development to even think about innovation (for the most part).
...Because the W3C said "Holy Cow, this beast goes too far in supporting presentation. Let's work on other things like CSS and XML that we can use to support presentation..."
No, this is backwards-compatibility.
Which would be a great thing if these browsers weren't broken in critical spots, if they had robust support across well-documented feature-sets... but they don't.
Which is the job of the designer, not the standard... and every competent designer knows this...
I'm with ya on this one...
This is more problematic, but not because of standards or developer petulance. Rather, clients demand client-side interactivity that doesn't exist when JavaScript is disabled. Flash is such a fad as a result of the same mindset.
...Which, if the browser implementations would allow developers to effectively separate presentation and content, would not be a problem.
In principle, you are absolutely correct. However, the refusal to support any whiz-bang at all results in rejected proposals. You have to sell a client before you can get a job. Unfortunately, selling clients means impressing them, and niether errors nor plain (i.e. Mosaic-style) pages impress no one.
Again, you're absolutely right.
This is a fucking troll, and I'm falling for the bait. I can't believe it.
HTML is NOT the only item in the toolkit of a competent "Web designer" (God, how I hate that title). A designer who bills hours also has a grasp on dynamic scripting, copywriting, graphic design, information architecture, JavaScript, etc. etc. They may not have all of these skills themselves, but they know how to work team-wise with people who do.
Um, yeah. The last time I checked, that profit was what made our paychecks happen!
However, I'd like to point out too that there are plenty of designers who'll build the pants-creaming demo and then studiously nudge the client into approving a design that visitors will actually use. Happens all the time...
They're called Information Architects and UI Architects, and those are coming into their own as recognized specialties in the Web-design/dev field.
Any Web-oriented Perl/PHP/ASP/Python programmer worth their paycheck who's still looking for work is either:
There are lots of people who want it on the server side, and aren't getting it because they can't find the people. Note also that once you've done your planning, server-side development doesn't involve nearly as many variables as client-side development...
...Or anything having to do with presentation, really.
Whatever floats your boat, buddy.
The thing that gets me is that the vast majority of people who use Lynx, or disable JavaScript, know exactly what they're getting into... and still expect that things will be just as perfect for them, as they are for everyone else. Listen to the caveats, would you?
As for people who bitch because JavaScript is disabled at their job, I really have no sympathy for them. If they're visiting time-wasters at work, they need to make do. (Yes, I'm inferring that most sites that are heavy on JavaScript are in fact time-wasters. *grin*)
Conversely, designers who build sites meant to be accessed from a workplace who insist that JavaScript be enabled, deserve whatever crap they get too.
Cheers, everyone. See you later this week on alistapart.com.
...When in doubt, think for yourself.
You cannot legislate language (see: The failure of German spelling reform of last year). You can only react to how people use it.
If I can't stop people from using impact as a verb, we certainly can't stop folks from using Frontpage to make their Geocities home pages.
We may know more about the language. But we cannot define it.
Sheep run the show. And the corporations on whose land they graze are the only ones who will profit.
baa. baa. baaaa.
Or at least it's more standards compliant. Tons of people still use netscape 4.x, and can't use IE 5.5 or NS 6. Therin lies the problem.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
One word - SLOW
Microsoft(tm) - a particular virulent virus that has infected most Pc's.
Somewhere along the line I finally caved and switched from mosaic 3.0B to netscape, back when I was using older hardware. It was probably a conflict with some hardware I have; it's been a while.
:)
Anyway, I preferred Mosaic to Netscape, and istr that it was much faster . . .
At the moment, I'm typing in lynx
hawk
Here's what nobody seems to get about this topic: believe it or not, we're all on the same side. The problem is that human language is preventing comprehension, and some people are posting or moderating before understanding the material. The WSP is not encouraging people to upgrade their browsers so that web designers can go add a bunch of fancy graphics and glitz to their pages. They're trying to normalize the page creation process.
The most important standard to make sure everyone has is correct and complete CSS1/CSSP support. This solves a number of significant problems with web pages:
[1] CSS permits creation of lightweight, structure-centric documents. With regular HTML, you achieve formatting by using font tags, nested tables, single-pixel spacers, and other various hacks. This forces the content to be mixed with formatting, which makes the page very hard to parse, maintain and repurpose. CSS works to abstract the document from the display by enabling formatting through simple property lists that can be kept in a separate file. This is how it should be.
[2] CSS provides more predictable layout control With regular HTML, even if you use all sorts of hacks to get items arranged on a page, they always seem to end up in different places in various browsers. This is because HTML was not designed for such things. CSSP solves this by allowing the author to specify a point of original for page elements.
[3] CSS is scalable, and degrades graceful Anybody who is concerned with supporting multiple types of devices with the same content should be very interested in CSS. You can take the same document and apply a different stylesheet based on the environment. For example, one set of display rules for the browser, and one for a printed pages. Or, one for WebTV, one for a cell phone. Or one for regular browsers, one for audio browsers (for those without the benefit of sight). And since CSS abstracts style from content, you should be able to read static text just as well if you decide to not render the rules in the style sheet (or supply your own rules).
[4] CSS typographic control reduces the need for text graphics Text is often rendered as an image to preserve typography settings. CSS provides more typographic control, meaning lynx users will get all the text, and that download times will be shorter.
[5] CSS provides formatting automation Instead of wrapping a font tag around every page element, you can simply create a class for a certain type of content, which then formats all text that fits that description. CSS also uses inheritance to allow formatting of parent objects cascade onto child objects if you desire.
After taking all this account, it should be clear why CSS is so important, and why WSP is pushing for new browsers to be adopted for CSS use to become more widespread. Netscape 4.x supports CSS to some extent, but its implementation is so broken and incomplete, that designers end up using the older hacks anyway, which is the worst of both worlds.
And while CSS is the most important immediate standard, it's just part of the story. Once we have XML pages with correct DOM using ECMAScript, then we can stop this ridiculous business of refreshing the entire page everytime one element has to change. This wastes bandwidth, CPU power on both the client and server, and is disorienting for the user. But this requires standards support.
Believing that WSP is your enemy is pointless. You're giving the battle to Windows IE's proprietary web standards. People are going to want to make nice-looking, functional pages. The audience and the purpose of the web is much different than it was in 1992. It's not just about static technical manuals anymore. You can either try in vain to convince people to adopt to your aesthetic tastes, or you can provide them with an open, well-documented way to express theirs. Push for W3C standards, and you'll have your choice of browsers and platforms. Ignore the problem, and you'll wake up one day to find you can't view many sites on anything except Windows.
There are plenty of good browsers out there that meet WSP's recommendations. Mozilla, Opera and the newest version of IE should all do a satisfactory job. If you don't like Mozilla/Netscape 6's UI, find another browser that uses the same Gecko engine, but has a nicer app wrapped around it. There are several efforts underway in this vein. The biggest goal here is to get Netscape 4.x (and earlier versions of Explorer) off the market, because it makes web developers' lives a living hell. It's akin to having to support Windows 3.1.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
I'm going to be blunt here: The problem is not the "increased fracturization of the internet". The problem is webmasters like you who don't have the faintest idea how to make use of kewl new HTML version N+1 features while also maintaining compatibility with the least common denominator. It's not that hard. The only thing worse than your frenetic attempts to "maintain layout compatibility" by using "four levels of nested tables" is the webmasters who are detecting browser versions and using big switch statements to hand-tailor their gunky overtweaked HTML for 57 different varieties of the two popular browsers, leaving poor old Jon Postel (or any other besotted old troglodyte who once believed in the mythical concept of interoperability) spinning in his grave.
> I have 18 years experience coding in C.
Probably explains why you think that Mozilla is poorly designed... I have nothing against C. I code in C as well. However your comment strikes me as being entirely too similar to other comments I've heard from pure C programmers. C is just a tool like a hammer. However if it the only tool with which you have practical experience, you will see the world as a nail. There is no direct analogy between some computer languages for exactly the same reason that their is no direct translation between different human languages (precisely why interpreting between languages is so difficult a job). C code does not directly translate to component-based C++ which does not directly translate to Java.
Mozilla is C++, JavaScript and XPCOM with only a light sprinkling of C. As such they are approaching the problem correctly: attacking the interfaces and leaving the implementation optimizations until last. This is what they have done. Read the roadmap. They have stated that optimization has only started recently. They were completing the interfaces and the base implementation before optimizing.
> It would take me perhaps a few months to
> achieve the knowledge that the existing
> developers have in the project. That would be a
> waste of time because I am not a part of that
> team, and have no intentions to ever be. My time
> is best spent elsewhere.
Yes it would. It is an investment of time. IF you are not willing to invest that time, so be it. It is your decision. But do not then criticize others because they do not share your priorities.
You say that you have worked on long-term projects (libraries and kernel). And yet you have never come upon the bug that keeps getting set aside because there are more important things to a lot of people. Mozilla's bugzilla has a "most requested bug fix." This and its ilk are attacked first. It doesn't look like your pet bug are most requested by the others that use Mozilla.
Unfortunately, the Mozilla project hasn't garnered the attention that the Linux kernel has gathered. As such, it doesn't have the same amount of driving force behind it (people). And yet some filesystems have rotted and died. Some devices have fallen by the wayside. Is this because no one uses them or bemoans their loss. No. A small enough percentage stopped using them and no one with sufficient coding experience to maintain them stepped forward to claim them.
> I will suggest to you that the organization of
> Mozilla falls somewhere between messed up and
> fubarred. Now that's just my opinion based on
> looking at several pieces of the code. And I do
> think that's a major reason why Mozilla has been
> so late, runs so slow, and is riddled with bugs.
> IMHO, their whole development approach is wrong.
A component-based, language-neutral approach is wrong? No I don't think that C is obsolete and I am not suggesting it. You are basing your opinion on your past experience. I am basing mine on my past experience when actually writing/using/maintaining many disparate options (C vs. Objects vs. Components). It is obvious that we will not agree anytime soon. However I would suggest that you (re)read Design Patterns.
> The often-replied statement "submit a patch"
> is what I'm complaining about.
Really? And here I thought this was one of free software's hallmarks. I have researched the problem. I now how difficult it is. I have every right to post this. If so many people weren't resting their hopes on Mozilla, no one would care that they are taking this long or using this approach (which would have put them in the same category as 99% of all free software projects).
No, I have not been programming C as long as you have. I would have had to start when I was eight years old and my parents weren't programmers. I'm am not doubting your abilities as a C coder. I fully acknowledge that if put in a room alone, you would be able to produce better kernel code than I. I am however questioning your judgement with regards to languages other than C and your take on your pet bug not being fixed.
If a bug crashes the browser or causes it to suck up ten more megs of RAM, I sure as hell want them to ignore your bug! Let me put this to you "for the sake of informing others." Do you think a project's priority should be on making sure the browser works on multiple platforms at all or that they should take time out to make sure that someone can dictate the size of the browser on startup from the command line?
If you answer the latter, I simply agree to disagree.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Ummm... Point of order. The W3C doesn't have any such method. The reason your code is failing is because the method name is
getElementById()
Note the capitalization. You'll note that suddenly things will start working...
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
I was not suggesting that Amaya was a day-to-day use browser. It is a reference implementation. It is slow as hell, doesn't support JavaScript and has no mailing capabilities. It is a reference implementation of XHTML and CSS. The fact that it doesn't work at all for you is unfortunate. It has worked for me in the past. But after Mozilla showed up with standards support, I stopped looking at Amaya.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Too many times I've opened a site that uses all the fancy features of IE5/NS6 and actually contains no really useful information.
WSP isn't advocating glitz. They're adovacting standards so that documents can be more efficient and reusable.
Content and usability are king. If you can find a compelling reason to use DHTML, then use it. Otherwise, forget it, stick to basic code.
They're not pushing for animation. They're pushing for normalized documents.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
> Let me make myself clear. Sticking with basic
> HTML elements that work on all browsers and using
> style sheets to pretty yourself up for the modern
> browsers is keeping it simple. That doesn't lend
> to eight different versions of anything.
You neglected the inclusion of CSS in my argument. We're arguing the same point here.
With regards to straight HTML, no two browsers on the planet have ever rendered HTML is exactly the same way. There has always been the need for an extra or spacer image to get the style right.
The HTML form does not allow for large, heirarchical chunks of information -- although it can be hacked in.
HTML does not give a context to information it contains. And the meta tag has basically been rendered useless.
Case in point the time when G.W. Bush's campaign site was the first site referenced on Yahoo and Google in response to the the query "dumb motherfucker". I thought it was funny as hell, but HTML alone will never solve this problem. I'm not saying that the new specs will magically make search engine problems disappear overnight. It will take work and time. But they will never be solved if we stick with straight HTML.
> Once again, I agree that JavaScript and DHTML
> have their legitimate uses, but their legimiate
> uses don't make the issues of privacy, security,
> bloat, and compatibility with all web browsers
> (not just the bloated ones that support
> JavaScript) go away.
No, but it raises the bar and gives a clear goal that everyone should be working toward. Privacy and security are separate issues. Most (all?) browsers have had problems with these at one time or another.
100% compatibility with the past is impossible. If you have to keep to the lowest common denominator of the past, note that early versions of AOL's browser didn't support the <center> tag. I realize that this was not your argument however. There should be *some* regression path for web documents. This means however that NS 4.x users will see more and more pages that look terrible.
IE 4.x+ has >80% of the market now. Most companies just code for >80% of the market with token attempts toward 10%-15% of the market (NS 4.x+). This is exactly the same as when the stats were reversed and people coded just for Netscape.
Personally I use Mozilla on Windows and Linux at home and at work. It is my primary browser. At home I use a Celeron 333 -- hardly cutting edge. I have a hard time believing it when people tell me that NS 4.x was somehow a better beast and it's not worth the upgrade. NS 6 is bloated. The people who packaged NS 6 say that it is bloated. Use Mozilla already!
I have nothing against Konqueror. But yelling at the people who code for 98%-99% of web pages that can't or won't test for Konqueror because it's so little used in the web at large is like screaming at the Rock of Gibralter expecting it to crack. Businesses are lazy. They want to do as little as possible and stay in business/not get fired (Ever seen "Office Space"?). When the bare minimum of effort gets you >90% of the eyeballs out there, there is very little incentive to work harder. It sucks, but it's classic human behavior.
I recognize the argument that the perfect browser has not come. I recognize the argument that the halfway decent browser seems a sketchy proposal.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
so those with 56K modems will be forced to upgrade. I've seen a lot of the junk that comes down for the "newer" browsers and when it is not outright annoying, it merely wastes bandwidth.
.26 dot pitch monitors, Whatever IE Beta is out there with all the Windows plugins that don't work on Mac and Linux, and that then pop up a dozen ads?
I'm still waiting for the "Run Javascript" button so I don't get the annoying pop-ups (I leave it disabled because of this).
I also usually print out material. The web is designed to kill trees since most pages end up being narrow content surrounded by junk. A few sites have printer friendly versions.
Sometimes I run in emulation in 640x480. Many sites seem to have been designed for 1920x1440 full screen windows.
Who is pushing the move to sites that require a personal T1 to access in a reasonable amount of time, that require 25"
Lynx works. It even accesses frames individually, a trick that the versions of IE I have don't (I can disable them, but not do "frames as links").
It's about content. All this stuff is just noise. It might be pretty noise, but it is still mostly noise.
Most sites provide a basic service. Some are calendars, some are schedules, some are guestbooks, some are news articles. Most of the web does not require DHTML, leave alone flash, plugins, or java. [...] Why start demanding that people upgrade to see the same crap they've been seeing for years now?
WSP's goal isn't to make the page flashier, it's about making it easier to manage. Nothing WSP is talking about involves Flash, Plug-Ins or Java. Those are not W3C standards.
There are two points to be made here:
[1] Standards like CSS and XML enable the web document to having meanful structure beyond display. This makes maintenance and reuse much more practical. This gives us a web document that can compare reasonably to a document generated from a word processor or page layout program, while using the flexibility that the internet provides.
[2] Web sites are no longer just flat technical manuals. Many of them are distributed applications. It's insane for each time you click a window widget to have to refresh the whole page just to update the display. This wastes bandwidth, CPU on the client and server, and makes software much harder to write. If we get DOM, ECMAScript and XML in gear, we can solve this problem.
Somebody is always going to find a way to use technology in an obnoxious way. That doesn't mean you don't try to improve things. If we believe that, then we might as well give up on the web.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
And, furthermore, if we could have a low-resource browser, that handled the standards, strictly, we would have no dificulties?
So go code a browser, if it's not so hard... and don't forget to put in css1,2, *HTML*, and XML support... Oh, and I like my pages to not look like ass (Netscape...)
moderators: by reading this you agree to mod me up +5, insightful...
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``Users are not seeing the cool stuff we are doing to justify our paychecks. Well, let's just force them to see our nifty pages full of dancing baloney and squinty fonts that could give a lawyer eyestrain.''
Hell, some sites make me long for the days when all I had was lynx. All I am looking for is information, not an Internet experience. And I'm far from alone in feeling this way. I wonder if web developers are aware that when many web users utter ``Whoa!'' when they see a web page, what they meant was ``Whoa! What's all this stuff'' and not ``Whoa! Isn't that cool.''
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CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
You are absolutely right - that choice is yours.
However, I think you overestimate the "average user" who might not know any of these issues - and who would welcome a suggested upgrade.
Now, forced redirections are a bad idea, and I must not have read that part right. My comment wasn't in defense of this "feature", but instead in support of the "encourage designers to use the new technology and not worry so much about their pages breaking on uncompliant browsers."
As a user of such a browser, you are surely accustomed to dissapointment when visiting certain sites, but this is likely usually due to non-standard HTML. If you knew that those pages were unsuable because of your browser and not the designer, would you be more likely to upgrade?
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Sorry.
I didn't mean to imply that there's only one web programmer out there. After all, who would they unite with?
There are, in fact, three web programmers. Again, sorry for any confusion.
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CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
You cannot progress everything. Not only is text internet still around, but it is growing.
This is all thanks to wireless devices which do not have full featured displays, EG Blackberry, Palm, and even IE in many ways.
I see the need to move to newer standards, but don't force new content types on people. If one can't view pictures on their browser, they should still be able to interact with a site in a sane way.
I loved browsing with my RIM and running into:
Warning your browser is older than IE 3 or NS3. Please go to upgrade your browser, or something like that...
Bye!
WSP isn't adovcating Java or ActiveX. Read the material.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
If sites are having to choose between standards compliance versus bass-ackwards compatibility with old, broken browsers, then yes, that's a problem, and we should see if we can't find ways to help those sites justify doing the Right Thing (which is of course to lean strongly towards compliance).
But backwards compatibility with prior versions of the HTML standard is a very different thing, and twisting the arms of users of old browsers (especially if those old browsers are compatible with HTML version N-1) to try to force them to upgrade is clearly insane. There are far too many reasons why someone might want or need to keep using an older browser.
Trying to lock users into some kind of a faster update cycle (18 months already seems quick to me, and that's what they want to shorten it from?) is a tremendously misguided notion, and would be of far more benefit to those who want to hasten the conversion of the Web into the new TV (taking yet more power and control out of the hands of the end user/browser) than it would be to web designers who would like to have an easier time of creating cutting-edge yet widely portable HTML.
See
http://www.rnib.org.uk/digital/welcome.htm
"People with disabilities have a moral (and in some cases a legal)
right to be able to use web sites...
There are 1.7 million people in the UK with serious sight problems or blindness.
Can they use your web site?"
Might also want to see
http://www.rnib.org.uk/technology/inaccess.htm
Some don't perceive visually.
Exactly.
I don't care...
I DO care about your message.
I want to hear what you have to say. By all means, spend a few moments on making it look nice. But there is really something wrong if you spend more time on "style" than the actual substance.
Tables are great. They help my browser format large amounts of information so that I can understand your data. But please don't use dozens of nested tables just to make some graphic show up at exactly coordinate x, y.
Graphics can help your site make sense and help me to understand your message and naviate easier. But please don't pollute my browser with hundreds of micro-images just to achieve some special effect that could be replaced with a simple navigation bar on the side.
Most of all, if you respect me (the viewer), with clean and useful content, I will respect you for the effort you have spent in creating it.
A dingo ate my sig...
Okay, there must be something I'm just missing in all the browser war talk. NS 4.76 is to this day my primary browser under NT, and my secondary on FreeBSD (Konq being my primary). If the font handling weren't so god awful it'd be my primary on FreeBSD as well.
I personally don't have the constant lock up problems I keep hearing folks complain about. I personally support around 40-50 installations of NS 4.76 at my company, and the darn thing works. To date, it still has the best E-mail client I've used on any platform, and it certainly has the best LDAP integration at there.
Yeah, IE is faster at rendering pages with gobs of emedded tables. So? NS 4.76 still processes JavaScript faster than anything else I've tested, and the right-click menus are noticeably faster. Other than ActiveX security updates, I honestly don't have a reason to move my browsing to IE, or any other browser for that matter.
Even Mozilla, right up to last night's build, doesn't perform any faster for me where it counts, at the UI level. Again, some of the heavy table pages show up a wee bit faster, but no where near a level to compensate for a far slower UI. Oh god, and don't get me started on the mail client.
How about getting us end user types a browser that has a really sweet and fast UI that'd cause us to actually want to upgrade? This strong arming us from the top down makes the web weaker, not stronger. Dreaming up standards faster than developers can implement them is just plain annoying. How about let's all get HTML 3.0 done correctly across browsers and platforms, THEN worry about the wonders of CSS and XML? How about getting JavaScript to actually work 100% across every browser at the version it's at now? We ain't even there yet, and these folks are worried about CSS? Ack!
"This page is not viewable because you need to upgrade to IE or die! Don't like IE? Go buy another 256meg of RAM and run NS 6.0!"
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Well, my big problem with all this is that with Netscape 6's rather poor "plays nicely with older code" performance, coupled with the 25Million or so AOL users, the NEWER stuff is currently causing more problems than the tried-and-true.
Seriously, Netscape6 seems to operate on entirely different rules of how to implement HTML... I have seen pages work fine in Opera5 and fall apart in NS6.
I may not win many points by saying this, but I strongly disagree with those in the "HTML should only describe the document structure, not lay it out" camp. I mean, the ability to force the page to lay out as a designer sees fit is central to the functioning of many sites, both commercial and non-commercial. Yet, the HTML standards people will tell us that we need to do it with style sheets and with desctiptive markup - the end result of that is that we either have to do all sorts of user agent detection and redirection to different pages optimized for particular agents, or else live with not being able to predict how the page will look for different segments of your user population.
Honestly, the web seems to work well the way its been going - those who REALLY want to be HTML purists are free to follow their hearts and have pages that 95% of visitors will not know or care that they have been given a document that they can control the presentation on, and those of us who are building/maintaining big commercial sites can tell our marketing folks, "Yeah, anyone using IE4-5.x, IE4.x, or AOL 4-5 should have nearly the same experience on our site, and that is about 80% of our users."
Sounds fair to me.
"When all else fails... Lower your standards"
-Goat
+++++++++++++++++++++
The Digital Sorceress
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"don't smoke, don't drink, don't fuck
at least i can fucking think"
Minor Threat
my opinion is that the web is about content. People with sites where content dominates have something to say, where visitors leave richer. Sites where layout dominates have something to sell, where visitors leave poorer.
hey, only the former make me smile.
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* Sigh *
Now how about updating your goddamned site?
One of the great advances of web standards is that they have re-introduced the strict separation of structural markup from display markup. This effort is actually a bonus for the vision-impaired, or handheld users, because the more standards-compliant a site is, the more likely it is to be possible to get some kind of coherent content out of a site after the "designed for 800x600 graphical displays" styles have been stripped away.
This is one of the real problems with the current system. The more you have to tweak your site just so it'll work in NS4.x, NS3.x, IE3 and IE4, the less inclined you are to do the work that will also make it viewable in non-traditional browsers, screen readers and handhelds. If people used standards-compliant browsers, then the effort now put into supporting 5 different browsers, could instead be put into supporting 5 different modes of viewing.
Charles Miller
--
The more I learn about the Internet, the more amazed I am that it works at all.
If you don't want to be ignored on /. you have to make a strong statement, with no space wasted on quibbling over details. My post was moderated up because it presents an interesting idea in a short enough form to not waste the reader's time with strong enough language to break through the simplistic "standards == good" mindset. Like most successful posts on complicated subjects, it lacks balance and annoys a lot of people.
/. posts. I usually come out of it a bit like this.
Readers can control how much balance they get by how many replies they choose to read. You make good points, but try to imagine slashdot as a debate, where people stick to their assigned premise and refuse to be shaken from it regardless of any arguments or whether it's at all a rational viewpoint; offensive things naturally come out of it and nobody means it personally.
It's a strange day when I fully agree with one of my own
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I'm looking for a day-to-day browser. I guess we agree that Amaya is not that. Having standards compliance in the day-to-day browser would be a big plus, and would certainly be the deciding factor between otherwise equal browsers. But it would not be the end-all reason.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
My objection is not with the use of C++. But I do believe they have approached the problem incorrectly, though I cannot pin down exactly what that is. I do know that the majority of projects, both open source as well as in business, are approached incorrectly simply because the results are so often quite dismal, as is the result of Mozilla. I do know that if you leave optimization out of the design stage, you can end up with something that can't be optimized very well. The design itself is what has to be optimized, not the code (well that, too, but that's a separate issue).
I am not criticizing others for their choice in how they invest their time. I am criticizing a project for having poor results. I can't say what the exact cause is; I can only guess. I was also criticizing you for your choice of using the strawman attack to make it appear as though I was not contributing. Hopefully, when you think about it, each of us is best contributing at what we do best.
It it a hallmark, but a false one. When a system gets very large and complex, as both Linux and Mozilla are, simple patches simply cannot be made to fix an underlying design error that has already be frozen into thousands of lines of code. Apparently the problem in Mozilla is that there is too much data hiding and by the time something quite abstract gets to the point of actually starting a window up by interfacing with the X window system, much information is fundamentally lost at that point. Abstractions can be carried too far, and I see that in this project (one of the major reasons I don't want to touch it).
Another thing to learn about is good time management. That includes the concept of not spending a lot of time to do what is a miniscule accomplishment. The lack of compliance by Mozilla to X standards is probably a small issue, but in terms of who can do the fix more effectively, then it is something for the team to do. But they have obviously a bigger project than they can handle.
I would want that crash and burn bug fixed, too. And fixing it first certainly makes it easier to run the tests necessary to fix the other bugs. The real problem here is that Mozilla is TFB (too ... big). It's bigger than they can debug effectively for the size of the team they have. Maybe they expected a bigger team when they designed it. Maybe it just got out of their control.
I want to see code that is majorly bug free, by the time it is released. When people claim Mozilla to be worth starting an upgrade to, then that is wrong because it is nowhere near bug free. Lots of open source software leads the world in reliability, but I'm afraid if Mozilla is considered ready before its time, it will hurt the reputation of open source. Perhaps this is all because I have an apparently higher standard, than most, of eliminating the bugs (in the design and in the code).
By the time Mozilla is released, all the simple bugs should be fixed. Any simple bug remaining is an indication that it was not ready to be released. If the bug in handling -geometry isn't a simple bug to fix, then the design is wrong (not the choice of language, but the overall design that makes it not easy to correctly handle -geometry).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
And out of curiousity, what is the ui "misfeature"?
--
Looks like someone recognized themselves.
That is the question...
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
WaSP is not trying to get sites to force users to upgrade to Flash-compatible browsers. They are trying to get sites to "upgrade" to versions that conform to the open standards set forth by the W3C.
If done correctly, this should have the effect of making things more accessible by, among others, the visually-impaired. Additionally, it would make my life as a web app developer much easier.
That said, most businesses are not going to do what they suggest, because, whether they are the size of Yahoo! or Amazon, or are the local record store, I'm sure no one, if they can help it, wants to alienate their potential customers. Their customers could not care less about standards; they only care about whether or not they can view the site properly, with the tools they already have.
-- gold23
Trust not a man who's rich in flax / His morals may be sadly lax
but, if you shouldn't complain if a web site doesn't look good with your browser. I have a personal web page that is pretty basic, but I have a couple of tags that older browsers do not support.
It really gets me when people say it doesn't look right and I should change it. From now on I will use the link to the update site when I get these emails, but I will not redirect people just because they are running an older browser. That is a bit like a popup ad.
mark
"The whole point of the upgrade campaign was to punish Microsoft and Netscape."
Just step away from the keyboard, man. Did you read the Web Standard Project press release? IE was one of their recommended browsers, noted for its good CSS support and the Mac version was praised even more highly.
I haven't used Lynx in ages, but if it doesn't understand style sheets that's OK too if it ignores them (as opposed to breaking on them). Stripping all the formatting information out of HTML and into CSS will make pages easier for Lynx to render. At worst, at least it's not going to make it any *harder* for Lynx.
http://www.bootyproject.org
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
...which don't support anything fancy. Up to 1/3 of the traffic on our sites is robots and spiders.
If your pages require JavaScript to function then search engines are just gonna pass you by. There won't be anything to index.
And then how will your audience find you?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Linux on Intel is just as mainstream today. But someone running Linux on Sparc is doing so on purpose and has no right to demand anything.
Detecting the user-agent? There has got to be a better way. Presently I use Konqueror as my web browser. Occasionally I get a site that says I need to upgrade my browser to IE or NS. What crap is that? Konqueror is very standards compliant. So I use the handy user-agent option to disguise myself as IE. Yay, now I can view it.
Perhaps there should be a way to detect the capabilities of a browser. Detecting for IE or NS or a "4.0 browser" (smack the person who thought up that term) is just a really bad way of doing things. There should be no reason to need to know what client is being used.
Yes, yes, yes!
Of course by "most recent standards", we must include support for Python-based applets, as supported by Grail.
Don't even start giving me that BS. about how you had to nest tables for browser compatability. My ass! You could have just written nice clean HTML and made a nice web page with some words, pictures and graphics, hell 98% of the web doesn't even TABLES much less cascading style sheets!
Hmm, how many print newspapers do you know that only print text in one column? There are reasons for logically dividing data and presenting it in a particular form.
Since you seem to disagree with this practice, I'ma assuming you are in favor of the proposal, since it will allow you to turn off CSS and eliminate much of that non-content dross, like text styles and colors and so on, that you find so unnecessary while you view web pages. Correct?
The newest browser for IRIX is something like 4.0.6
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
But if you developed a C program and it only worked properly on a newer vesion of the OS, of any platform, and this was a very wide spread problem. Wouldn't you encorage your users to upgrade?
Telling a user that they are not worthy to use my software or view my website is something I will not do. If they meet the basic requirements for my software (X11R5+ and POSIX), and it still won't run, then I'll go in and fix it. I won't blame the user. If I am following the ISO and ANSI C standards, then your scenario won't work. Period. Only software that doesn't follow the standards (like using glibc and gcc extensions) will have your scenario's problems.
In the case of WASP, why should they even care if I put diesel in my gas-burning Ford, or try to view their pages with an HTML-3.2 browser? I'll tell you why. It's because they're arrogant buttinskis. Well, screw them! Maybe I'll start filtering out pages that have their little "test" in it. Now that's an idea!
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
You're right, there's nothing wrong with Netscape 3.0 I personally still use it as my primary browser. Not only is it cleaner, smaller, and faster; but it's also better security-wise. I've gotten 4 copies of the Kornakova virus and had gotten at least a dozen 'I love you' letters, but the e-mail client with Netscape 3.0 is pretty much bullet-proof from any crap like that.
;)
.8 and I'm VERY enthused to see the finished product, it could replace Netscape 3.0 for me
It's not security thru obscurity, it's security thru obselesence.
BTW-I downloaded Moz
- "When I say dance, you'd best DANCE motherf*cker!" -Violent Femmes
Marvellous... but why is some ropey english in an old Megadrive game suddenly so popular?
Does my bum look big in this?
Mozilla's gone from my box now, and good riddance. Mozilla had a chance, but is now completely irrelevant[...]
Ok, now that's just silly. This is a 0.8 release!
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Sooner or later, this does have to happen. The standards we all need won't be fully implemented until people stop writing hacked code necessary to support broken browsers.
OK, realistically, of course it will take a bunch more time before everybody upgrades, but it's going to take an explicit push/campaign to raise awareness and make it happen.
I've already started to do most of my coding (except on a couple of hand-picked sites targeted at legacy users) in XHTML strict/CSS with non-table positioning (floats, relative and absolute) - things that just don't and can't work in older browsers. I do server-side sniffing that redirects to a warning page if a lame browser is detected, which explains the situation and gives them a link into the site that skips the browser-sniff if they really want to go in without a compliant browser. But the results are usually disastrous for them, even though the code is 100% valid. And for these sites, as the WASP says, if the code is valid and your browser can't display it, then it's your browser's problem.
No, that attitude won't work for everyone and all sites. But we doing smaller sites can begin now, and an education campaign to get people to upgrade and chuck these stupid, broken legacy browser will help everyone.
TomatoMan
-- http://frobnosticate.com
Ah, if only Mozilla didn't suck so much ass. Sure, I've built it in the past; try it every few months to see if they've gotten it working. Hasn't happened yet.
The fact is, you need simple, backwards compatible pages not because you're desparately hoping that the portion of Lynx users will someday rise about 3%, but because you have to face the reality that more and more people are going to start accessing the web from lightweight, portable platforms such as palmtop computers and WAP-esque phones.
No amount of Flash-DOM-whatever insanity can be crammed into a platform that small, and that's fine with me. Whine all you want to about how these "luddites" are holding back your web designers masturbatory portfolio fantasies, but in this case the best way to prepare for the future (xhtml, css, etc) means carefully *not* rejecting the past. In this case, moving simultaneously forward *and* backwards is both possible and necessary.
Telling your designers to force people to upgrade or be left out is both wrongheaded and short sighted. It's fine for someone on a moderately new PC/Mac/Foonix system (as long as there's an alternative to Mozilla, which sucks too badly to put into words; guess that rules out Foonix...), but anyone on oldish hardware or a (currently) "exotic" platform such as a palmtop or a cell phone has no choice in the matter. Don't ignore that.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
URL completion did not work for me. Don't know why, if it was working for you.
As for bookmarks, they may work for trivial lists of bookmarks, but mine is quite large, having been built since 1993 (although only a few have stayed around that long...)
Mozilla is DEFINITELY not up to the task of handling my bookmarks file.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
I'll have to investigate that further.
--
Could be. I only tried the Windows version, since I don't use Linux on the desktop very often.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
*heh* When our company was redesigning our website, something similar came up. But our boss said, "if they can't be bothered to upgrade their browsers, then we don't want them as clients." That's the sort of thing we need. :)
If you read more about the campaign, you'll see that what the WaSP means by "not supporting" older browsers is simply using HTML4, CSS and DOM to its full potential. The worst-case scenario here is the someone using Netscape 4.7 will see content that is uglier than the designer intended, not that they won't see content at all.
And yes, JavaScript is risky as a fail-safe redirect, but that's why the WaSP-affiliated A List Apart is using a fairly elegant workaround: older browsers see all the content, minus styling, and a simple "Please upgrade" notice at the top of the page, with a handy link. Newer browsers don't see it at all - and there's no scripting involved.
This is a Good Thing, people. Jakob Nielsen has been saying for some time that we're 'Stuck With Old Browsers Until 2003'. Frankly, this sucks. Using HTML4, CSS and DOM makes creating a web site that works for users and for the designers and maintainers an order of magnitude easier. No stupid nested tables, no <FONT> tags, etc.
Please, go read the damn links, then come back and contribute something meaningful.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
You say you'd be upset if websites started telling you to go away until you upgraded your browser, and you say you'll "upgrade when you're ready.", but fact is, if even 20% of the site you wanted to go turned you away for using an old browser, I guarantee you most people would upgrate immediately. Pressing technology forward is necessary for improvement and sometimes you have to anger some people to make the technology better.
Corporate sites don't give a rats about browser technology. They want their audience to see the site, and if you fail to make their page work in the old ass version of AOL's crappy browser like you said you would, they are going to sue you for everything you have.
Also, no web development firm is going insist on using new browser standards when the competition knows the client's ceo want's to have the page work in the widest selection of browsers possible.
I'm not tooting my horn here. This part of the discover phase of web application development in the industry today, and as long as it remains so, we're going to be laying out pages in tables and clear spacer gif's. We're lucky we were able to sneak css text control past the clients, seeing as how it doesn't work in version 3 browsers. The only reason we cant use css-p is because the AOL browser chokes on it.
AOL's web developer documentation even has the guts to say that we may as well "sacrifice" new technology for the greater good.
Talk about pushing a boulder of cruft up a mountain as your day to day existence. I've found some HTML sites that I've worked on to be harder than keeping 7 dimensional arrays in my brain. It's all because we've learned to write code to break consistently, instead of working.
And it isn't going to change, no matter how hard we try. Our clients just won't go for it. They're willing to pay money for crap technology everybody can see, and aren't willing to pay LESS for good technology that the user would have to install additional software to see. They know the customer/user would rather use some other site.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
Toyota Canada is a sorry-ass lame site. The use of redirect loops to trap users is flat out rude.
MOVE 'ZIG'.
That's exactly what this is about - there are no browsers that support "HTML4,css1/2 javascript and java" except the ones W3C is advocating that we force people to upgrade to.
W3C is not doing this to promote flash, shockwave, realvideo or wmf. W3C is trying to provide us with HTML that isn't broken.
Ok, so who there do I send the bill to for the cost of upgrading some of my older desktops which use Netscape 3, Netscape 2, etc since they are so adamant about how we need to be using the latest browsers?
I mean, if your going to start literally ordering webmasters to lock people out, you better be ready to help upgrade those people who get locked out.
Not everyone can afford a 1 ghz athlon with 256 megs of RAM, etc just to support the latest standards. Some of us actually use our old hardware for things other then firewalls.
Brielle
Thats ok since the search engines see it and don't index it. No problem for me. I don't get to web pages that insist that I use the latest (buggy) browser and I only get sites that aren't too heavy on the eye candy.
It's not about market share, it's about standards compliance. If your web site follows the standards as written, and the browsers do the same, you can reach the largest audience possible. It's in everyone's best interest to follow these standards.
Gee that really ticked me off.
--
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
They mention IE 5.5 - that's all fine and dandy, but what about, say, IE 5.0 for Mac?
IE 5.0 for mac is the most standards-compliant browser at present. It does have some bugs, though, and 5.5 is reportedly in beta.
TomatoMan
-- http://frobnosticate.com
It really says something about this idea that even the PHBs would know its stupid. I can only imagine what the usability people like Jakob Nielsen would think.
What about people that have turned off Javascript, or better yet, use browsers that never heard of it? Where does this leave them?
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
TheCounter.com Browser statistics
The big problem is that Netscape 4 still has around 9% of the market - this needs to fall further before it can be ignored.
VGA resolution didn't get ignored until it was around 8%.
but as for your comments, do you wanna use the cutting edge stuff because its there or because its the best way for your page. in most cases all that whiz bang shit is not needed.
As usual, it's clear most people here have posted without even clicking on the link.
W3C standards are NOT about making everything pretty at the expense of accessibility - in fact they enable GREATER ACCESSIBILITY. Pages built entirely using CSS have a minimum of presentational crap mixed in with the HTML, so more primitive applications and platforms can understand them better than they could a page written in perfect HTML 3.
WITH FULL CSS SUPPORT, NESTED TABLES ARE A THING OF THE PAST. Nested tables are an abomination, necessary since HTML started to be (mis)used as a presenational markup language - not a structural one. Tables are what will make your life difficult when you browse with lynx. Pages built with CSS will look fine on lynx.
Read this. Do it in lynx if you want.
But this gets to the issue of how many people are using which versions of which browsers. I am of the opinion that you should support the browsers that make up a large enough portion of the market that it is not worth it to. Would you want to throw away ten or twenty percent of your market?
The problem is that this type of argument sounds like pre-emptive marketing on the part of some. Similar to saying "well boys and girls, we have already won the game, so why don't you all go home"
Tallies from many stat counter sites vary widely from audience to audience. For example, sites frequented by readers of Slashdot would likely have many more users of netscape than the AOL chatroom. It is difficult to assess the actual market share.
I am not sure wher I would want to go with this, but I would probably want to encourage truly universal non biased standards, without forcing the market. This is a difficult question. My own practical experience would suggest that ie4 and ns 4.5 as a practical low end, but your milage may vary.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Adhering to standards isn't the problem. Forcing people to upgrade is.
/mill
If these "web designer" morons just used the standards and stopped trying to make decisions for me I would be fine. Heck, use XHTML and CSS and I will still use NS3.0x. It is their damn hard-on for using javashit when it isn't necessary and other k3wl techniques that breaks everything.
Oh, and of course the fact that they want, like now, to tell me my user agent won't do. I _know_ my user agents short comings and in 99% of the cases it will do just fine.
Idiots.
This wouldn't be a bad idea if everyone conformed to the w3c accessability standards.
Something that would worry me about this would be support for non-standard webbrowsing devices, things like mobile phones, lynx, (and personally, my trusty old Psion5).
A lot of web designers are exactly that, designers. They come from a design background and aren't used to not being able to put together exactly what they want. They forget that HTML wasn't designed the way it was to make life difficult for them. It was designed to describe structure, rather than position and formatting. The client can impose whatever formatting it can on the structure.
The way is to implement backward-compatibility into *browsers*, not webpages. Why don't the all-so-standards-compliant browsers include a filter-module which transforms old-style code into valid current-generation code? With all the flexibility that CSS offers, this shouldn't be too hard. As a user I still have only these two choices:
1. A browser of the previous generation which shows most of the web just fine but fails to accept standards compliant modern code or
2. A current generation browser which renders standards compliant sites perfectly but fails to show me the rest of the web.
Webauthors can't recommend upgrading until there are browsers which don't force users to make an exclusive choice between the majority of pages which rely on tricks and the minority of standards-dependant pages.
Since IE3 is still default for Win95 installs (yes, it's not sold, but many people have kept with this version regardless of the latest MS upgrades), it's hard to convince end users to upgrade past this key version.
Now, I do agree that before they go all draconian and declare that everyone must upgrade or die, the WSP should have evaluated the state of compatiable browsers on all platforms, including the various UNIXs, as as others have said, NS hasn't been upgraded and cured of poor HTML interpretation for those platforms. Sure, they're a minority, but that's still significant. Instead of telling consumers to upgrade, they should be asking Netscape at least, and possibly MS, to make their browsers fully compliant. Maybe go the route of Sun and Java -- if the browsers don't pass their compliancy test, they then cannot call themselves HTML-x compliant.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Second, sometimes it is rather handy just to fire up lynx to do a quick little errand, instead of waiting 30 seconds Netcrap 6.0 to come up.
Lynx does a good job of supporting most of the standards, actually. A standards-compliant site should work well in Lynx.
Third, how is this going to affect accessiblitiy for disabled people. Do the latest standards allow for this group of people to use the web?
Of course. That's one of the central purposes of having the standards at all. You can't hit WAI level AAA with old browsers except for the most basic, text-only sites. You need standards-compliant browsers and standards-compliant code to have images and multimedia and be fully accessible to the disabled.
TomatoMan
-- http://frobnosticate.com
Now, I'm a professional website developer, and I have my fair share of frustration in building websites that are generally accepted as "standards compliant" but that can't be rendered properly by many people (sometimes even our clients, on their own machines).
Am I the only one that sees this as non- professional, incompetent behavior? What ever happened to testing before releasing (even to the client)?
hopefully nobody set us up the bomb
In that case, a move to purge old buggy browsers that can't grok standards-compliant source is probably a good thing - make a clean start, that's fine by me.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Doesn't mean I can see it happening any time soon, though. People will still be idiots, but at least toughening up webmasters' jobs so they can more safely say "it's your browser's fault - you moron" is a good move.
~Tim
--
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
are up to date, at around a million hits per hour.
IE 4 and NS 4 are both around 10%. This means they can't be ignored. But if they fall a few percentage points more marketing will forget abot them (this happened to VGA screen sizes).
I can understand why it would be benifical if everyone had up-to-date browsers. It would make web designer's jobs a lot easier, but there are still some things to consider:
* What about people with older computers that can't run the newer browser software?
* What about all the people who bought internet appliances with browsers that can't be upgraded?
* What about all the people with slow access/unreliable connections that can't dl the new browsers?
* If every page today was standard compliant, wouldn't most up to date browsers have problems?
* Will we every see a similar push for broadband? (You should design your site for broadband, you can do so much more. Don't let those people still using dailup access hold you back. They should upgrade if they want to access your site.)
Quake is just a crutch for those who can't handle Descent.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
I need information. Often, Lynx is all I need for that. If you want me to view your page, you'd better make it comply with the standards of my software. So screw your pop-up panels, I'm already riding out on the next link.
Don't use JavaScript. At all. Join me, and we can kill pop-up windows forever!
The truth about Michael
--------------------------------------
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
Normally I'm against this sort of pushing users to upgrade. But this is a special case; similar, in fact, to the libc5 vs. glibc2 upgrade.
.PNGs for my images, and make sure my pages work as expected on Konquerer, Mozilla, and IE 5.5. I also run my pages through tidy. After all that, if you can't view my page, then you need to upgrade your browser. I see no need to bug the user about it, they'll figure it out. (Then again maybe not. But I still don't want to bug them about it.)
The situation is that the 4.0 browsers were the fallout of a browser war, products made at the peak of that battle, and so bear all the scars and ugliness that went with it. Luckily that battle has ended, and the needs of the users (both viewers and creators of content) are considered paramount once again.
We need to leave behind this horrible cruft, and the sooner the better. I'm not sure I agree with the Javascript; besides Javascript itself being a product of the browser war, lazy coders tend to forget that there are more than two browsers out there. (Thank goodness for Konquerer's modifiable user agent string!)
My view for a while has been this: I code to web standards, use
Interesting, why are you running X on that?
It would be a better ssh box then a web browser...
dont you think?
Fight censors!
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
Get stuffed. Anyone who uses the word "kewl" is a fucking moron. I'm just a wee bit older than 12, see. As a professional admin, I see lots of systems and lots of OSs, and I have yet to find anything as reliable and well-built as Sun hardware. From that basis, I choose my operating systems as appropriate - OBSD for the firewall, Solaris for the NFS server, and Linux for my personal workstations...this is a reasonable and intelligent approach and is not to be mocked.
Likewise it is reasonable to expect that if one architecture is supported with a given OS, then any architecture should be supported with that OS. The *ONLY* difference between sparc-linux and ix86-linux is the endianness. EVERY OTHER ASPECT OF THE PROGRAMMER INTERFACE IS IDENTICAL. THE SAME BUILD ENVIRONMENT, LIBRARIES, AND SYSTEM CALLS ARE AVAILABLE, WITH THE SAME SEMANTICS. Therefore there is absolutely no reason for AOL not to provide a binary - unsupported is fine - for this platform.
Well, if you want easily available software, use a mainstream system, it's that easy.
With the single exception of Navigator, every piece of software I want is distributed in source form, so it's never an issue. And besides, this *IS* a mainstream system, sufficiently so that NS6 was made available for it first. In porting software, it's the OS that makes the difference, not the architecture. Only very badly written software will break moving across architectures within an OS.
I don't really know why I respond to trolls like this, but it pisses me off to have children mock the decisions I make. If you like Windows or Peecees or the as400-ibm-penix platform, I don't care - you won't hear me try to convince you that it sucks, because it's not my fucking problem. In the same fashion, I don't think it's too much to ask that you either contribute intelligently to a discussion on cross-platform interoperability or stay the hell out of here and go back to playing Starcraft.
Wrong. We have 4.6+ running on IRIX.
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
But the idea of axing old browser support is good. On sites I design, I don't bother to support anything older than the IE4 and NS4 level. I think cutting out IE/NS 4 is too much.
--
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
As far as I can tell, this is NOT about plugins or the latest whiz-bang flying graphics.
A lot of the hostility towards things like Flash is a direct result of standards non-compliance. No one handles things exactly the same, everyone has different difficulties making things work, users and developers alike get frustrated.
They are asking that every site design only for the standard. This WOULD NOT mean that Links, Lynx, or any other "alternative" browser will be unable to use the web, in fact it would make it easier for them, giving them a standard basis for their changes (like image removal, etc.)
I'm guessing the WSP has noticed that most modern browsers are mostly correct in drawing HTML, (At least better then I ever remember) but designers and designs are still forced to cripple themselves to avoid alienating potential customers.
If the majority (80%? 90%?) of users had a modern browser, the only subsequent upgrades would involve
A) Bug fixes -- Most users are happy to upgrade for this.
B) Feature Additions -- This is obviously up to the individual browsers, but most users will also upgrade for nice new features.
C) HTML Standards Changes / Additions -- This happens less frequently then A or B, and could thus be lumped in with them.
So.. one big web-wide browser upgrade (not just to IE5.5 or NS6, but any standards-compliant browser) and the World Would Be A Better Place.
This is not about making you watch Flash movies, or download 2.4MB of DHTML, or 10,000 nested tables. It's about organizations that now have to build 4 seperate pages instead of 1, and it's about your user experience suffering as a result.
Does this really sound so bad?
--
A way to do it would be to offer certain versions or levels of certification, like a level-1 certified browser supports these standards, and level-2 supports level-1 plus these. Rather than have half-finished standards like microsoft's XML parser or the like.
Then, simply specify that you need a w3c level-1 certified browser to surf this site, be it netscape, ie, konqueror, opera, etc, etc.
Just my thoughts..
This should not be marked as a troll at all, it's just common sense...
give me all your garmonbozia
But I don't see what the problem here really is at the top end: just generate your pages from a database and stick the content into a template for the browser/platform in question. What's the big deal?
I know of a good system to do this: the Everything engine (which powers the world's largest online encyclopedia). But what about people whose content is hosted on Freeservers, GeoCities, and XOOM, hosts whose security policies do not permit server-side dynamic page generation?
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I am visually impaired (legally blind) and also design Websites, but as an avocation. Nonetheless, I often violate my principles of KISS and concentrating on content. After all, applets, Javascript, DHTML, animated gifs, etc can be really cool at times. At least cool to me, but perhaps a major hassle to others. The original purpose of HTML, as I understand it, was to deliver content and let the renderer decide how it should be presented. Yet tables are now used for precise pixel layout. I think it is becoming damn difficult for all browswers to support all the bells and whistles of modern Web pages. And all those bells and whistles can be annoying at times and do not help the bandwidth problem. Not all of us have DSL and the broadband industry is in a real state of flux.
Look at the big, successful sites: Amazon, eBay, Slashdot, Yahoo. Totally vanilla HTML. If they don't need all that crap, why do you?
I am a professional web developer. The web standards group is assuming that the browsers they've chosen truly support the standards, and that they (members of the web standards group) are capable of writing according to those standards.
All I know is, the page http://www.webstandards.org/upgrade/ BREAKS in Mozilla 0.8 and Internet Explorer 5.5.
Either the web standards group isn't following standards, or the browser manufacturers still aren't. Either way, users loose. Thank god for Mozilla and Opera -- were it not for those projects, would the web standards group be fighting for IE/Netscape only, they'd be fighting against alternative operating systems as well as browsers.
Also worth noting: In my entire career, I have NEVER had a professional client say "hey, we have to be backwards compatible!" - usually they want the latest versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape on the PC, and we have to fight for Macintosh/Linux support, backward compatibility and alternative browser targets (opera, lynx).
I think I will keep on creating lovely pages that work without all the fancy flash-and-dash, and keep pushing for text-only versions and older browser support on my projects.
The original HTML was a far cleaner and elegant specification, both in implementation and in concept, than the fractured crap that is called HTML today. Perhaps developers should do the opposite of what the article urges, and write only to the original specification and avoid the use of most of the so-called `modern' stuff.
why do you hate Java/Javascript?
Quailify this, I dare you.
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
Shrug. If someone wants to screw around with XML, let them. If it's unnecessary for someone's needs, though, it would be rather fascistic to force it down their throats as a standard.
> The web is not at all about stylized content. It's about content. Period.
:(
:^)
The web is about _lots_ of things, and to say something as sweeping as the above proves you don't understand that yet.
I'm a web interface designer/developer, and thus am _really_ picky about how things appear. It's often quite difficult to organize content and design interfaces to complex content. Most sites don't get it right - heck, most don't even come close! One of my mottos is, "If someone can't _find_ what they're looking for, it might as well not even _be_ there." There is a place on the web for both style as well as substance. You could put the best novel in the world online, but if you make all the text blink, it won't matter. _Think_ about that! People avoid sites with lots of crap, despite how good the content may be - simply because the other stuff is too irritating. It's not necessarily that there's too much 'technology' (ie: javascript, popup windows, etc.), it's that it's not DESIGNED properly. Some content lends itself to simple layout - all text, perhaps, single column, whatever. Some content does NOT (no matter what your personal opinion is, I'm sticking to this). Frames are not only somtimes appropriate, they're sometimes the ONLY _good_ way to present some content (generally navigation, though). Just because you've been subjected to evil web site design using frames or javascript or popup windows (as have we all), that doesn't make such things bad. Those things are just tools - neither good nor evil. I certainly like having the option to use such thing when I feel they're appropriate.
I've seen some _fantastically_ artistic presentations done via Flash - which many SlashDot snobs dismiss out of hand. I've seen things that simply couldn't be done without Flash. Sure, someday some of the upcoming vector and SMIL stuff will likely make that possible without Flash, but it ain't here, yet, so stop bitching about Flash. Instead, bitch about Macromedia not properly (not even REMOTELY properly) supporting non Win and Mac platforms. And where's the Flash program itself for Linux? Nowhere. Ugh. Nevertheless, the technology is here, and can be quite cool.
Anyone developing a website has to make many choices, not the least of which is, "How many people, and WHICH people, am I targeting this to?" Does it make sense to not be able to, or to have to dumb-down, your content to be able to reach more people? Many artists in non-web fields would answer that with a resounding "No!", so why should artistic expression on the web be any different? Just because a small percentage of people think so? The artist is the only person qualified to determine what is the 'proper' method of expressing their vision, be it text or audio or visual. Deal with it.
In a related vein, my opinion is that if content really WAS king for most people, the web would be vastly different than it is now, and people would be more willing to pay for quality content. I'd certainly be willing to pay a small fee for monthly local movie listings, for example, if they listed EVERY local movie theatre, and listed them correctly and reliably. Unfortunately, moviefone.com and citysearch.com both have similar such problems.
All of this is, of course, an opinion, just like yours.
There is glut of emotional responses here without a hint of factual backup. Here are your answers.
I find it ironic that your so hip in technology to use a PDA but want everything text based for your convenience as well.
as for the impaired, standardizing will only *IMPROVE* the ability to design interfaces that user STANDARD data types and such. Only making it many times easier to use the information you retrieve.
Upgrade your browsers!
i am glad to see this getting pushed, cause im sure as hell not strong enough to do it alone. the best way is server side (ie silicongod.com) but javascript is at least a good start. what makes this any different than the tv -> hdtv thats coming? except there if we dont switch, we get nothing. so why not do the same? as far as i can see, the only thing stopping most people is them not knowing how to upgrade. so as long as detailed directions are there, where is the prob? i will thouroughly enjoy paging a code ONCE.
NEWS: cloning, genome, privacy, surveillance, and more!
NEWS: cloning, genome, privacy, surveillance, and more!
Gee, we just found out the new multi-gazillion dollar financial package we bought from this guy named Larry only supports IE 5.0! Do you think we really care if our employees can see that rich, compelling web content? Not if it messes up payroll!
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My wife is like Unix. Lots of commands. Lots of arguments.
stop whining and update your fscking browser. this is because of fscking bozos like you lots of web pages are terrible mess.
the fact that NS6 will NOT install for me is a problem that I face. There is something wrong w/Java or something. There is absolutely no reason that Netscape should have a difficult install for a system that is quite standard. If you are going to try to market a product at least have it install easily.
:)
Yes, I know Linux isn't a big priority but still.
no no no no no
Current HTML and CSS includes the ability to code *directly* for things like text-to-speech, or LCD Projector or... etc.
And the WHOLE IDEA of this is to eliminate the need for browser detection! That's what standards are about!
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A discriminatory short-sighted campaign that goes by the title of WaSP, what a new concept (ok, not a direct parallel but still part of the campaign title and one of the first phrases on their web-site.
:)... I'm used to not seeing ani-gifs; I like it.
Though actually.. As long as they provide a decent text or text/minimal graphics alternative I don't think there would be anything wrong with a browser requirement. Of course, this is all nil since in the end it will be the market that dictates the type of web-content that will become a standard.
Of course, then there are gals like me who like lynx
Frankly, I don't *want* massive Java/Flash/DXQRCIHTML/XML/super-special effects-enabled web sites. I just want the damn content. Text, and the ability to display PNG and JPG graphics. That's really all I need or want.
Then compile Galeon on your machine and don't install any heavy plugins.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
No offense intended, but slashdot, k5, and everything2 will all work fine under netscape 3.0 (and probably 2.0), as well as lynx. I mention these sites because each is successful at what they do, and all of them look good on my horrible 640x480 resolution (my monitor is special). Each of these sites get across a large amount of data yet each site doesn't force WYSIWYG webdesign that seems to be popular nowadays.
The worst offenders in the "upgrade or break" seem to be commercial stores. I can name a major company that sells small fashionable yuppie trinkets whose webpage won't render on a default IE on win98SE default setup or on the latest version of netscape. This is insane. There is nothing wrong with using the latest browsers to make a stylish page, but it is possible to do so in a way that doesn't break every previous browser. It is also possible to make a commercial website that can take online orders in such a manner that you can use lynx to buy a product. Making compatable code is NOT difficult for a web developer, and it does have some benefits. If a web page is developed to work in everything from netscape 2.0 to netscape 6.0, there is a great chance that it will render in IE, Opera, or any other major browser. When web pages want to force users to upgrade their browsers or install some plugin, its because, in 99% of the time, the designers are lazy, and can not understand how to make a page that is not exactly WYSIWYG, but can be used on a variety of platforms.
Blank page.
As it turns out, the JavaScript code checked for IE or NS on MacPPC or Win32. If you run NS on BSD/OS, they don't want to do business with you. Neither do they care about Amiga, Mac68K, Linux, WAP phones, well, anything they never heard of...
Every three months they change the website, and every time I run into this, I point it out to them (at first to the webmasters, later to their PHB's). They usually fix it a few days after I report it, but they invariably screw it up when they bring a new site online and they fail to see that it's the kewl scripting that's the problem, not my browser.
I don't care how the site looks. I want to buy an airline ticket. This concept is one I have not been able to get across, and they will not acknowledge it's their problem. Sometimes I can vote with my feet, sometimes I can't: that's my biggest frustration.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
I've reached the decision to stop trying to make my personal sites Netscape compatible; now that I've stopped doing all those things the W3C is always telling us not to (Don't use tables for layout, don't use the tag), Netscape 4.x doesn't render CSS information correctly either.
.GIF layout correctly, maybe they should worry about their content and its accessibility. Lately I find my designs devolving into the web circa 1995, when it was still (mostly) about the exchange of information.
I know most Linux users use Netscape, so rather than take the presumptuous and high-handed approach of sending them to a snotty 'upgrade your browser' page, I will probably add a note to the bottom of any page served to a netscape browser indicating that the page looks funny because I have given up on Netscape. Or I may redirect them to a PDA/Lynx-friendly version of the site transparently.
Professionally, writing bad code to get pages to render correctly in Netscape is still a necessary evil. These guys come across as idiots. I'm supposed to upgrade my browser so I can read their size 2 bold black text on bright orange background better? No thanks. Instead of designers worrying about people being able to view their 4-level-deep nested table/spacer
I think this is an irrationaly move, most typical people that browse don't upgrade because they don't know they can for the most part, and also because they see no point to, what they have works fine, so they stick with it. As for me, I'm not inclined to ditch my NS 4.75 for NS 6, since as far as I'm concerned NS 6 is the brain child of a crack addict (or maybe just AOL execs), and I prefer to refrain from using IE because of my personal bias against microsoft products.
Attitudes like that hinder progress. If you want to stay behind fine but don't expect the rest of us to wait for your stubborn ass. Change happens whether you care to be part of it or not.
You statement makes it sound like every web site should hold off on an upgrade until you have decided to upgrade. You don't own the web. If sites decide to change to a manner in which you can't view them but a majority of other people can you lose out not them.
I am not trolling here, we recently did an upgrade at the office and had a tech who said he wasn't going to help with upgrade, that he didn't want to do it. His reasons were nothing more than him being bullheaded. The upgrade wasn't going to make any dramtic changes to the system but it was going to make it easier for the main office to keep track of the invoices. He said the office should change not him.
He is now out of a job.
The invoicing gets out to our customers a lot quicker now.
that works on all platforms and will never need updates, distribute it freely, make extra packages for people who want fancy things, and write pages to detect no_packages and packages. That way, if you want fancy things, it is your responsibility to keep current, and if you want good ol' text only, you've got it.
Thought I'd like to add that I'm responding to this post using a Pentium 133, running IE 5.5 ... Considering I saw the same speed computer being sold for $50 in the paper, there's no reason why we should support anything less then that... (I also have the latest Mozilla running too... although not NS6, since I can't even install it for some reason).
I'll upgrade to something stupid and new IF everyone will pass the validator and Bobby. Until then they can go join the MS class action lawsuit against the evil "Open Software".
(Insert generic "I Agree Completely" statement here)
Thanks for providing the voice of reason.
--
And yes, I hate Flash. And Frames.
And yes, these are just my opinons too :-)
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I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
Second, sometimes it is rather handy just to fire up lynx ...
Ironic that you mention this. A web site well-designed with HTML4 and CSS will degrade much better to Lynx than a site marked up with lots of crap to support Netscape 4. HTML4 and CSS are very simply the separation of style and content, and that makes everyone's life easier.
Third, how is this going to affect accessiblitiy for disabled people. Do the latest standards allow for this group of people to use the web?
Briefly, yes. HTML4, CSS and DOM have much, much greater support for users with various different physical abilities than any previous web standards. Here's [recent accessibility article on A List Apart] a good place to start.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Standards organizations are a scam. A (relatively) small group of people get together and say "This is the way it's going to be from now on." It's bullshit.
I've seen a lot of standards written, and rewritten, and rewritten, with never a fully-compliant implementation. No standards-body should ever release a standard without a fully-functional reference implementation; otherwise, the natural ambiguity of human language will always leave doubts about what is and isn't compliant. Standards are mostly useful when everyone who is expected to follow them has a part in making them (i.e. such as if all memory manufacturers get together and agree to make standard interchangeable chips); this is impractical for something like the WWW.
The WWW was defined by the first web-browsers. There has, in fact, been no truly useful addition to HTML since the first few years of development. It has only had gobs of useless and annoying eye-candy piled on top of (obscuring and interfering with) the content and navigation.
Every new browser worth mentioning still works with this original core functionality. This is the defacto standard
Defacto standards compliance:
-it works in every major version of IE and Netscape
-you can navigate with images turned off
-it works with Java turned off
-it works with Javascript turned off
-it works in Lynx
It's not hard to make a web page that everybody can use. Avoiding all the new features will generally make a better, less frustrating interface, too.
That's the problem: it's very easy to write good HTML. "Web designers" like to pretend that it's hard, that's what gives them a career. They sell flashy, expensive garbage that looks good to a manager viewing a local copy for the first five minutes. That's where the majority of the profit is, anyway. There's certainly a need for navigational interface designers and back-end programmers, but they hardly care about HTML features.
So let's turn the tables. Everybody use Lynx!
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So now browser dictates content? This is a perversion of the idea of standards.
Check http://www.anybrowser.org to see what some people are doing to promote a web with access for all.
What is 100% compliant HTML?
Thats the root the the problem. There is no standards board (except one could
say the people who make IE since Netscape is dot-com-ed). The W3C is a joke of
a power play and none of the other standards boards have published anything in
a long time.
The only way the web designers are going to get what they want is to redo the
low level formatting in something that is complete and not just a hack. For
example TeX allows everything designers need (except ease of use) and won't
work if its syntacticly incorrect (which is why html is so bad now). This proposal has as much merit as changing
the entire web from html to TeX.
If you don't care about me, I don't care about you. I've left more than one site because they only support this or that. I can't see how any commerse site can afford to not support as many browsers as possible.
That's the idea of this program - with the additional feature of known broken browsers get told to upgrade.
The web is not at all about stylized content. It's about content. Period.
.. javascript logins on government sites... whats next, javascript voting?))
I read slashdot every day, often many times a day, and I really dont give a hoot about how it looks. I even elected to use the lynx-friendly version so it'd be easier to read and faster to download. "Just the facts, ma'am".
If you're a designer yuppie who wants to charge by the hour to make some lousy flash animation, fine. Just dont force me to look at it, because I wont. And while you're at it, delete that snippet of javascript too, cuz I flipped the switch on that one too. I dont flip it on unless I really must (and tragically enough, it happens a couple of times per week (*sigh*
No matter how much hi-tech features and fancy graphics you put on your page, I still wont go there unless it holds some valuable content. Once you get some content, you'll notice that you really dont need all that fancy stuff anymore.
/proton, CEO of the "Ban CSS, Java and Flash" campaign.
For those folks out there without vision, or having vision impairment (my dad being one of them), I'm sure they're all going to love being forced to upgrade from text-only to fancy flashing pictures and scrolling marquees.
We should just go out and shoot all the horses now that we have these fancy horseless carriages.
Agreed.
I've always looking for a printer version of the sites that I read since most of those dump a whole pile of the trash that fills up most websites.
You could (and should) have used a server-side dynamic page that looked at the User-Agent: request header and 302'ed to (or, better yet, displayed) the correct content.
Many professionals have their pages hosted on a free service (such as GeoCities, XOOM, FortuneCity, Freeservers, or the like) that does not permit CGI access "for security purposes." Do you know how much mod_perl costs per month?
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Let's see. They want *outdated* browsers to run a *javascript* code to tell them to upgrade. But what if their browser is so old it doesn't support JavaScript?
Went to the site with Netscape 4.76, and just now with Mozilla .80; under 4.76, you're redirected to the upgrade page. Under Mozilla you get the main page.
So, I guess they do count Mozilla, they just don't tell you.
Three dits, four dits, two dits, dah!
Radio, radio, rah rah rah!
>> The web is not at all about stylized content. It's about content. Period.
>The web is about _lots_ of things, and to say something as sweeping as the above proves you don't understand that yet.
Yeah, the "web" might be about a lot of things, but keep this in mind:
HTML labels content, it does not control layout.
We should all think about this when we write web pages. If you write a web page with HTML, you have to remember that it isn't there to make your page look "right" or pretty, it is there to describe what the content is so that any browser can display it in an arbitrary way. If one browser wants to use the em tag to bold something, and another wants to use it to underline something that is FINE.
If you want to write a more complex "web" interface using something other than HTML, that does control layout (CSS anyone), then fine, but don't expect HTML to do something beyond defining what the content is.
fnord
What I mean is use it the other way round - browsers with javascript disabled or older versions would get the text version and only the new browsers (with js on) would be redirected to the fancy pages.
In other words reverse the default and code for the advanced browser being the special case.
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I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
I'd rather not be forced to upgrade if this is what I get. You know, come to think of it, I don't remember Mosaic ever crashing on me. Maybe I should downgrade :)
-magic
siri
One of the great advances of web standards is that they have re-introduced the strict separation of structural markup from display markup.
Now they just have to throw out that display markup, Java, Javascript, Flash, and all the other idiotic plug-ins, and the web will be usable again!
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If it's netscape 4 on Win32 or Unix do X
If it's netscpae 4 on mac do this
If it's netscape 6/ Gecko do this
If it's IE do this
etc
This was a real pain in the ass to write but...
Hint: you can remove the "if it's ns6/gecko" section since you browser would have already crashed if you are using mozilla.
Yes, unless you like living in the past
As a user, when I click on a link, I'm putting some small amount of trust in the author of that page to actually is valuable information that really is what the link's text described. There are several flavors of this (listed roughly in order of annoyance):
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Not a safe assumption to make. While I'm now fortunate enough to have SDSL, I was stuck with 26.4 for almost 2 years. Many others are in the same boat. Phone companies will do anything to squeeze more lines into existing hardware, and it is the modems that suffer. Many people are SOL when it comes to bandwidth.
Yes, I realize this was probably a troll, but 26.4 when you are doing remote monitoring is enough to drive you crazy, and make you pissed off for years to come...
Eventually, though, people stop making 30-pin SIMMS, then decent 72-pin ones get so much more expensive that it becomes cheaper to scrap that motherboard and get one that uses SDRAM in DIMMS.
That's also the way it works, and a part of what everyone has to live with. There's an inherent limit to backwards compatability called "the point of diminishing returns".
ZeroWing
Douglas Adams
1952-2001 :(
My point exactly. Make a DTD. Use the DTD and every broser can read it.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
This is absolutely STUPID!
Making people use this browser or that browser is in total contradiction to what the web is all about!
Free Information for ALL*
*all who happen to use the *right* web-browser
`which fortune`
An open alternative to flash is SVG, which is now a w3c recommendation.
"moo" - cow 3, 1906
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I just posted:
You know, that's a bit too strong a statement on my part. The WSP has a generally clued outlook, and their goal is to reinforce standards instead of making things more complicated, but I don't think forced upgrading is a great idea.
Web authors should write standards-compliant HTML and apply compliant CSS where needed. Browsers that can't render that should be upgraded. But users of those browsers don't need or won't benefit from this kind of campaign.
I'm not going to upgrade.
I'll be living in the Retro Web. And anything that doesn't will be read through a Retro Web to New Web Gate Way (like a HTML->WAP portwhole).
It'll be totally fun hiding out in retro web when all the New Web users get high-jacked and data mined.
GO RETRO!
------- see rettro.txt for details. -------
M0571y H@rml355.
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This web site will cure all your ailments.
When the Web Standards Project can comply with some reasonable standards on _their own site_ I'll start listening to them. Using JavaScript rollovers to hide link URLs in the status bar and CSS to prevent me from distinguishing visited links is complete, total, utter crap. They want me to upgrade for that shit? They can go to hell.
The original purpose of HTML was to present INFORMATION. The primary purpose of a user interface is to allow users to ACCOMPLISH THEIR TASKS. If anyone wants to take their entertainment site and dis anyone not using the latest browser, go ahead. If anyone wants to take their business, consumer, community, et al. site (you know, the kind that revolve around INFORMATION...where people just want to get at INFORMATION), and dis anyone not using the latest browsers then you're making a horrendous mistake. Frankly, if you run an informational or service site and you can't figure out how to make it work on older browsers, you belong in a different line of work.
How can we afford to ever sleep
So sound again
--ebtg
You mean some retards are still using NS4.7?
For instance, I hear IE3.0 claims to support CSS1, but a lot of CSS breaks it. And browser blah version 5.2 is in common use and is ok, except this HTML 4 element breaks it...
It seems that some of these older browsers will happily support a 'subset' of HTML4 (or XHTML for that matter) and CSS1, so has anyone written a guide to this minefield? I'd like to be able to validate a page as HTML and know that if it's valid by the standards, and avoids list of tags we know break older stuff then it'll work on IE 3.0. I'm not a web designer by any means, but I knock up the occasional page, so while I'm willing to put in a bit of effort to do this I don't have the time or inclination to do my own research regarding rendering on the old browsers.
By the way, the last page I did was my timetable for this year. Anyone in a non-IE/Mozilla (the two browsers I check in, both recent versions) care to flame me down if it doesn't work in their browser?
EA.com is leading the way...you need a Windows IE 5 or greater to play. Evidently "greater" doesn't mean that old joke that goes something like "so I installed Linux."
Oh great, now we'll have bigger clunkier browsers and even more script kiddies who think java is 133t. What next? "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US."?
Douglas Adams
1952-2001 :(
What on earth are you talking about? The web would work brilliantly if everyone followed strict HTML standards. Maybe what you mean is that the web wouldn't work at all if every User Agent tried to enforce strict HTML standards.
"moo" - cow 3, 1906
I dunno about the text, but as for tables, as a designer, I'm forced sometimes by clients to make sure that nothing goes past a certain limit (since they believe their own clients are on PDA, 640x480 monitors, etc.) .. yes, of course there are ways to stretch things, but sometimes some clients (for example, the Canadian government) does not allow even that... accessibility is king it would seem.
Having support for the latest standards and the old standards in a way that doesn't break one or the other is incredibly time consuming.
If we ever want to progress to the new technology that's now available, then at some point we have to say 'enough' and stop supporting the older browsers.
I'd rather it was done gracefully (possibly by having a plain text site for those people below a certain level), but I want the new tech to be used.
_____
My Journal
Do it on the server side--conditionalize the html you send on the user-agent header. Then your pages will work even for users who turn off JS (like I do).
I still believe flash is web cancer. These guys want every form of shiny thing on their web pages they dont want standards they want MTV.
The problem is...AOL's has a huge head (ego) and an even larger ass.
Rader
::laughs:: yeah, good point. touché.
I thought webpages are about content, not flying pop up windows or ultra hip design. Maybe some people care more about the way they can hide the content under pretty graphics, but I personally want to get the content (information) out with any browsers available at the moment.
Old standards allow this perfectly. What`s so important about these new standards that they need to be enforced to use ?
What about text based browsers ? It is really annoying for example to find a solution to a hardware problem, when the vendors page is full of odd javascript:NixNaxPox("index.html") or such crap.
Damn you webmonkeys. In the future I will probably see messages like "Sorry you need IE 8 and Windows 2002 SE SP4 to read your email"
GeoKone.NET
You know what? The web wouldn't work (at all) if everyone followed strict HTML standards. The only way anything works theses days is because everyone's bastardizing the "language."
Can you imagine dealing with XML as bad as HTML? hahahahaha.
Anyway, I think it's time that everyone followed HTML standards 100%.
for me to upgrade my browser. Netscape hasn't supported sparc*-sun-linux since 4.51. Someone, please tell me, how am I to upgrade to NS6 when AOL can't be bothered to telnet over to their sparclinux system and type make for me? I'd very much like to rid myself of this down-rev, POS browser and get something that looks like the authors have at least heard of the W3C. But until either AOL gets its collective head out of its collective ass, or Mozilla runs for more than 10 seconds between crashes, I can't, really...
Wrong, IRIX is very current, at least 4.75 is available and I have no reason to believe full support for 6 won't happen.
Even though I was warning them, it was a shock for the webmasters, when some guy checked the page with Netscape, and when some jscript turned out to be a wrong idea, when a customer had his customers in US (here, in Poland, there are very few guys with older browser - the net is still young). And they didn't learn.
Only I had to make it all server side. Yeah, go put it all on the admin's head...
Segmentation fault. Ore dumped.
(for lynx or other text-based browsers, on arriving at a site that uses Flash, MPEG, RealVideo, or whatever).
"Were sorry, but this site uses <insert your graphical technology here>. Please get a fucking clue, realize that there is more to the web than what can be displayed in a text browser, and NOT flame this page based on its graphical content, should it be posted on Slashdot.
We thank you for your cooperation."
Some users (like vision impaired -- or people using small handhelds) need to be able to get text only content. There are really no excuses not to provide data in a text-only format.
Second, JavaScript is a _bad_ idea. A quick check reveals that the percentage of users not using Javascript at all was 20% in 2000, up from 14% in 1999. This is of course due to pop-ups and to the irritating habit of overriding user preferences that we all know and love, but also because it is more and more common for companies to filter out javascript at their firewalls.
I understand the reasoning behind their concerns, but as a practical matter, many web sites do _not_ wish to alienate more users than they have to (though some obviously does not understand this).
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
This idea is not as entirely stupid as it sounds. It has its merits. I am all for browser independant code.
However, I think a slight variant of this would be better. Support all browsers where if the current version is x.y, you include support for browsers (x-1).0.
This means that you throw out support for all the really old browsers, but keep support for the immediately previous generation.
People right now can't be bothered to upgrade. I can guarantee that once their favourite websites stop working unless they upgrade they won't even give it a second thought: "Who cares if I have to spend an hour downloading Browser X, I want to view my AOL page!!", and so on.
Hey, that's not a bad idea. I can't tell you how many times I find images w/o ALT tags, which are quite important for text browsers and for those that are visually impared. AND, the validator dings all those &%$#@ Microsloth "smart quotes", which render as ?question marks? w/Netscape on Unix. The aptly named Demoroniser can help you fix these...
But to suggest the we NEED to use wizzbang doodads like javascript, CSS, etc., and we need to force users to enable these things is ridiculous! Personally, I don't trust java and especially javascript, and try to run with them turned off. I can't stand it when web designers force me to enable these things, when mostly it adds nothing to the content or the useability.
Since I actually *want* people to view my pages, so I usually try to code for a maximal audience.
<CONSPIRACY MODE=ON>
Besides, it's all just an attempt by the Feds to get you to switch to these new browsers with enhanced snoop capabilities. Haven't you read Jim Redden's Snitch Culture?
<CONSPIRACY MODE=OFF>
I like Slashdot's layout. I *don't* like sites which say and print their content in tiny little text in a 600-pixel wide table.
To me, content is king, NOT stylized content. There's room for folks who want glossy mags and folks who want text/plain. However, I have a theory that most folks don't give a rats about layout, as long as it's not un-attractive and as long as they get the information they want.
I don't like the WSP's methods on this one, but I wholeheartedly agree with their goals.
What people seem to be missing is that standards-compliant Web pages will be accessible to everyone, not just the people with the IE/Opera/Mozilla/whatever. The whole point is to get other browsers in on the action too.
Even the WSP seems to be missing this one at the moment, with their insistence on The Big Three. That's not what standards are all about. Yes, I'm a vehement supporter of standards-only pages; I've even chided Slashdot and Freshmeat for not going fully-compliant (though the later is making improvements in this aspect). But my reasons for going standards-only are to be inclusive, not exclusive like this.
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What the hell are you talking about? Professionals use GeoCities? Are you nuts?
Who the hell wants those damn GeoCities ads floating all over your content? Mostly personal sites are on GeoCities.
Is the idea to create webpages that break in older browsers which then do not display the "error" message becuase it is a non-JavaScript browser (or one which has JS disabled becuase the technology isn't very nice anyway)?
So what is it? Bells-and-whistles or standards-compliant?
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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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email: proprietary becomes free, org to com
It is going to greatly improve access for disabled people.
The problem is not old browsers per se, it is the buggy, partial implementations of NS4. Web pages written to current standard degrade gracefully in merely old browsers, that ignore tags and css which they can't handle. The problem is that NS4.* thinks it can handle, say, css positioning, and mungs it up horribly. Or crashes if you put a radio button inside a div with a solid border. Sometimes.
Thanks to NS4, we have pages laid out with tables, which confuse the shit out of assistive technology. We have visual effects achieved with blockquote tags and such, because that is the only safe thing that works. Accessibility is going to go way up when we can write standards based web pages.
backwards compatibility is a must. it's gotton bad over the years with all these table, java, image crazy webpages.. sure it's sometimes nice to have that smooth curvy border that changes colour and dances around when you move the cursor over it, but I've noticed the amount of real content going down with the increase of all this visual content. there are exceptions but lately the web has become cluttered with this junk people think is pretty. call me old fashioned but I (and I'm sure much of the slashdot community) use lynx for most of my web browsing. It's quick (or at least it used to be in the days before scrolling through 500KB of formatting/positioning pieces was necessary) for getting to the meat of a page, and in general I just prefer reading plain text in my own font and size without the distraction of everything else. now these days I've pretty much had to accept the fact that it's not always easy to do that anymore, especially on some of the big popular sites today, but I can still always count on the few web designers who understand the importance of writing html that anyone can use, and often sacrifice some of the visually pleasing elements for some usefulness.
now comes a campaign to rid the world of this important compatibility factor so a bunch of WYSIWYG web designers can whip up dirty broken code that everyone can see as they wish it to be, while invalidating millions of users with valid standards-following browsers. the web was not designed to be a TV set, but a useful way of linking resources together. anyway I've said enough..
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This web site will cure all your ailments.
I've written javascript like this before but it was more along the lines of:
If it's netscape 4 on Win32 or Unix do X
If it's netscpae 4 on mac do this
If it's netscape 6/ Gecko do this
If it's IE do this
etc
This was a real pain in the ass to write but it needed to be done some some funky tables our designer came up with looked right. Turned out to be a really cool looking site. I can't imagine turning to my PHB and saying, "This person is using Netscape 4, we're not going to sell them anything". I would have been fired sooo fast.
You're damn right. Flash and Java slow things down and their's no way I'm waiting more than 15 seconds for a page to load. It's okay to have a Flash presentation and be able to skip it, but organisations shouldn't create all their site in Flash, it's just crazy. Besides you can't bookmark a specific Flash website, nor increase fonts size, hyperlink color, etc.
Second, sometimes it is rather handy just to fire up lynx to do a quick little errand, instead of waiting 30 seconds Netcrap 6.0 to come up.
Third, how is this going to affect accessiblitiy for disabled people. Do the latest standards allow for this group of people to use the web?
I have been doing web development since 1995; for 3 years I was the main webmaster for a Australian G8 University. As the article says, it is workarounds for buggy browsers that are causing the problems. Inconsistencies and bad rendering are to blame here -- most ./ers will agree that this is why we are so glad to see Mozilla/NS6, since this is an open implementation that should do it as the spec says.
I wouldn't go to such extreme lengths as to mandate everyone use Javascript to give people an upgrade message. There are better ways; just use strict markup - use HTML4.01 strict or XHTML. Heh... use CSS1 exclusively for your layout, so when people with non-CSS browsers come along and see an ugly site, you can say <SPAN STYLE="display: none">Upgrade your browser to a CSS compatible one</SPAN>.
Raise the bar and encourage people to upgrade that way. You do not want to lock out users of other 'non-mainstream' browsers (lynx, IBM Webspeak, etc) by given them a redirect. However, taking out this 'compatability code' is a very tough case to present in many organisations, where management want it to look like a DTP document.
And don't say javascript.
you can't have it both ways, folks. we bitch about having to make adjustments to sites because they have to be viewable by IE3, 4,5, NS 3,4, 6, Mozilla, AOL, Opera, Lynx...etc. we say "gee, wouldn't it be cool if everyone followed standards so we wouldn't have to do this?" and *at the same time* complain because Netscape's browser "lost the war", and bitch about how Microsoft is evil because IE is used by more people than netscape. all right, that's an oversimplification, but still...
Karma only matters to me now and zen.
I ask 'cause I tried the latter two several times, just tried a minimal install, and am happily using NS6.01. Of course, mine is a win box cause I have a winmodem (non-Lucent chipset), but using the minimum install option might actually work. Or it might not. Hope this helps!
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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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email: proprietary becomes free, org to com
Move to IE 5.5, even though IE 5.0 is far more stable? Move to Netscape 6, even though 4.7x is far more stable, much faster, and available on more platforms? (Which version of Lynx do they want us to use?)
Seems like these guys want to install a Big Red Switch on the Web, and turn it off for everyone not surfing on the bleeding edge. No thanks.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
As a web developer, I love this idea. I'd no longer have to keep 30 browsers installed on my system.
But as someone who sometimes uses lynx, or services like avantgo, I'm not so sure about it. It could mean that web designers will assume everyone has browsers that support graphics and all the fancy plugins. But it could also mean that web sites will be designed with content seperated from form. The later would mean BETTER support for text-only on low-end browsers.
This could be a good things, but it also could be a bad bad bad thing.
You may want simple, or complex, or weird, or whatever, but the fact is that this increased fracturization of the internet is destroying progress. FUD perhaps, but by God, if I have to write another stupid page with four different ways to do the same thing just so that I can support every browser out there, I am going to shoot someone. Four levels of nested tables makes sites absolutely evil, but that is what you must do if you want to maintain layout compatibility. Even then, it still breaks like crazy on older browsers. I think that if we don't have a concerted effort to get everyone to update to a 5.0 or equivalent browser, and soon, we will face an even bigger problem - new standards are just not backword compatible, and soon half the pages on the net will be accessible to only certain browsers. How are we going to improve the web landscape if we cannot even use the new standards, for fear that no one will be able to see them? I mean, DHTML is still rarely used, a few years after its release, becuase so many 3.0 and worse browsers are out there. If you really just want plain text and crap layouts, go back to Usenet. The web is all about stylized content. I mean, have you looked at Slashdot's HTML lately? The insanity must end!
OD
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
You know, this idea isn't entirely bad. I build all my sites by hand with templates and such that are W3C compliant. [If you look at TOTK.com, you'll see that it's not, but *I* don't build it.] I encourage others to do the same, for two reasons:
That said, the adoption rate is either going to help this or harm it. I would have no problem adding something like this to some of my sites. However, I've got one problem: one of them, our SGA Web site, is most often viewed by students on campus. This usually means labs, and lab techs are loathe to take labs down while they upgrade the Web browser, especially when it's not a high-demand item.
It would actually be better if a couple of big sites would do this, but guess what? They won't.
It appeals to the windmill-tilting standard-bearer in me, but I'm not going to rush out there to be the first Don Quixote...
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-- Geof F. Morris
Ok, I can agree with the separation of content and style. But what tools currently exist to support generation of the N different styles? Not that I have used a lot of Web generation tools. I use Net Object Fusion and Arachnophilia. Do realize that much of the Web is generated by people who do not want to know about HTML, CSS, XML, or whatever. How do those people generate Websites that are viewable by all?
The real problem I have with this "initiative" is that people using older browsers tend to be doing so for a reason.
Most people using Netscape 3 is because they are using older computers, and can't afford to upgrade to newer computers. Basically, we are trying to tell people that can't afford a recent computer that can run memory intensive versions of Netscape and IE that they can't use the Internet anymore?
Standards are supposed to make sure that more people can view a web page, not less. The only thing this will accomplish is that anyone who can't afford a new computer won't be able to use the Internet any more. Is this really what we want to say? The message we want to convey to everyone? You can't afford a new toy, or don't want a new toy, so your old one shouldn't work any more either?
Unbelievable. Absolutely Unbelievable.
One of these days i'm going to find this 'peer' guy and reset HIS connection!
HTML is fine for displaying content, however the problem seems to lie in that Web content is much more now than HTML. The Internet is now used in ways not imagined during its early years, and the Web browser situation is similar.
I agree with posts saying plugins are bad. However, if its done in an open standards sort of way, I don't think we should have to hold ourselves back. The web has an opportunity to become a pseudo-desktop. At some point we have to cut the dead weight.
For those visually impaired, XML to voice translation has got to be more accurate than badly written HTML to voice.
If we as web developers plan, we should be able to move forward, eliminate bad HTML, browsers, etc, and still accomodate all those in a better way than we are today.
From their web page:
Together we can make the web accessible to everyone.
So by convincing designers and sites to prohibit everyone not using the latest browser from viewing their pages, they're making it accessible to everyone.
Not that I'm against standards per se, but if you just throw off these trite slogans you just turn them into gibberish.
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Just get a certain nearly-free[1] program called The Proxomitron and you can use it to do many, many useful things, including faking your browser.
[1] Nearly Free: The program is "ShonenWare." It's not spyware, has no ads, and never expires. The registration is basically buying a CD from the maker's favourite band.
O'Toole's Commentary on Murphy's Law:
We've tracked statistics of browser adoption by our users for the past 4 years:
http://ridge.aps.org/APSMITH/osstats/
-- people, or at least this group of people, do gradually upgrade; it just takes a while. If Mozilla/Netscape 6 had been available sooner, we'd certainly have wider adoption by now. But just wait a year or two, and nearly everybody will be using it (or IE 5+ where that's available). Does it really matter that much to try to force it to happen sooner?
Energy: time to change the picture.
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
Not much. You can find sites that use PHP that charge less than $10/month. Some less than $5/month. What professional can't afford that? Somewhere on php.net there is a list of providers so look there. I'm sure some of these same providers provide mod_perl.
... precisely because this standards body has no way to enforce this.
On the other hand, server-side methods of the likes of Perl, PHP, and others, are making it very easy to deliver solid, cross-browser compliant code without having to resort to JavaScript gimmicks. And who needs DHTML anyways? And what about text-only browsers like Lynx? Should we simply forget about them, too? I pride myself, as a web designer, in developing sites that look good AND operate correctly on all browsers, regardless of how advanced they are.
Agreed.
CSS uses the principle of "graceful degradation." In other words, if the browser can't or won't use the style sheet, the resulting view should still be readable and useful.
The Web Standards Project (feh) doesn't know what it's talking about.
If you make a detect script that won't let you in without the latest IE or NS you preclude the possibility of new better browsers. So soon you will have M$, AOL or nothing.
My mom got a virus on her computer (less than two weeks after I told her to be careful about opening attachments I might add), and they had to format and reinstall Windows. Dad installed Win98 SE instead of the Win95 that was originally there. Mom said that she got strange errors in Netscape, so I asked her to fire it up. While it was loading (this is a Pentium 200 with 24 megs of RAM and a 350 meg drive), she commented that it was an old version.
I know you have to try pretty hard to download an old version of Netscape from their site, so I figured she was mistaken.
Nope, she was right: It was Netscape 2.0! Apparently my dad installed it from the CD-ROM he'd received when he signed up with GTE many years ago.
I started to download a newer version, then stopped when I noticed she only had 6 megs free. Solution: remove Netscape 2.0 and use Internet Explorer, since it was already there.
The error? Some strange JavaScript error on a rather simple page...I didn't even bother to debug.
I'm pleased to notice that the proposed methods of browser detection and redirection actually utilize modern functions and see if they work -- sort of like <NOFRAMES>. So, first of all, obscure but modern browsers will "just work". And perhaps more importantly, older browsers (and special-purpose ones, like text-speech) could transparently be redirected to pages designed for that technology level.
As a compromise between users who want to stick with their old browsers and designers who don't want all of their time stuck in a quagmire of old-browser esoterica, I'd suggest that the redirection page should be a plain-text version of the content, with a footnote note that compliance with certain standards is required to view the fancy web page.
This is less heavy-handed than just pushing people away, and yet still gets the message out -- and doesn't take nearly as much time as it would to generate a distinct complete HTML site.
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webpages that are renderable to plain text (w3m/lynx/emacs' browser) are quite probably more easily rendered to audio outputs......
if these people want to insult people with visual handicaps, i guess thats their problem, but if enough people with visual handicaps got together, appropriate lawsuits could be used to inspire people to avoid using web design that doesn't work right.....
just my $.02 USD
Need a Catering Connection
I'm sorry but there really is no reason to not upgrade to the latest browser. I mean come on. "boohoohoo i have dial-up so i can't download a 14 meg file boohoo" oh come on, whiner. I freelance pc support and consultation and am constantly encountering people with ancient machines demanding i get quake 3 or some such system gobbler to run on their ancient machine. People that don't upgrade are whiny babies that expect they should do nothing to be able to experience the latest and greatest. "what do you mean I can't see you whiz-bang site unless i upgrade Its not my fault your page is too complex or nifty you should make it so my computer can view your page" boohoo. It's like demanding that a VCR be able to play a DVD. the investment of a little time to download a new browser is not too much to ask. I mean come on it may not always be free as in speech but is as in beer and thats what matters to the rest of the world. plus if you can't download it you can pick up magazine at any grocery store with a cd attatched that has the latest version of your browser or ISP (aol, etc)
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Currently the best test for a site to avoid is if it says "IE 3/4/5 required.", "Netscape 4/5/6 required." or "Resolution must be 1024x768." Even worse is the appearance of JavaScript and Java--the black plague and ebola of web sites.
Many of the features of my browser are used in nearly every other page I visit, but I'll be hard pressed to find one example of good use for many of them. JavaScript, for example, is used everywhere, but *very* rarely for anything usefull. Some 20% of users turn it off, not because of imcompatibilites, but it's uselessness and annoyance (popups). Frames are another example--they're shunned by the design community not because of any reason but their abuse.
I've found that the less features of my browser a page uses: the easier it is to navigate, the faster it downloads and works, the better impression it displays, and the higher likelihood I'll find information instead of gimmiks.
What will forcing standards complient everything do to the web? Will design get worse as designers are free to abuse even more "features"? Will it be more difficult to tell the difference between a well designed site and crap?
But could things actually get better? What's the reasoning behind that view? With this new freedom given to designers, to freely use any feature without fear of imcompatibility, be rightly unabused by those who don't need any more features--AKA: most designers?
There nothing worse then trying to get information from a site and having the whole site renderd unusable by "modern code".
There was a time when I had no option but to use my laptop to surf the web and with its small harddrive X was just too big to use just for the benifit of a GUI browser.
links/lynx/w3m were all incapible of viewing the site of the manufacture of the laptop. What was I to do?
I was to say that I would never buy that brand of computer again.
If they can't display in plain text then they lose all my buissness.
Txt browsers are the fastest means of getting to real information on the web without all the distraction of corp america trying to get me to click on this and win that.
Altavista was even so nice as to know that you were using a txt browser and give you a readable page. Google looks great in txt or GUI.
The comand line is your friend. ibpconf.sh
Ascii artist &
Most of the things they want to do with the latest and greatest browsers are flash and glitter anyway. More time should be spent making the content better and more accessable, not excluding people because they are not using the browser of a sites choice.
Want to make a site look pretty, fine. But seperate the content from the layout, then the content (ie. important bit) is still viewable if a browser does not know what to do with your flashy layout.
If Godzilla did not exist, man would have had to create him.
So what's wrong with Netscape 3.0? Sure, it might not load any pages with any kind of javascript on it anymore, but really, don't you think thats MY problem? If I don't access your site because you choose to make it more complex than I am able to access, then that is YOUR problem and shame on you for not providing an adaquate alternative. Certainly, you don't HAVE to, and if I REALLY need to see your page, I will. Older browsers have certain features that make them ideal. They take up less space, they're a LOT less bloated, they load faster, and in some cases, they're a lot less bug ridden.
So I'll use whatever browser I damn well please.
-Restil
restil@alignment.net
Play with my webcams and lights here
The original goal of Web and HTML was to be platform neutral - now I'm being told that I need one of the approved browsers in order to sites.
The point wasn't to reject all browsers but a select few. The point was to reject a few bad browsers (read IE 4 for Windows and Netscape 4.x) that are known not to conform to standards, known not to degrade gracefully when presented with content they don't recognize, known not to be accessible to the physically challenged, and known not to be fixable by the community.
I use conforming HTML 4 on my own pages and see no reason why I should have to support user agents that don't handle conforming HTML in a "nice" way.
If you're running Netscape 4, upgrade to Mozilla 0.8. Now.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Just a friendly warning to be careful. I remembered that old versions of Netscape were vulnerable to a rather nasty security hole. In essence, an applet downloaded from a web page has the ability to make your browser act as a web server, giving read (not write) access to any files on your hard drive. All you have to do is turn off Java, though, to correct this. AFAIK they fixed this in NS 4.xx somewhere, but I don't know if they fixed NS 3.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
What about those of us that use non-standard OSes that don't have Netscape, IE, or Opera?? The original goal of Web and HTML was to be platform neutral - now I'm being told that I need one of the approved browsers in order to sites. Its bad enough when I go to sites that tell me that since I'm not on a PC (defined as Windows/Mac) they won't display ...
"Software is the difference between hardware and reality"
Great article here, probably because I wrote it.
People who aren't upgrading.. won't... "This webpage looks best on IE 5.5 or Netscape 6" won't convence them...
This will however make a decent excuse for that webmaster who wants to support only the latest beta...
I don't actually exist.
If they're talking about not supporting Microsoft of Netscape extensions to HTML, I'm right behind them. But if they're talking about not supporting HTML-3.2, then screw them!
I like C++. It's great. But if I have a project that doesn't need objects or templates, then I'll use just plain vanilla C. Likewise, if I don't need any HTML-4.0 constructs, I won't use them, and resort to HTML-3.2 instead.
And I'm certainly not going to put in any ECMAScript telling the user that I disapprove of their personal choice of web browser!
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
What about schools and other public computers? Most schools use Netscape 4x/3x and most districts will not spend the time to upgrade all of them. Not to mention the idiots still using IE.
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AIM: dpete455
Yahoo!: dpete455
Jabber: dpete455
http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares
What you say?
There's no benefit to any of these new lousy
gimmicks you build into your browsers.
My browser shows text and pictures. It allows
forms. It can do encryption. NO ONE FUCKING
NEEDS ANYTHING ELSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!
A web page with a video on it and some instructions on how to do something technical. How about video games or movies, do you like those? Because this is the kind of 'fluff' that an idyllic internet of the 21st century could provide.
This has all been possible for some time, now we just need the bandwidth :)
Now see, that's funny. Starting a post with "Gee, I'm kewl..." is not. Some people just don't know how to poke fun properly. :-)
"why do you hate Java/Javascript?"
/. masked. How often would you find yourself on that goat...- Shit?
With all browsers that I know, i can not control wich kind of Javascript to allow. Mozilla is starting in the right direction here(disabling pop-ups). But pop-ups are not the only problem. The one thing I hate most and that is the reason i usually switch Javascript off are masked links, as seen on the page http://www.webstandards.org/ .
I want to know, where i am going to.
Imagine all Links on
There are many, many other abuses of Javascript.
As long as i cannot control it, i will not turn it on.
Especially considering dot.gone tendency and overall economic slowdown. Those who follow this advice will be the first to go, giving others more chances. Good Thing(tm)
Last time I looked, there wasn't an NS6 that had email and newsgroups built-in. If I was up to NS6, I'd have to put up with more Netscape commercialism, and I'd have been exposed to some security problems that didn't hit 4.76.
Have you looked at Mozilla 0.8 (NS6 without the commercialism and with more bugfixes) yet?
But with a 4+ year old computer and only 128 MB
(I wish I could fit that much RAM in my 4+ year old computer.) Mozilla 0.8 should work just fine for you.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
While I know there are people out there who complain about "being forced to upgrade," I think using existing stanards is good. I mean, it's 2001 -- when will I be able to use CSS1 (a 1996 specification) fully? How about CSS2?
/finally/ (as of 0.8) replaced Netscape for me on the desktop for browsing. It supports it.
Mozilla's
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Interesting thing, I can zoom the fonts in KDE with a standard two button mouse. Same effect but one of us had to spend $80. Somebody's got to help Gates stay the richest man in the world, though...
AC comments get piped to
...when they pry it from my cold dead /dev/hda.
The javascript thing made me grin. We have enough problems with that shit already....
The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. (Marx)
I get the impression that some people aren't even thinking about writing web pages for layouts other than HTML... how about the wireless craze that is being hyped into existance? How about dealing with WML, VoxML, etc? If you don't come up with a half decent method for dealing with different versions of HTML, then how will you deal with the different devices?
:)
Remember, XML/XSL is your friend.
$0.02 (CDN)
http://www.webstandards.org/ gets a frowny face from the HTML validity checker in my current primary browser, iCab.
More specifically, it reports "Error: The defined widths of table cells are not consistent." The problem seems to be a width="25" in one of the td tags, which should be width="25%" to match the other rows.
I think if more browsers adopted an always-there error-checking interface like iCab's (a small face icon that is either a smiling green or frowning purple; clicking on it produces a detailed error report) then there would be a lot more pressure on developers to produce decent HTML. It is amazing how few web pages actually get it to smile.
BTW, /.'s HTML gets a much longer error report with its frowny face.
Still, this NS 4.76 crashes a lot. Locks up when you switch windows too quickly, about once an hour when I'm using it heavily. I think that it has to do with multiple processors on my machine and pages that contain javascript, flash, or something like that. But with a 4+ year old computer and only 128 MB, and I like to check the internet without closing down all the applications I'm using for work, NS6 is not a good idea for me.
Why not install it on the server level so that it forwards using more standard, lower-level methods
Installing any dynamic content on a server costs a hefty chunk of change when upgrading from free hosting (Geo/Tripod/8m/Xoom).
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Go for your life on the latter, but then don't bitch if it still doesn't look "right". Sure, I've heard people bitch about how they can't look at a site without doing this, and then it still doesn't work. One of the first precepts of computing, "Garbage In, Garbage Out".
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
Upgrade your browsers!
Um, that's the point of this discussion. The thing is, it is to the point where the next generation browser will _require_ next generation computers. People that have a Pentium 133 that does the job just well enough shouldn't feel forced to upgrade to an Athlon or P!!! just to view a _web_page_, because browsers are excessively bloated as they are. Forcing people to upgrade in many cases means forcing them to buy a new computer. I know several people that use the internet and computers as a toy or are whatnot, and have no need to blow money on a new computer just to see the latest sites. Sometimes it is a money thing, sometimes they have better things to spend money on. Not everyone really cares about their computers as most slashdot types, but like using them to find product information, communicate, etc.
So in short, intentionally not supporting the older browsers means that you don't give jack about the people that don't want to customers that are pushed around by companies or the usual web wonk or elitist developer.
why use html-4 with all that when xhtml-1 is the current recomendation? and it still seems like the standards a in a messy flux. wait until they settle down first. at least xhtml basic seems stable for now...
It *IS* identical, and it *IS* as easy as typing make, at least it is if you already support big-endian targets, which Netscape does. Look, Netscape supports SPARC. It supports Linux. They've been supported together in the past. Furthermore, sparc-linux and i386-linux are 100% compatible for standards-compliant userland code. Therefore, there is no excuse for not supporting it now.
Well, they asked for it; we're going to have to retaliate by boycotting every page that isn't valid HTML 3.2.
That allows forms and tables, already more than I'd trust some people with. Of course, most uses of background and inline images wouldn't be missed either, but let's take this campaign one step at a time here.
---Bruce Fields
Requiring people to use the latest bloatware to access the WWW should make hardware vendors, especially memory makers, very happy. How many people run a v4 browser or an older version of an OS to squeeze another useful year out of an original pentium? Guess you're SOL.
"Konqueror is very standards compliant. So I use the handy user-agent option to disguise myself as IE. Yay, now I can view it." BINGO, and i do the same with iCab 2.4 which is also very standards-compliant... that said, i do believe that often as not, less is more, simple is beautiful, AND form follows function.
8:35am up 10 days, 19:46, 16 users, load average: 0.40, 0.36, 0.37
155 processes: 150 sleeping, 4 running, 1 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 50.7% user, 2.3% system, 0.0% nice, 46.8% idle
Mem: 130656K av, 127616K used, 3040K free, 0K shrd, 372K buff
Swap: 248936K av, 111732K used, 137204K free 48604K cached
PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT LIB %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
8746 mikec 10 0 37436 36M 14244 R 0 45.0 28.6 1:47 mozilla-bin
Since there's no <pre> tags, I'll confirm. Yes, that's 45% CPU usage on a p3-700 and 28.6% mem usage (out of 128Meg).
Yes, you could use Opera but screw ad-ware. There is no IE for *nix, and NS4 sucks for CSS and DOM.
Mozilla has some serious problems.
If you really want to have fun, try changing the inner contents of a div tag with JS on a scrollable layer with mozilla. The first time the layer contents overflows, you can no longer write to the layer. Yes, there's been bugs submitted.
--
A mind is a terrible thing to taste.
"A mind is a terrible thing to taste."
I'm frequently reminded of the Dilbert cartoon where Dilbert's boss tells him the company website needs to be more "webbish". And then he asks how long that will take. :) That's the world of professional website development in a nutshell.
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This web site will cure all your ailments.
There are two ways to keep viewers attention. Dazzle them with brilliance or blind them with bullshit. You claim that only the latter will hold their attention for more than 30 seconds. I guess if all you know is "hammer" then every viewer looks like a nail.
First of all, I reported the bug that NS 4 failed to correctly position the startup window via the standard -geometry option to Netscape back in version 4.0b2 and they didn't fix it. Many 4.X versions came out since then and they have not fixed it in any one of them. The Mozilla project came out and it still didn't work, so I reported the bug in Bugzilla. It kept getting put off and put off and put off and now they are saying it won't be fixed by final release.
I start up multiple X environments by script control and NS 3 is the last browser that actually works. NS 4 and later foul things up in the startup and make a mess.
Come on guys (Netscape/Mozilla coders), how hard can it be? It works in NS 3. I think it's time to get some browsers that are NOT so buggy. And I believe the reliance on toolkits, and the confusion over how they work, or bugs therein, is part of the problem. But you tell me. Tell me why you can't fix this bug.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I hope someone mails the whole /. thread back to the committee.
Content?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Netscape 6 on my dad's p100 with 16 meg of ram
come on! he has NO interest in upgrading his box, doesn't want to spend the money, which is FINE since he can do all his basic webbrowsing, wordprocessing & e-mail on it, which is all he does
but I don't even want to THINK about what netscape 6 would be like on there, I mean...it takes a long time sometimes on my PIII-500!
I work as an internet developer, and frequently have to code for the "lowest denominator"; that is to say, so code so that it will work on even the lowliest of browsers (really old versions of Netscape, for example.) And a lot of times, that entails re-writing portions of code because one browser may not like/support a feature, or the page layout becomes completely screwed up as a result. I'm all for upping the ante and forcing browsers to be able to handle certain things; I just think we need to make sure that IE isn't the only browser that can do it.
---
evil adrian
evil adrian
They don't *have* to use JavaScript to do this. We all know that javascript is turned off on about 20% of peoples' machines because of popups, etc.
Why not install it on the server level so that it forwards using more standard, lower-level methods.
That is, if this were a good idea at all, which I doubt.
Nevertheless the site renders correctly only in IE. (The paragraph below "Resources" crosses the intended border.)
So either Mozilla, IE or the page designers don't support the standards. Perhaps it is only my Mozilla Build (2001021304). Can anyone confirm this with a newer / older Build of Mozilla?
This page shows also why nested Tables would have been better: I could use one of the best features of Mozilla and make the fucking Text bigger than 10px on my 15" Monitor with a 1024x768 resolution using my Mouse-Wheel, which on this page i can not do.
what makes you think javascript would even work?
A better way is to have the server detect the user agent from the request header and send a 'Location:' header back when appropriate.
AC comments get piped to
Standards must remain backward compatible and developers must be allowed to care about content and accessibility if they choose to do so. You don't care about that? Then feel free to redirect whoever access your site to whatever sh*t you want.
i'm sorry but if you are using a non-standards compliant version you are living in the damn past. for you hardcore people out there, the sites you want to see wont be upgrading by the way of the web standards project. your group of users aren't interested in current web technology, you simply want information delivered to you. i'm not saying you are ignorant, thats just the way you like things. so your sites will continue to work for you. for the rest of us, the web has evolved. the technology of the web has evolved. there are very few reasons to be using browsers whose technology dates back to 1997! what good is the w3c at all if developers dont pay attention to them at all? i am a web developer, and it is a pitiful shame how i have to make my code a god damn mess for old browsers. if you would look at jeffrey's source code on www.alistapart.com it is fuckin beautiful. i'm amazed. he has completely separated style from content using html and css. and it looks good on any standards compliant browser. the real web developers of the world need to unite and make a stand, which is what we are doing. if you want to live in the past you can stay there. we won't miss you.
Fricking shiny flashing ad-filled fluffy empty bullshit was the other point and niether had anything to do with KDE. (I personally think KDE and Gnome have a decent shot against Windows, especially once consoles (which linux ports easily to) start popping up more and more in conjunction with HDTV and the like
As long as Flash keeps working on all platforms (most) though, I won't mind, because personally I think vector layout is the future of the web experience and since it's mostly mathematical, so it's easy to port.
aol making netscape 6 bad? netscape 6 is a great browser. its just packaged up mozilla, which is open source, not made by aol.
Sigh. The guys in the story have a good sentiment, but a rude implementation. Why can't more people be thoughtful and polite these days?
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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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email: proprietary becomes free, org to com
Actually, using the newer features like StyleSheets, and HTML4 compliance are going to have an easier time achieving the your requirements (especially the lynx / w3m part). Why? They do better with stuff like that. No silly tables needed for layout structure, HTML has purely content, stylesheet has layout.
Anyhow, the majority of people posting here seem to think otherwise. Guess they haven't looked at what their viewing in a while.
Rod Taylor
Frankly, any site I hit with "aural" content gets bypassed immediately
Even MP3.com?
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
(Before anyone suggests that I look at Junkbuster, I already use it!)
Check out Toyota Canada with mozilla + javascript.
No go.
I wrote them an email to remind them that as a commercial site it is in their best interest to be accessible to anyone. They responded that they were thinking about it.
That was a month ago. I just hope they don't build cars like they think...
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
Now, I'm a professional website developer, and I have my fair share of frustration in building websites that are generally accepted as "standards compliant" but that can't be rendered properly by many people (sometimes even our clients, on their own machines).
But, the approach of these folks seems too harsh and too subjective. They're basically saying that "our desire to use standards is supremely more important than your [lack of technical experience | shortage of time | computer's limitations | appreciation for simplicity. ]"
It's not that these things can't be overcome in time - they can, and they are being overcome. But to suggest that, starting right now, someone shouldn't be able to look at a website with whatever client software they want is akin, in my mind, to saying they shouldn't be able to publish on the web unless they adhere to a certain set of guidelines. That's scary.
An hour to download the major component of 99.9% of people's internet experience is not a huge ask, in my opinion.
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
If you were designing a website targeted at issues for blind people you may suddenly realize how useless that IMG tag is. OTOH, if you are designing a website for some modern art culture magazine you're going to simply overdo the IMG tag. And, if you are IBM designing the olympic webpage, you'll remember that (for BACKWARDS COMPATABILITY) there is an ALT tag that satisfies both worlds.
; 2b=b;2=1
Whats my point? Know your audience. Rome wasn't built in a day and neither should your webpage. Understand the demographics that will be visiting your website and adjust your style accordingly. There is no such thing as a one-site-fits-all website; each site is targeted at a specific audience. Your job as a web developer is to understand this audience and work with it.
While your working on that 40 level deep nested table, please remember that you did set out to say something... right?
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a=b;a^2=ab;a^2-b^2=ab-b^2;(a-b)(a+b)=b(a-b);a+b=b
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
I have used the new tech. It sucks. You use yours, I'll use mine.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
If it were possible to kill off old, bad standards then we would have shot FTP in the head and left it to rot in a ditch long ago.
yes they are in chrage of standards, and the standards are what ie5.5/ns6/mozilla/opera5 support. w3c can't force anyone to change their browser tho. it takes a genius like zeldman to come up with this idea, and he has many followers. and as i've stated in another post, not every single site will participate in this project. hardcore users who like jakob nielson type websites will stick with their outdated browsers and read their simply designed pages. all they want is content, and that is what they'll get. i'm not complaining to these users, for their desire will be fulfilled by their old browser. i just see no reason to use a browser that takes back to 1997 - nn4.x. if you wanna use nn, then use nn6 or the latest build of mozilla.
If you don't have the time to explain yourself, then why do you even bother?
Please while you're at it, tell me why TV, Cartoons, Movies, or crisp illustrations suck too and I'll make everyone stop creating them, because everyone hates them.
There is informative content. There is art. Then there is advertising. Text is fine for the former, although math symbols and graphs can help. Visual art requires graphics, as auditory art requires speakers. Its the advertising that we hate. There is an *in your face* attitude that makes me long for the printer format option. *sigh*
If you have a problem with the content being ignored due to bells and whistles, CSS is more of a concern than Flash. God, I cant tell you how many times I have screamed at developers for using !import on me so that I cant read the damn text.
It's like that argument on wheter cars are evil because they kill... In the end most everyone agrees, it's the person behind the wheel, not the car, that is doing the killing.
Finder of the any key.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Images ARE content
Granted, some sites (corbis.com, artchive.com, etc.) actually provide images as their content, but bullet GIFs instead of <li> and transparent spacer GIFs instead of CSS positioning doesn't look very "content" to me.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
this project is not about god damn images. its about clean concise standards compliant code that can display the content of a page similarly between browsers/platforms.
As somebody who designs a website I wholeheartedly support the idea of everyone upgrading their browser to something standards compliant. If everyone would support CSS reliably my job would be SO much easier.
But the fact is there are a lot of older computers out there being used by folks who can't afford a new computer, or as cheap internet terminals. And new browsers are so big/inefficient/slow that old computers can't even run them. Or even newer ones. Netscape 6 is ridiculously slow and STILL doesn't support CSS properly. IE mac 5.5 is the best I've seen so far but still is too processor hungry. People with older computers cannot be cut out as viewers, so until they are supported I cannot ignore them.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
People so quickly forget that most of the population simply cannot afford to have the latest and greatest computer so they can run the latest versions of web browsers. Unless you've got a computer made in the last couple of years, you can forget about running IE 5 or Netscape 6 or even 4.7. I am fortunate to have a computer that can handle modern browsers, but many people aren't. My roommate uses an older 486 for just web browsing and chatting, and can't afford the latest PIII or G4 machines - and I think that is common of much of the web-surfing population. Don't forget those people when designing web pages or web standards! How many schools can afford to keep on top of technology, especially private schools? Do you want to see the hard-earned money they've invested become worthless because they can't afford computers to run the latest web browsers and therefore can't even look at a web page? Web designers - get off your ivory towers and join the rest of the world.
Just don't support them. Use the standards and ignore the fact that the result won't look right on certain browsers. Furthermore, don't code specifically for broken new browsers. For the page to actually be standards-compliant, it can't really treat even the latest browsers specially.
If you actually follow the standards, the only people who won't have the site work are those whose browsers are not supporting the foolishly-designed standards.
Web Standards Project? Aren't W3C supposed to be in charge of web standards?
You'll notice that their own web site doesn't do this. Hypocrites.
On the other hand, an important lesson of the dot-com era seems to be that commercially oriented websites should encourage people to buy their products from their website. Sure, its easy for lazy webdesigners to "require" Internet Explorer, X version of Java/ECMA script, or similar - but that loses customers. If your page isn't readable with Lynx, you've lost a great many blind and visually impaired users, not to mention users who browse sans-graphics in the hope of speeding up their connections. If your page relies upon the existence of V4 browsers, you've lost a whole bunch of users on cellphones, PDAs and some primitive appliances. Even frames may be pushing it a bit in terms of global compatibility!
What this group are forgetting is that HTML is designed to convey content and not a specific look and feel. Ideally, a webpage should be useable on any device, irrespective of platform.
That said, it can be really hard to stop web developers from going nuts with Flash, sometimes. :-(
Lead developer, http://wisptools.net
Yes.
You're currently on Eastern Standard Time, not Daylight. The server might be a little confused.
enjoy your life in the past. just go use lynx if you wanna be such a hardcore user...
I have a workstation here which still runs Netscape 3, and Slashdot works fine with it. I hope not many providers follow these rules. Supporting people with non-0-day-old hardware, I think this whole thing is a big pile of nonsense that will only make hardware vendors happy.
If people don't understand HTML (etc.) well enough to design "backward-compatible" web sites, they are in the wrong job.
- Hubert
Backwards compatability is a fact of life, for all branches of technology. Yes, it is annoying. Yes, it does mean you can't implement some-really-cool-hack with some bleeding edge technology. That's the way it works, live with it.
How is XML going to help us if people don't create the support base that is the first rule of using XML?
By The Way what kruft. I've used old versions of browsers. They don't fuck up like the newer ones.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Well, you can't control everything in the world, why not just turn yourself off?
:)
Javascript is not going to do evil things to your computer, just to the objects on the page. You can't get to Alt-F4 or (whatever window closing keyboard shortcut you use) to close a pop-up window? Please, what's the worst that javascript can do to you? Steal your email address? I can see turning off unsigned Active-X or Java applets, but Javascript? Please get real!
You probably use Netscrape on Losix anyway, which has an absolutely horrible to code for document object model compared to that of Microsoft's, so you probably get errors and strange behavior all the time anyway
People only upgrade their browsers when they think there is suficent need.
I work in the design business and always tell junior designers if there is is something that you cant do at the moment inside the html4 spec or using flash 4 then you need to revise your design skills so you can do it.
the fact that you can doesnt always meen you should
people using version 3 or so browsers understand that they might not be seeing the page the way it was designed but that doesn't mean that you should block them from seeing the content.
i even use lynx some days, just cos i want to. most news sites can still be read through lynx. a piece of js that tells me to upgrade to a new version of lynx is just silly
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Drink Coffee - Do Stupid Things Faster And With More Energy!
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Drink Coffee - Do Stupid Things Faster And With More Energy!
As several posters have said here, you don't shut out people with older browsers, you just present them with something that's not quite as visually appealing. And yes, as several others have said, separating the presentation from content actually does make your page more accessible.
My updated home page still looks just fine in Lynx, and it has a "please upgrade" link that goes to this upgrade page. Note that it doesn't force you to go anywhere or do anything that you don't want to do. Happy now?
Then why not just start over and use something like java(of course make layout esier). Most people have at least a 56K modem now.
WaSP wants everybody to write HTML-compliant markup, but they also want us to make our web sites not work on older browsers. These two ideas seem almost mutually exclusive. I strongly support writing compliant code because it allows web sites to be viewed with all browsers. As a previous poster mentioned, WaSP's web site works perfectly in lynx. Standards compliance is a Very Good Thing, but alienating users of older browsers for no reason certainly isn't.
While it sounds nice to require people to upgrade, look at a few results: The only two browsers you will be able to use will be Netscape/Mozilla and IE.
I regularly use iCab on my Mac, and I have no idea how many times I have had web pages redirect me "because our web pages require [frames|JavaScript]." That is all nice and good, but iCab supports frames and JavaScript just well. But the web server is simply looking at the client identity and seeing that I do not have (Netscape) or (IE) >= 4.0
Many pages will also permanently turn me away for not using Netscape or IE. iCab will support the pages just fine, but there is *no way* the server will allow me to see them as long as I am reporting using an alternative browser. iCab allows me to change the client identity string, but it should not have to - web designers should warn me that I am using an non-supported browser, and then let me in.
Posters are also complaing about how badly older browsers display their pages. Two points:
1) Make sure you are using completely W3 compliant HTML (or XML or CSS) - you cannot complain if an older browser does not support a non-standard MS-created HTML tag.
2) Realize that there are people out there who are willing to view your page less than perfectly. People who browse with images and JavaScript off are a perfect example of this - giving up display in order to gain speed.
I am all for the suggestion if
1) Web filtering is more powerful than simply "You are not using the most up-to-date Mozilla/IE." There are alternatives out there.
2) Web designers use only 100% compliant HTML.
Since chances are neither of these will ever happen, I am against this proposal.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Xoom, geo...
Content?
You seem to forget that even PinEight.com (home of the mighty TOD) is hosted on Freeservers.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
This is not about graphic design. It's about the separation of style from content, which will allow us to do amazing things. Like redesign an entire site in hours instead of months. Stop authoring and debugging stupid, browser-specific markup. And support non-traditional browsers, from Palm Pilots(TM) to Braille readers, without building multiple versions of every page. All pretty good stuff.
Also, they make it clear that his move isn't for everyone. IE, big sites like yahoo and amozon. But they could still have a little link instead of redirecting.
In case you did hear me in a previous post, or didn't see the quote above. They are trying to make the web more acessable. Not trying to make sure that people can see neat/cool/flashy sites.
Maybe you should check out the following:
www.w3.org
www.webstandards.org
www.alistapart.com
The crashing sound you hear isn't only your browser, it's the dot com's! What new marketing concept is this? Stop customers at the door and make sure they are "kewl" enough to come in to spend their money?? The point of the web site that you are building is to be functional - that means to make it easy for your customers to spend their space bucks, which in turn will allow your boss to make payroll this week!
Web design is customer service - when you go to a store and the clerk is rude; you vow never to return - the customer who is turned away from your "door" won't come back either. Trust me, they won't even remember that they couldn't get in, because they will have moved on, bought the thing-a-majig at a user friendly site, and will sing the praises of the competitor.
I work as a php/html programmer, and I know all too well that when the boss tells you he wants top of the line brand new leetness, and wants it netscape/opera/lynx/etc compatible, it's not a good place to be in.
Monochromism
============
http://www.monochromism.net
- an experiment in moral degredation
Until then
If its something else, they better have something really amazing for me to have to switch to another computer just to view the site.
I am all for webstands and what not, but I don't like the classic BS MS and NS pull.
I will not upgrade to NS 6 for QUITE a while. Why ? Hmmmmm, geee, lets see
I have a friend who used to work for a fortune 100 company who forced ALL users to disable js. Why ? Security reasons.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
until (succeed) try { again(); }
If you think there is more to design than flashy looking web-pages then you are very wrong.
"I have only one prayer: God grant that my enemies be ridiculous."
-Voltaire
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I htink a lot of you are completly missing the point here. As a web site designer, the backwards / cross platform problem is a complete nightmare! I think the aim of these guys isnt so much to say "UPGRADE NOW IR DIE!", but rather "upgrade so EVERYONE can get consistant content regardless of platform". Id love to send users of older browsers to a healpful site with all the resources they need to upgrade their browsers. And thats exactly what this article proports. You can upgrade whn you want to, but your holding everyone back. I mean, 5.0 browsers are the first to even almost get html rendering right.
"Stuff... In my home!? NEVER!" - Zim on Invader Zim
"I want the toilet seat!" - Little Dog on Two Stupid Dogs
times change, my friends.... people used to walk to their jobs. we rode bikes on the street. we viewed web pages without graphics. we listened to music on 8-tracks. saying that the web should be text based and all pages should work in every browser is like saying we should lower the speed limit to 15mph so the bikes and pedestrians can keep up. if you want to use an outdated browser on a slow machine, you should be viewing the outdated material designed for it. don't let progress upset you. embrace it, or step aside.
If you use IE and an Intellimouse on Windows, you can press and hold Ctrl and scroll the wheel to resize all of the fonts on a page. Hell, it can't get much easier than that. You can also apply your own style sheets to every page you go to. Gee, I guess I should give up on Javascript though, it just doesn't have any place in this 'web' world.
Here it is.... http://rmitz.org/AYB3.swf
I humbly apologize for my actions in the past - actions which completely failed to take into account that only glitch knows what sort of content other people need to be looking at on their browser. I didn't realize before that the types of web pages that glitch likes are the only ones worth bothering with. I will gladly take up my role as a promoter of the World Wide glitch Web and spread the Gospel according to glitch.
Thank you for making me realize that if glitch doesn't care about it, then nobody else does, either.
This proposal is coming just at the exact wrong time in the evolution of the web. There is a lot of growth in web access through devices other than the personal computer -- WAP phones, PDAs, voice browsing, etc. Now this group comes along totally ignoring this direction (which for my money emphasizes content over glitz) and pushes for everyone to use (and code to) only the platforms that support all the latest and greatest "features".
From looking at the page it appears to be a heavily graphics design oriented group, or what is known as the "pixel perfectionists". But from my experiences coding interactive dynamic applications for all these other devices, there's a great deal more interest (among businesses and customers) in making useful services go, not in making things look graphically stunning. Yes, it is very important to have a good user interface, especially with clunky interfaces like the typical WAP phone, but pictures and layout don't factor much into that effort.
Looks to me like Mr. Web Standards Project is just trying to feel important. Look, he got called a "web standards group" on CNET! I thought that was the W3C...
Not letting people view their site unless they have a machine that can run the latest version of browsers is just plain inconsiderate. There are plenty of machines out there that are limited... various UNIX machines are limited to older Netscapes, various Windows machines can't support the newest browsers, Palm users, WebTV users, Win3.1 users, etc etc
Sites should be designed to degrade gracefully. Granted, this is easier with a dynamic system (ASP,PHP,etc) than trying to code it all in HTML, but if one sticks to standard HTML, it should work. It won't be as pretty, but giving someone with Netscape 4 an ugly, but functional, page and saying "it'll look better with a newer browser" is a heck of a lot more polite than saying "piss off."
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
- Nietzsche
It's apparently the most standards compliant than any other browser, should it just simply be left behind, and users be told to use Mozilla?
AC comments get piped to
Give the people a reason to do it. Most people on the web still have modems. Does your new spiffy code speed up downloads and cut cruft? If you want people to upgrade because you need them to wait longer for your new java applet to load, you are crazy. Man I tell you that friggin Internet is outta control, we can't force people to do what we want. Give me a break. ISP's can try to spead the word but they can't force a person to do anyting. I think the wide range of clients out there keeps thing honest really, don't like it tuff titty.
That www.webstandards.org attempts to convert the whole Internet (good luck) -- but then it itself 100% readable from trusty ole' Lynx
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
but somewhat surprised. It just goes to show that, for sites that don't try too hard to support broken 4.x browsers, a good, solid, reasonably standards-compliant browser will work well. Of course, the browser I'm using is netscape 3.0 without javascript, which doesn't seem to be on the lists of browsers to upgrade to.
With all the hype about standards compliance, it's nice to see them not using non-standard tricks to get rid of browsers they don't like.
The support for the low-end will dissapear - note that the article SAID they want to encourage site designers to REDIRECT people whose browsers are not the version and vendor they are looking for. VERY BAD IDEA.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Once again, someone has not read the artical, or bothered to do a bit of research before ranting off about something.
Please go back to that site and tell me where it says that they want to force everyone to use images.
If these standards are supported. Then it would be possasble to deliver you information on a 26400-28800 modem, with no graphics. With out having to re-direct you to a differnt version of the site. The whole point is to make the web more accessable, and that includes you and your 26400-28800 modem.
Oh yeah, Flash SUCKS too! (can you sense the sarcasm?)
I don't care. . .
I don't care for your idealism.
I don't care for your skewed opinions.
I don't care for your need to spew flamebait.
I don't care for your idiotic rambling.
Most of all, if you respect me (the viewer) . . .
I assume by this statement that you are trying to represent the average viewer (and not being egotistical - thinking you're the sole viewer) - so let me be the first to say what a bunch of idealistic bullsh!t that is.
This is akin to saying personality is the biggest aphrodisiac. Ha!
Sure, it sounds good on paper, but face it: most people like to be dazzled. If a web designer is working for realistic (not idealistic) page views, he or she oftentimes wants to make the page visually appealing, to keep the user entertained. Most users, on average, give up on a site after 30 seconds or less - when they are surfing.
Unless someone is specifically looking for something on your site, they will be distracted by the other visually appealing sites. This means you're not a very good web designer.
Just because you want a return to 1992-like web graphics (IE. none), doesn't mean that everyone else does. All text and no fun makes the web a dull boy.
The web is not just about content. It's about expression, and a multitude of other things - maybe before you post, next time, take a second to take your head out of your ass and think about the position of others, before speaking for 'em.
To quote www.alistapart.com:
"This is not about graphic design. It's about the separation of style from content, which will allow us to do amazing things. Like redesign an entire site in hours instead of months. Stop authoring and debugging stupid, browser-specific markup. And support non-traditional browsers, from Palm Pilots(TM) to Braille readers, without building multiple versions of every page. All pretty good stuff. "
From looking at the page it appears to be a heavily graphics design oriented group, or what is known as the "pixel perfectionists".
Actually, the site has hardly any images on it. And what images there are, are small in KB size. And yes, it does look a bit on the flash side. But then again, they are web-designers.
What's up with this, I just noticed that I was still in PDT, it seems we have to change between Standard and Daylight time manually via our preferences. You'd think they could have put a check box to enable an automatic change over.
you're the fucking moron. if you're so sure of yourself go look at the page.
www.alistapart.com
it doesn't use javascript
Hm...the word "grassroot" reminds me of "institude of competitive technologies".
The web, at least for me, is more about information than presentation - I dont care much whether it supports whatever function (most useful things are server side anyway, client side stuff is mostly bloat and whistles :-) :-) that look absolutely fine on any platform from QNX to Amiga to Linux to Windows.
Its funny we are discussing something like this on slashdot because in my experience its one of the few sites (excluding my own
Presentation is important and I do use CSS and Javascript on my sites but I make damn sure that I'm not so arrogant as to make it unusable in a browser that doesnt support them.
no sig.
Upgrade the browser or stay off our site...OK, idiots, I'll stay off your damn site!
Just for note - Microsoft refuses to let me upgrade my browser (from 5.0 to 5.5). The upgrade application takes an hour to download the files then comes back and says my version already is current and stops. Guess I have to wait for XP...
AOL isn't making things any easier with Navigator. I've got Communicator 4.6, and what I've heard about 6.xx why would anyone bother to 'upgrade'? Adware? bah! Incompatible 'standards' applied? bah!
Don't want me to visit, than don't promote/market/advertise your damn site!
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As the subject says, this won't fly. Why? Netscape 4.x is still the major browser used by business and government. I support about 200 users who use NS4.7 exclusively for their mail, news, and www access, and we are the smallest branch of a nationwide organization. We're going nowhere until we get a supported, easy to deploy solution that runs on all our platforms. Oh, and includes LDAP support...
Unfortunately, most webmasters nowadays would say "We run best on Internet Explorer. Upgrade.". We meet this frequently while advocating for the Mozilla / Konqueror teams, finding sites which do not work and reporting their owners (sometimes very large companies).
I had to go through this myself lately too, when I was running a long series of mails and replies with the Ozon.ru staff (a big Russian book/video store) about trivial HTML bugs on their page. Instead of realizing I have a clue, they simply told me my "Netscape 6" isn't yet supported, so I should use Internet Explorer ... or email them my order details manually!
So much for "addressing the biggest possible audience" ...
Since I have a lousy 26400-28800 modem and unable to get high-speed broadband, I am forced to use the Web without graphics (95% of the times). I only want INFORMATION. I don't need pictures. I will decide if I want images or not!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
... when they pry my dumb terminal from my cold, dead fingers.
Think of it...
You're a website owner/designer who wants to get as many people to see your site as you possibly can (so that they then go on and buy stuff/click on banners/laugh at your jokes/post first).
Someone comes to you and says, "Listen Mr Webmaster, we're sick and tired of people not cooperating. Put some scripting into your page which makes your customers disappear if they have the temerity to not want to see sites as your designers dream of making and persist in not wanting to spend a couple of hours downloading our new bloat"
and you say,
"No, bollocks, I want as many people as possible to see my page/buy my books/read my posts, and if my designers can't be arsed to make a page that the biggest possible audience can see, then that's my problem. It's nothing to do with my customers."
Imagine a bookshop not letting you buy their books until you'd completed a literature degree. Do you think people would go to another store?
Do you know of any sites where the same content CANNOT be found elsewhere?
Do you think these sites are going to make it actively difficult for potential customers to come and see their stuff?
nope. didn't think so.
I just posted the above message and it said "posted at 8:20pm EDT". But I'm sitting here in Toronto in the Eastern Daylight Time zone and it's definitely around 7:23pm.
Am I missing something?
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
- Nietzsche
I have heard many web developers on slashdot, in this and other articles, complaining about the difficulty of making a site multi browser. It makes me think of the accomplishments of GNU, and in particular, autoconf - allowing the GNU utilities to run on a multitude of hardware/software platform combinations despite all being written in a fairly non-portable language (compared to Perl or Java, not assembly). Why could a web server not format outgoing documents based on the browser that is accessing the information, much like autoconf configures a software package to run on many systems?
If nobody ever re-invented the wheel, we'd all be pushing around flintstones cars, wouldn't we?
People have lots of legitimate reasons for not upgrading. Their hardware may not support it. They may not be able to pay for it. They may be on a slow connection or wireless device. And they may need special accessibility features.
Any web site that relies on the presence of the complex web features is broken. Sites should be able to render fine with no JavaScript, no DOM, no pixel-accurate positioning, and no graphics even. If they want to offer a graphically overburdened site in addition to a plain one, that's fine, but that should be an option.
Most old browsers are perfectly serviceable for rendering plain HTML and graphics. If someone with an old browser comes to a web site, the site should fall back to its plain version. It shouldn't complain or hassle the user.
Common guys, get a life. Most people don't even own the hardware to run a browser >= 5. Even in Europe and the US many people still depend on old (outdated ?) hardware, let alone less rich country's.
Maybe I should download the lynx sources, change a few lines and beef up the version number to 6.4 or something.
BTW, if you want a cool _graphical_ browser for the Linux _and_ DOS console, check out http://www.arachne.cz .
sure... i wanna see you code some of the designs that get thrown at me, in code without tables. some people in this world have a great respect for design. sadly in america a vast majority do not.
umm, did you read anything?
They are advocating IE and NS. They are also advocating that people use versions of these browsers that aren't broken - something that would vastly improve the quality of the web if it were to happen. It would vastly improve the quality of one of my jobs too.
Once we have statistics indicating that, say, less than 10% of the browsing population are using incompatible browsers we can stop all this multi-coding nonsense, ignore them, and get on with coding proper pages. They'll figure it out eventually.
I'm sure you would like W3C to be advocating plaintext so you could pick at them, but I'm afriad they're not, and neither is the wsp.
I don't see why I need all the 'extra features' is in my browser and on web-pages. Flash makes my P166 rather slow. For 'happy tunes' I have a radio. Also extra features often contain serious security-bugs. (Outlook??)
I'm really happy without all those fancy features, shopping buttons and more. To me a good page is text and some graphics. If you need more to tell your message, your message is wrong. KISS. Keep it simple, stupid!
I think maybe it's time to start a campain to make all sites LYNX-compatible.
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Privacy is terrorism.
Besides, Nestscape and IE can't even agree on things, and now they're to dictate to us what we can do???
I think it's very waypointing (is this an english word?) that they do redirect my Netscape 4.76 when entering the page but not Lynx :)
Lynx is always up to date. World domination for Lynx! ;-)
:)
thank you for saying something intelligent
why do people upgrade their kernel? sorry everyone but technology evolves and we evolve with it.
From the My-8086-can-out-browse-your-8086 dept.
I'm disturbed by this. The small (but growing) sector of the computer community who are hobbyists interested in collecting and maintaining "vintage" computer systems have relied for years upon the fact that HTML standards are backwards compatible. Sure, for my main browsing I don't use my Macintosh SE, but I can, and that simple fact is just cool as all heck. (to me)
I can't run many things on these old computers....you can't play DOOM on my AT&T 6300, I can't play movies on my TI99/4A, and I can't play MP3s on my Mac SE/30. But the simple, basic, root protocols and standards of the Internet still work. Email. Telnet. FTP. HTTP. News. Take these away, and you take away a lot of usefulness in our hobby, our older machines, and our enjoyment.
So when will the "new standards" of the telnet protocol push our text consoles into oblivion? I rue that day.
Blog,Twitter
The web never was about artistic design
Umm have you ever been to www.flashkit.com or any of the other flash sites? They have a huge community built up around the idea that artistic design is actually worth something and actually conveys some kind of information to the end user. Without artistic design, all web pages would look and act the same. Pictures illustrate ideas.
A tree menu for instance is the perfect illustration of heiarchically organized information material, but we still don't have one that works really well on all browsers. I'm now learning Flash because it runs on IE and Netscape, Windows, Mac, and Linux AND it supports XML data and *sockets with events* to and from the server. I wish I had started learning it a long time ago. My first real project in flash was to make a dynamic tree menu that populates itself with xml from the server. This will be really useful to me and people coming to my site when I finish it (there is a lot to learn). I will be able to do things like have a message board system with thousands of nodes on it, or a categoricaly organization of coding snippets and techniques, links or ideas that are available to anyone.
Currently, I'm really only designing for IE and Netscape, and I check my pages on every single OS I have at work, namely Windows. (And occasionally on a Mac when I can pry our graphics department from her PC.) I'm not trying to be a fascist and force people into choosing specific browsers and OS's to view my site, but I'll never have the resources to do more. Sure, it's lame. But it's reality for me, and it's reality for a lot of not-so-cutting-edge websites. And, for what it's worth, a lot of these cutting-edge websites are spending a lot of time tweaking for the dozens of browser combinations when they could be writing the content everyone here keeps saying is the only thing that matters.
I don't like this solution particularly, but the status quo stinks. I'll take this solution over what we deal with now.
Who is RTFM and when will he help me with Unix?
I can't believe all these people saying the net should be nothing but text! What a fantastic tool we have to distrubute ANY information freely, and people want to voluntarily cut themselves off from a large portion of it? I don't understand, but it makes me think of an analogy.
It's cliche but...Imagine the old man saying that he ain't ever gonna buy no goddamn automobile, his horse works just fine. I don't think enforcing people to upgrade is the right way to go about this though. But without poeple looking forward, technology becomes stagnant. Example: Your 486 might run Linux just fine if you are willing to make alot of cool stuff anavailable to you, but the majority of the general computer using public actually like those cool new features. If we stuck with 486's and never upgraded when they came out with faster chips, our computers would pale in comparison to what they are now. There are good ways and bad ways to use anything, it's ridiculous to hate Flash, for example, just because you've seen a few bad sites that use it. There ARE good ways to use technology. If you want to see just plain text on a webpage, fine. But you know what? That's BORING to me. I like to see the creative side of humans, not just the logical side. I love horses, but my car let's me do SO much more...and not all of it is that bad either.
We have Mozilla running on IRIX here.
Burn Hollywood Burn
I've never done a site which tried to sell stuff. For niche sites I use frames, funky graphics and Java, but make it easy to just get the plain text frame.
For political and other content sites I mostly focus on Nielsen's writings (ignoring his 1st law tho), with XHTML1 and CSS1.
I usually have a "Best viewed with a CSS1 capable browser" line on the meta page.
--
mrBlond
CowboyNeal for president!
"Hit any user to continue."
Damn good idea. I'd kill for one of those, even for interests sake. In practicality it'd be damn useful.