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.
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/
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?
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?
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.
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.
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...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
--
--
"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
Opera makes it very easy to overide the web page's CSS settings - just click one button to flip to a user-controlled CSS.
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...
--
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
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
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.
A "standard" that changes ever two minutes (as the HTML standard, for example, has)
CSS1 has been ratified since 1996. MacIE5 was the first shipping browser to implement it properly.
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
WSP and the W3C agress with you. HTML4 is minimalist. The strict version doesn't permit font tags or other inline formatting. All the display is shifted to stylesheets.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
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
Next time, fly Britshit Earways, Air Chance, Butchansa or SABENA*...
* Such A Bad Experience, Never Again.
--
Wow, I didn't know that Slashdot had flash!!!!
I guess I'm gonna have to upgrade from Mosaic...
--
>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...
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
--
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?
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
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
--
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
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.
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
Did you file bugs against these in bugzilla?
--
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
lynx is a bad example. AFAIK pages that are accessible to the blind (like government's pages) are often tested by opening'em with lynx. The sentiment was OK, the example happened to be one that's not all that good :)
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
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.
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
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
``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.''
--
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
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.
--
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
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.
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
---
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
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
"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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yes, yes, yes!
Of course by "most recent standards", we must include support for Python-based applets, as supported by Grail.
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
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!
--
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
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
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."
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.
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"
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:
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
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
Wrong. We have 4.6+ running on IRIX.
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
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?
Look at the big, successful sites: Amazon, eBay, Slashdot, Yahoo. Totally vanilla HTML. If they don't need all that crap, why do you?
why do you hate Java/Javascript?
Quailify this, I dare you.
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
> 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.
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!
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 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.
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).
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!
---
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.
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
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!
---
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.
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...
An open alternative to flash is SVG, which is now a w3c recommendation.
"moo" - cow 3, 1906
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
----------
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..
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.
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?
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
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!
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...
--
-- Geof F. Morris
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.
--
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'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.
--
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?
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
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
--
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Well, seeing how I can't get any java applets to work on ns 3.0 anymore ANYWAYS, lack of java support is not a major crisis.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
...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)
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
-----
IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
-----
-----
IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
-----
email: proprietary becomes free, org to com
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?
---
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?
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.
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?
::
Sorry, you're going to need to upgrade your browser so we can tell you to upgrade your browser so... (ad nauseum)
::
to understand recursion we must first understand recursion. or something like that.
:)
---
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?
What are you talking about? If anything, moving to fully CSS compliant browsers (and thus using fully CSS-ed pages) would be beneficial for the handicapped. CSS pages are much easier to convert to plain text and they don't suffer all the junk mark-up that we see with HTML.
I would also direct you to the relevant section in the Educational FAQ of the WSP about how uptake of web standards will increase accessibility to all.
W3C? Pfft. They don't even have the word 'STANDARD' in theire name... what do they know about standards. Jeez.
; 2b=b;2=1
Seriously though, you bring up a very good point. I'd like to see the W3's stance on this issue which, afaik, is that you choose a DOCTYPE for your HTML and STICK TO IT. Most people are using 3.x or 4/transitional. Few use 4/strict because it is too strict (whereas trans allows 3.x browsers to be supported).
---
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?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Here it is.... http://rmitz.org/AYB3.swf
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
We have Mozilla running on IRIX here.
Burn Hollywood Burn