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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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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!
---
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.
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...
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.
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.
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!
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 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
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.