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Web Designers Ignoring Standards and Support IE Only
An anonymous reader says "According to this story on news.com, it is becoming harder for users of Microsoft-free systems and browsers to view the web. This seems to be a new call to arms from the standards groups, and it is something we should be thinking about. Without help from web designers, using browsers like Mozilla and Opera will effectively cut off our ability to view web sites 'correctly.'" My pet peeve is when sites hype and announce new-and-improved sites, and then they come out and they are simply a gigantic
flash application.
And people design sites inorder to get the most users. That means having to code for IE. It sucks. But, all you can do is just not visit that site.
Michael Loves Me!
Hey.. sometimes the gigantic flash apps are really cool and sometimes not... it can go both ways.. flash is fun..
As a web designer, it's in my job description to make sure the site is designed for "the majority of our audience". This means IE. I could go ahead and design everthing so that it's compatible with Mozilla, Opera, or any browser that begins with the letter K, but as I'm constantly trying to hit a tight deadline, it's easier to just go for the majority. As long as I *know* the site looks like it's supposed to in IE, I'm happy with it.
And so are the people that pay my salary.
Roadkill is yummy.
You are using: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
But I guess that MSFT has succeeded in polluting the standards to the point where
IE can totally ignore IEEE compliance.
Not a troll, just a lament
Don't read this!
That really sucks. Guess I'll have to switch back to Windows. Ho hum...
I personally enjoy using flash, and feel that it could easily replace html, if the world could all be broadband. However, that not being the case, I feel that major sites should stop using designs that are fitted towards the broadband user only, and instead make it accessible to everyone.
How Jaded Are You?
When he co-founded Netscape Communications in 1994, Jim Clark introduced a Web browser that promised computer users a way around the Microsoft juggernaut.
Now online photo print shop Shutterfly, another Clark-founded venture, has a succinct warning for visitors who come to the site using the latest versions of Netscape: Beware. Versions 6 and higher of the browser are "unsupported," meaning people who use them cannot take advantage of several site features and may run into glitches not found with Microsoft's Internet Explorer, according to a browser error message being published on the site as of last Wednesday.
Shutterfly's browser preference page is more than ironic; it reflects an ongoing bias among some Web sites to write and test their pages for the browser most people use--Internet Explorer. The trend lives on despite the support Web standards receive from several new browsers, including Netscape's latest, its open-source cousin Mozilla and others such as Opera and iCab.
Non-agnostic Web sites "are saying, 'We're only interested in people if they use this browser,'" said Janet Daly, a representative for standards group the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). "That's a mistake on their part. The browser is a basic utility for people, and it's about having access to information regardless of who made that information or what authoring tool they used."
The call for Web authors to comply with standards comes as a new wave of competitors seeks to dislodge Microsoft from its perch as the No. 1 browser maker. IE is used by more than 85 percent of all Web surfers by many counts, and may go even higher. One recent study showed it with 95 percent share.
AOL Time Warner, which purchased Netscape in 1999 for some $4.2 billion, is throwing more support behind the company's products after years of neglect. For the first time, the company is testing Netscape as the default browser in its CompuServe and America Online service software, having used IE for years as part of a complex cross-marketing agreement. AOL Time Warner has also filed a civil suit on behalf of Netscape that alleges Microsoft engaged in illegal practices.
Mozilla, meanwhile, recently released its first public version, Mozilla 1.0, capping four years of development. Other IE alternatives from companies such as Opera Software are also winning fans and giving Web surfers more choice than ever before.
Waiting on Web authors
While competition appears to be piling up, would-be IE rivals must overcome industry inertia that runs deep within the fabric of how Web pages are put together. Not least, they rely on the cooperation of skeptical Web authors who see little reward in supporting technology that is used by just a small fraction of their customers.
Shutterfly is hardly alone among mainstream Web sites discriminating against browsers. Safeway.com, for example, warns visitors that "the Safeway.com site works best with the Internet Explorer Web browser. Other browsers, such as Netscape, may not function properly."
Critics call these browser warning pages reminiscent of the bad old days of the Web, when sites routinely sported the tag "best viewed in Navigator" or "best viewed in IE."
Microsoft in November revived those memories and earned widespread wrath when it locked out competing browsers from its MSNBC news site. The incident provoked accusations that Microsoft was taking advantage of its near-total dominance of the browser market to further marginalize competitors.
Microsoft declined to comment for this story.
The state of affairs with browser-site compatibility highlights a lingering gap between reality and the lofty goals of Web standards. Even as standards advocates acknowledge that the browsers are largely in compliance with W3C recommendations, plenty of sites remain, practically speaking, Internet Explorer-only zones.
Now that browsers are mostly standards-compliant, the roles of accused and accuser largely have been reversed.
A few years ago, it was Web developers who organized and ranted against the browser makers, specifically Microsoft and Netscape, demanding standards-compliant software. Now, the browser makers and even the Web's premier standards organization are attributing many of the glitches to Web authors who write non-compliant code or tailor their code to work with market-leading browsers, specifically IE.
This phenomenon traps smaller browsers in a vicious circle: Because they have a limited following, Web authors don't write or test for them. When, as a result, Web sites don't work with the browser--or explicitly rule it out--surfers have a repeated incentive to give up and use Internet Explorer.
Beyond the basics
The person browsing with the latest Opera, Mozilla or Netscape browser will be able to access just about any site on the Web. But non-IE users are likely to start running into trouble once they start delving into a site's complex features and functionality.
And those complex features tend to be crucial when it comes to executing transactions on e-commerce sites.
"The Web is a chaotic place, and you will find no browser that can view all sites," said Hakon Lie, chief technology officer for Oslo, Norway-based Opera. "All browsers have this problem to some extent."
Some browsers have it more than others. Opera, for example, runs into trouble on several mainstream Web sites, including Salon.com and Apple Computer's Mac.com, that render perfectly in IE or Netscape.
Netscape has been taking an aggressive approach to the problem, monitoring sites where its "Gecko" rendering engine is running into trouble and prevailing on site administrators to fix the problem.
A joint Netscape-Mozilla team, formed two years ago, examined the 1,700 Web sites with the highest traffic to see how well they worked when viewed by Gecko. When the evangelism effort launched, only 60 percent of these pages worked properly, but Netscape claims to have boosted that number to 98 percent.
"Our evangelism efforts have garnished quite a bit of momentum in their outreach to Web developers," a Netscape representative said in an e-mail interview. But the "team continues to work with both corporate and individual sites to ensure Gecko compliance."
Opera's Lie estimated that he ran into trouble surfing with Opera on about one in 30 sites.
He also claimed that IE has seen its share of sites that it can't view properly. But because of IE's ubiquity, those glitches are likely to be fixed in a matter of days or hours, while problems with Opera or Mozilla languish on bug fix to-do lists.
The situation is reflected in the policies at Shutterfly, which makes no bones about its market-oriented approach to browser support.
"From the beginning, the situation has been that we listen to our customers and deliver what they ask for," said Whitney Brown, a representative for Shutterfly. "We have had very few requests for Opera--most of our users are on a PC using IE, and the next largest group is on a PC using Netscape. We have a pretty mainstream user base, which has moved away from the early adopters who may be aware of other browsers out there."
The site's browser preference page, which launched Wednesday during a visit using Netscape 6.2, notes that the company supports older versions of Netscape, including Netscape Navigator 4.7. Brown on Tuesday said the site's browser warning is out of date and that the site supports newer versions of Netscape--although it still does not support Opera and other less popular browsers.
Other troubles
Standards proponents point to several stumbling blocks beyond Web authors, including nonstandard extras included as part of IE and widespread use of nonstandard automated authoring tools from companies such as Adobe Systems.
Even though all the major browsers are considered to be up to snuff on standards compliance, some Web authors still find it easier to code directly to IE--and test only with IE--rather than to open standards.
In many cases, that means using nonstandard extras that Microsoft offers.
Mozilla.org, the open-source group that Netscape formed in 1998 to develop its browser, called those proprietary extras the legacy of Microsoft's maneuvers to become the leader in the browser market.
"The market power of IE, gained through illegal use of Microsoft's monopoly, means that Web developers find it convenient to use IE's proprietary extensions," said Mitchell Baker, who carries the whimsical title of chief lizard wrangler at Mozilla.org. "We do encourage Web developers to look to Web standards and to move away from proprietary extensions."
Opera took a similar tack, laying blame at the feet of both Microsoft and Web developers.
"I'm not going to put all the blame on Microsoft, though they do deserve some," Lie said. "The focus should really be on authors. They really need to test their pages. And maybe some of them have to adjust their ambitions slightly. If you try to do the very advanced, flashy stuff, you typically will get a page that will not operate with all browsers."
Now that so many of the Web's pages are coded by automated authoring tools, rather than by hand, much of the onus of standards-compliance has fallen to the vendors of authoring tools: Macromedia, Adobe and Microsoft.
The push to make authoring tools produce standards-compliant code runs up against the formidable obstacle that many Web surfers are using outdated, non-compliant browsers. If the authoring tool codes strictly to standards, it will lock out those legacy browsers.
Blame it on the browsers
And while Web authors may be more defensive than they used to be, some Web sites are still claiming that buggy browsers--even new ones--are preventing them from welcoming all comers.
"What we want to do is write once and have it work with everything," said Russ Sanon, senior manager for quality-assurance engineering at Shutterfly. "But it falls onto the lap of the individual browser manufacturer. There's nothing that we do that's proprietary. Everything that we write should work with W3C-complaint specs."
Some warn that while coding to IE may pay off in the short term, it could cost sites if the long-predicted shift to non-PC Web browsers transpires.
New W3C recommendations, particularly the HTML successor XHTML, are written to help Web authors accommodate the limited rendering capabilities of cell phones or PDAs (personal digital assistants). In many cases, this involves creating relatively automated ways of serving slimmed-down pages to small devices while showing full-featured pages in desktop browsers.
"If things are not built according to standards, you run the risk of having to do that content engineering all over again if you move to other devices," said W3C's Daly. "If you use a black-box proprietary format that doesn't port over to a handheld, then what? That's a strong business case for standards compliance."
But others continue to sound a more community-minded alarm, calling the persistent gap between standards and practice a threat to the Web's open character.
"What we're seeing with Web sites that are viewable only with IE is the privatization of the Web," said Mozilla's Baker. "And that's a dangerous setting. We're moving toward a world where all the capabilities of the Internet are reprocessed through a single filter, with Microsoft's business plan behind it."
This is, er, total rubbish. While a lot of smaller web designers may be MS focused, most large sites will try very hard to make their sites work across platforms. Just check out most of the discussion on alistapart, which primarily deals with new web technologies, and how to implement them in a cross-platform manner. While a lot of the 'amature' web may be strewn with proprietary tags, a lot of the larger sites really do care about users who use different browsers; from Netscape 4 to WebTV.
--jon
Cleanstick.org: Dumb weblog about nothing
I see this as an advantage. Ever noticed how the "Flash" sites are the very ones which tend to be filled to the brim with adverts and little else, or otherwise "arty" sites by self-important 'blogging nuts who think their combination of morphing pastel colours needs to be seen by the whole world? Sorry, but that's not what the Web is to me -- I use it for information, and that's why I use Mozilla.
And I always hear him say stuff like "Well, *I* run IE, so I assume most everyone does". For awhile I had just assumed that Microsoft was sleeping with W3C, until I met a few web programmers. As I see it, there are really two types of prgrammers. Those who learned HTML in the beginning, and those who learned Frontpage so they could be 133t and have their own website. Since the latter outweighs the former, there you see the problem.
In their defense, from the user's point of view, the easiest tools out there are made by Microsoft. Click, click, click, oh look! I have a website. Sure, it's 8 MB in size without graphics, but it's all mine! Sadly only the geeks care about standards anymore.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
...instead of just using Frontpage for everything, we wouldn't necessarily have this problem.
Oh, and what's the point really, of a Standards Body, if they can't to an extent enforce the standards? Just a thought.
Sorry, this document does not validate as HTML 3.2.
I especially hate it when web designers don't even consider other browsers. I brought a small page error to the attention of a friend of mine that I saw on Mozilla. It would have been a simple fix to make it work for all browsers, including IE, and I tested to be sure that it would still work in IE, Netscape, Opera, and Mozilla. But when I brought all of this to my friend's attention, they just said that nobody uses Mozilla and blew me off.
If one uses standardized HTML, it displays well in IE, Mozilla, and even (mostly) in Netscape 4. I guess most web developers are too lazy to bother to standardize their code, even though the W3C helps you.
You make a very good point. Unfortunately it will be modded down because it is somewhat pro-microsoft. :(
-- You are such a fucking fag
When I find that a website doesnt work with Linux or my browser then I send them an email.
Often they just ignore them but for examle the inquirer just this morning corrected their site after I emailed to the webmaster on friday with the bug.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Reasons to stop worrying and love the bomb:
1. 'additional features' will not really amount to that much, and websites will back off of using them (witness the standardization and stipping-down of websites in general compared to two years ago)
2. M$ might just pull something heinous in it's usage licenses, which will become much worse that what the market is currently tollerating
3a. Linux may make some headway on the desktop (hey-- 10% by the next year?)
3b. Apache will not be able to keep up with the features, which will cause managers to question #1 above
4. Lynx will return with a vengeance!
davejenkins.com |
Speaking only for myself, As a Web Developer, I code first for NS/Mozilla products first and IE last. My only complaint about NS is the lack of standards support in the 4x versions. However, as folks around the internet upgrade my job becomes better and better. The latest versions of Mozilla are very easy to build sites for, while M$ still gives me and some of my co-workers headaches.
Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
According to this story on news.com, it is becoming harder for users of Microsoft-free systems and browsers to view the web.
That's odd... I've been using Mozilla as my sole browser for a few months now, and I haven't had any problems at all. That's compared to a year and a half ago, when M18(?) was completely stymied by a lot of sites.
Seems to me that things are getting better, not worse. Then again, stories about things improving don't get the ad impressions.
--saint
If you can tell what browser the user is using at runtime, via GET headers, why not send them code specific for that browser? sure, you might have to re-write the code a few times for each major browser (IE, mozilla and its wannabe's, opera, lynx\links) but that way, everybody is happy
Gnome wasnt built in a day.
The boss tells the web designer what to do. (I wan't Flash, dynamic animated menus, this, that, etc.)
The boss uses IE.
The boss doesn't care if some small percent isn't using IE.
-... ---
I usually design web pages using w3c documentation, but Microsoft's MSDN documentation is a lot easier to sift through for a some of dynamic things. I'll usually design using IE and then tweak it until it looks good in IE and Moz. (even when using 'cross platform' code, it still never works right in both, in my experience)
Netscape 4 users can go fuck themselves, though. Seriously.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I have put together a few well used sites and have forgotten to check something new on IE and I feel stupid when somone tells me that it don't work on the browser they are using... Nothing works like shame.
Unfortunately, Microsoft and Macromedia have used the embrace and extend model successfully and if you want to add something fancier to a web site you are starting down the path towards platform dependency.
Any news on standards based vector animation?
#1 Microsoft is the dominant browser
#2 Most web "developers" are right-brained types that don't have a clue about how to acomodate multiple browsers.
#3 Many of the aforementioned people are too lazy to even TRY supporting non-IE browsers.
It would be an interesting exercise to build a IE-content detection function into Mozilla and emulate the "fee-churs" of IE (except for the security holes).
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
I personally use Netscape, and if a site is designed for IE, and isn't compatible with NS, I just go somewhere else. Microsoft thinks that their trash^H^H^H^H^H software IS the standard. Don't you just love monopolies?
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
Even if you ignore Frontpage's effects, a lot of the more recent authoring programs don't put out the cleanest code. Not necessarily as bad as tag soup of the past, but still putting out code that works with no problem in IE, but not good in Netscape/etc. And unfortunately, if you consider the cycle of web advancements, they are typically late to the game (that is, they won't add support for a standard until a browser with majority support includes it). So we're only now seeing these WYSIWYG editors including support for XHTML and CSS level 2 stylesheets, despite all the major browsers supporting these (to a good extent).
Of course, there are some that say "the best HTML editor is Notepad" (or vi, or EMACS, or...), and those are the people that I expect to have no problem with any browser on their sites. Unfortunately, that group is the minority, the majority seem to want to ignore HTML and just get it right in the WYSIWYG. And right now, that approach can easily lead you to the IE-only site.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
A while back I wrote to my credit card provider about their worthless website, which I can only use in Netscrape 4.7?. Even with the Mozilla UserAgent string changed to something more "standard," they won't let me past the homepage. They claim that my browser doesn't support proper encryption or something. Additionally, their damn menus don't work in Mozilla or Opera. Below is the oh so friendly and helpful email they sent back. It sounds so canned that I can't help but assume that they get a lot of these complaints. Why on earth don't they change their ways if they get so many complaints? There are fewer security problems with Mozilla than IE. I really should take my business elsewhere, but the interest rate is keeping me with them for now.
"You will only be remembered for two things: the problems you solve or the ones you create." Mike Murdock
Netscape becomes more and more like IE every time a new version is realeased. However, I mainly use mozzila and I am finding more and more sites just don't show up (I just get a white page). It's disturbing, but 'tis the way of the MS empire.
"You sir, have just crossed my happy line..."
At least with Flash, you know that any old browser than can install it will be able to view the "improved" site. From what I understand, it's pretty universal. --
"Wow. Now I see what you mean about web sites not being compliant." She told me. "Our site looks ok, why don't others?"
"They don't properly test them, or think some flair is really necessary that's only supported in IE 5.X. They forget Web Browsing is like window shopping in a Ferrari. You move on to the next one REAL quick."
Though I have to say Opera's pop-up management sucks compared to Mozilla's. Since I've installed Mozilla for her, I havn't heard a peep. Before it was "Some links just don't work anymore" - which was due to Opera not opening REQUESTED Javascript URLs.
BTW, I just didn't think it was a 'grand' idea to replace the presidents browser, but IE kept storing/retrieving some virus in it's cache (maybe from Eudora's preview?), and the calls from the president about viruses on her PC were getting annoying. Not to mention the reboot required to delete the IE Cache file that's ALWAYS open due to the wonderful Win98 integration! ;)
(*sigh* No, once the file is detected by NAV as having a virus, you can't do anything with it.. But it's open so it can't be quarrantined... get it? :P)
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
I gotta say, i agree with some of the other posters here. There really is no standard for html anymore. W3C has been irrevalant for quite some time now, and , well, most people use IE to browse the internet. Now, if you run a business website, your objective is to whore to the highest common denominator (in this case; ie users). So, you gotta give the majority what they want. In this case, that being pages that look nice in Internet Explorer I mean, you can try and be noble and W3C compliant, but if your site looks like crap in most people's browsers, they won't do business with you. Its as simple as that. And while flash may be a pain in the ass to most *nix users, well....it looks just fine to The Average Computer User(tm)
Flash is a crutch used by the design impaired to essentially dress up a turd. Swish makes it even easier for Joe-Bob-Billy-Webmaster to "dress up" their sites.
Flash is the bane of web design.
Macs as a fetish property
Don't think of it as having to change your design for 5% of the people. Think of it a designing to gain 5% more customers.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
So not only is this a problem with web designers targeting IE, but IE on Windows.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Yeah, ignore the fact that, for the longest time, IE was the only browser even close to compliant with Web standards. Even today, OmniWeb sucks with JavaScript, Opera is a buggy piece of shit, and Netscape/Mozilla barfs on complex CSS positioning.
Do you know what flash-page is looks like on Pentium 233?!
Stop supporting netscape 4. Netscape four is a bane on the internet. It is black death.
The sooner users get a browser that dosn't suck, the better.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Not any bits of the web I actually want to use, I haven't come across anything I want to see that isn't still Netscape 4.x compatible, let alone compatible with Mozilla 1.0. As far as I'm concerned the web is still working just fine...
Al.The Daily ACK - Eclectic posts by yet another hacker
(If you hadn't noticed, the Web is meant to be an open medium, not controlled by a large, monopolistic and law-breaking American corporation)
Sir, I do believe you are a troll.
in the past, this has not really bothered me. I've come across several sites that really only worked with IE, but they were sites that I could ignore, or limp by with poor rendering.
on more than one occasion, I've sent letters to the company sale people (not the IT people) saying that they just lost a customer because of their stupid IT / Web people.
I agree the problem has gotten worse. Just yesterday, a site simply did not ALLOW access unless there was an IE tag. It was the AC2 game website. Thankkfully, Opera's "Identify as..." feature got around the server block, but it just as well may not have.
Maybe I am missing something.. But if IE is the STANDARD isn't the problem that nothing else conforms to it? If nothing conforms to the W3C standard, it's not much of a standard.. is it?
.1% of the population is running that configuration it only makes sense that developers would target the mass of people running IE.
I thought even netscape 6/mozzilla doesn't conform.. Years ago their were compatiblity studies published that showed the only fully compliant browser was netscape 4.7 running on a MAC. Given that less than
Even though all the major browsers are considered to be up to snuff on standards compliance, some Web authors still find it easier to code directly to IE--and test only with IE--rather than to open standards.
Ah, but what version of IE? IMHO, just because is works in 5.0 and 5.5 does not mean it will work in 6.0. Service packs have a huge impact as well. From a testing standpoint, this is STILL a huge pain.
I find if it works in Mozilla, it will probably work in most everything. IE tends to be too forgiving, rendering bad or malformed HTML too well. For that reason alone, I prefer to test with Mozilla first -- then a cut or two of IE...
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
I work for a college doing web-based database programming (all of our apps are in-housed created)
I received an e-mail a few weeks ago from my boss saying that he wanted a few volunteers to run IE on their machines instead of netscape (right now we only "support" netscape)...
Supposedly we won't be required to start writing apps for IE only, but it makes me kinda worry..
Too bad i couldn't volunteer! I don't think they have a version of IE for linux yet...
Rediculous. W3c is far from irrelevent. If you comply to HTML 4.0 your website renders just fine in Internet Explorer!
"The best possible experience". Are you saying that you can't create a good website experience without Microsoft HTML? I know enough sites that display just fine in Mozilla and Opera but still have a good website experience (easy to navigate, pretty animated menus with JavaScript, etc.)
Let's face it, you don't need Microsoft HTML to create a good-looking website! W3C standards are good, dispite what all the Microsoft fanboys say. There's no excuse for not complying to W3C standards, except when you're creating a site like Windows Update.
I've been creating websites for years, and the fact that people refuse to comply to W3C standards is totally rediculous.
And there's one more thing: our rights. People have the right to choose whatever they want. If I don't want to use Windows or IE, then that's my choice. Standards are created to make sure that I can still view the Internet, no matter which OS/browser I choose. But people like you are effectively taking away our right to choose.
"Hell, even when I tried making my stuff NS compatible, Mozilla is so full of rendering bugs that it was impossible."
Then either you're using a Mozilla build from a year ago or you just don't know how to code HTML properly.
If you're reading this, thanks -- I've got a question about a topic that has been bothering me for a while. With Mozilla, if you see adbanners on a page, you can right-click on them, and then scroll down to "Block Images from this Server" and presto, no more ads. While this is simple with clickable imagemaps, its not possible with flash adbanners (at least with mozilla's builtins....).
Does anyone have any commnets/opinions or hints on how to "disappear" the flash adbanners?
Why did I post this? Ask me now!
The Pope is Catholic
There's a war in Afghanistan
CmdrTaco's grammar and spelling leave something to be desired
Your cat only loves you because you feed it
That girl would go out with you, if you'd only ask
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition
Let's meet our next contestant, Sybil Fawlty. Special subject: The Bleeding Obvious.
Best. Post. Ever.
I hate it too, but the sad truth is, there are not enough users of other web browsers to justify $BIGCORP investing $BIGNUM bucks to make their website 'standards compliant' when someone can hire a monkey that knows how to point and drool in Frontpage to make a pretty website. This isn't a call for more standards commitees, its a call to make your neighbor/friend/guy on the street use something other then IE. Only then will we see a standard compliant web.
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
Yeah, but what IS the new standard? If it's a STANDARD, why can't they publish it?
Yes... but good websites back up their funky flash features via normal text links, which is a trivial process. Even though I have flash installed, I still use text links if they're there because they're faster to navigate and easier to understand.
If it's about getting the most users able to use your site and therefore getting more business, why not consider everyone not just the IE majority.
By continuing to focus on only one platform you continue to force yourself down the MS path. If you're OK with that as a designer, fine... but don't expect that decision to not come back and bite you in future. History of MS has taught us this.
You sir, are a Fuckwad.
I'm sure that there will be plenty of poorly designed Web sites that only allow proper functionality with IE. For that matter, there will be poorly designed Web sites that are not really helpful at all to the person who wants to buy something, due to their (lack of) organization and structure. I deal with these sites in the same way: I buy from someone else.
I can't remember having run into an IE-only problem on a commerce site; the second type of problem is much more common. I've been able to use my bank's Web interface with Mozilla for months (and before then, I only had to use NS4, not IE).
That said, I was pleased to read about the push by the people in Netscape/Mozilla to get Web designers to create compliant sites. Sure, I'm never going to visit most of the sites on the Web, and if I have a problem with one, there will likely be an alternate. But it's nice that one browser maker is pushing for people to have as much choice as possible (it's likely that their efforts will also help users of Konqueror and Opera).
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
I found the opposite to be true if the page causes Mozilla to be in strict rendering mode. IE, on the other hand, has many CSS rendering problems (as does Opera, unfortunately).
You are using HTML for content and CSS for presentation, right? Or are you leaning on the old and crutches?
...instead of just turning out unbelievably ugly crap.
Ever wonder why most open-source project websites look completely unprofessional? Maybe we'd make better inroads to businesses if the marketing materials we used looked halfway decent.
There has to be a balance.
-- "The reward of suffering is experience." - Aeschylus
Pretty soon AOL is going to be using gecko for its HTML renderer.
In short order, developers taking this tack loose about 30 million customers. Do you want to be the one to explain to your boss why the company site doesn't work on his wife's computer?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I took a DHTML page I made in Visual InterDev that would simply not work in non-IE browsers and re-did it in VisualStudio.NET - it worked 100% perfect in all browsers (well, except Konqueror). Sure, not everything works or looks 100% right (some tricks I tried didn't have as good results but they did the job) but for all the fuss that Microsoft is trying to shut out non-IE users, .NET sure does seem to be doing a lot to try and keep all the browsers happy.
Schnapple
Some website designers are not aware of the difficulties of non windows users. A couple months ago I went to www.mancow.com and it was flash only. I e mailed a note to the webmaster and a few days later received the following:
An apology and explanation that no attempt was being made to alienate users
A request to view his NEW page the front page was graphically cool enough and then it linked to "Flash version or HTML version"
So, not everyone does this deliberately.
BTW As a courtesy (if his servers can take it) this was also a plug for www.mancow.com.
Karl
Why should designers need to program? Programming is for programmers. Designers design. There are lots of people who are both, but you can't expect good design from someone just because they are a good programmer.
Also, designing a web page hardly ever involves anything that could be called "programming". (since back-end stuff has nothing to do with how it's rendered in different browsers)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
My school [www.mcmaster.ca] is re-designing it's page. It's about time for a new web page since it's currently old and bulky. But the company that has been hired to do it worries me a bit. Their site is built on flash mostly.[www.cossetteinteractive.com]
Mac's site will not be a flash based application, because the content is the most important but I have a feeling we are looking at IE & Netscape > 5.0 browsers for CSS and java code (my mozilla doesn't have a java plugin!).
Anyway, it's going to be interesting to see how the university reacts to this change.
It's nice when things look pretty, but if it doesn't say anything, or not everyone can read it, then you've just spoiled your "target market" and your "branding" doesn't matter any more?
Chris
Are Microsoft's "changes" intentional or are they errors? If they are intentional then they should be submitted to the W3C for acceptance. If they are mistakes then they should fixed.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
Not really (a good point). You can easily make
sites that work in all browsers. Yes it sometimes
takes more effort, but less effort than using
some technology for the sake of it.
The point of the web is getting the information
accross. Not requiring proprietary plugin X.
If you were talking about a physical facility and a disabled person would you still think the point is
good? After all 90+% of people are not disabled
right?
if IE were the standard, it'll be at least compatible with itself, from version to version.
Who set these mythical "standards"?
Volunteers from academia and industry, just like the people who set up the "mythical standards" for the Internet.
The W3C has been irrelevant for several years now.
Then why are the browser manufacturers working so hard to make their products standards-compliant?
I maintain several sites that do lots of nice things using CSS and HTML...they work on and have been tested with multiple versions of Netscape, IE, and Opera (at the very least). As a Government entity, we've also got to consider ADA accessiblity and have accounted for that.
Making a site so that it works on only one browser demonstrates a lack of talent.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
I don't mind so much if there are a few bugs on a website because the designer hasn't tested it in Netscape/Mozilla/Opera etc - what annoys me is when a website will probably work fine but just blocks you out anyway.
Argos is a case in point. If you fake the UserAgent string, you can access the website fine. But why should I have do do that?! They're just losing customers...
Then either you're using a Mozilla build from a year ago or you just don't know how to code HTML properly.
Nice troll. My bugs have been languishing in Bugzilla for months. I was writing something that was in the W3C spec that IE supported and Netscape did not
. Jackass.
And there's one more thing: our rights. People have the right to choose whatever they want. If I don't want to use Windows or IE, then that's my choice. Standards are created to make sure that I can still view the Internet, no matter which OS/browser I choose. But people like you are effectively taking away our right to choose.
First off, I can *choose* to write my sites any way I'd like. Secondly, you can either choose to visit them, or not visit them. You can choose what browser to use. It sounds like you're trying to take away my right to *choose* how I code my own websites. Jackass.
Its true, a lot of trolls recently have been exploiting IE bugs on slashdot. Most famously the PWP (Page widening post)! So on slashdot it is the other way round.
Most people seem to think that there is just a choice of Netscape(tm), Mozilla(tm), Opera(tm), or Lynx(tm)...
Not so! This browser is the best I've ever seen:
http://dillo.cipsga.org.br/
It's about time that this gets some attention! More than once a day, I have to copy an URL from my Opera (6.0) browser to IE (5.5) just to view some website that doesn't care about anyone but Microsoft. The day I don't need IE to view web pages will be a great day!
Make a repository of sites which break on non-IE browsers.. Basically, a net-wide site-bug watch. Launch it as a universal database, and submit the reports to each webmaster in turn (as well as publishing the information on worst-offenders)
Anyone know of something like this? If not, I'll take the initiative and build it damnit.
Oh, and how many of you complaining wussies are posting via IE on windows anyway? Go sit in a corner.
from this post, we can ascertain that the tag is HTML 4.0 compliant.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
I've worked as a usability engineer on a bunch of applications, and it always comes down to the client or the project manager saying "Most people use..."
So everyone loads IE on their development boxes and writes the application, never bothing with things like validation.
The next thing you know, the developers are bitching and re-coding because it looks like crap in Navigator and they only figured this out in testing. As this point, the last thing they want to hear about is writing HTML to any sort of standard, so they decide they can just get around the problem by requiring the user to use IE. After all, notes the client and the project manager, most people...
The solution isn't that hard.
As soon as AOL starts using Mozilla as their standard browser everyone who maintains an IE only page will be forced to sort their HTML out or lock out a potential 34 million customers .
That should give them food for thought.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
"(If you hadn't noticed, the Web is meant to be an open medium, not controlled by a large, monopolistic and law-breaking American corporation)"
An open medium? Well then, I guess Microsoft should be free to do any damned thing they want to with web standards, developers should develop for any platform they want to, and consumers reap the benefits of openness. As for who controls the standards, how is Microsoft any worse than a bunch of dorks who write white papers about which standards to use?
I can read this site in IE perfectly. Maybe we need to change that.
thelikesofwhich.com
It's the same story from 7 years ago, in reverse.
It comes down to laziness in web application development teams and making users conform to the whims of the developers instead of the developers trying their darndest to be transparent throughout the web application process.
To make a specific browser an integral part of an application rather than making it irrelevant will be something web app teams will have to deal with well into the future if they truely want to cater to all PC users in the long-haul.
Just like error-trapping is necessary, there should a a browser-trapping standard developed for web apps.
Anyone agree?
Crapdot
News from birds. Stuff that splatters.
The new defacto standard *is* published:
New standards
That's like saying if I want to wire my house a certain way, and the building codes from 88 don't allow me to, then I should just go ahead and do it my way because the codes are 14 years old.
If NS and Opera want to compete, they need to make *their* browsers compatible with the new de facto standard.
Hell, even when I tried making my stuff NS compatible, Mozilla is so full of rendering bugs that it was impossible.
No.. You just need to try harder, or do it differently. Sure, I have a site that works a little better in IE (the TD background color is changable - remotely - in IE, as a highlight, while not in Opera/NS), but if I used an image instead, it would work just fine.
There ARE multiple ways to accomplish the same thing. By not conforming to the existing standards, and buying into the extended monopoly, you're only screwing the rest of us into a specific browser.
And remember, just because it looked right in IE, before you tried it in Mozilla, doesn't mean you didn't account for IE's rendering bugs.
For example. Did you know that for absolute width, there IS no standard? Some browsers include the browser border, while others do not. It hasn't been addressed. This can easily be worked around, and is well-known. I think you just need to do more research.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Since a couple of months, we've been active in a local group to support and promote open standards (http://www.openstandaarden.be). While decent use of html is not the only aspect, the current replies of webmasters can be cathegorised in 3 main groups:
...)
:((
1. Incompetence. Let's face it, with the advent of WYSIWYG editors, nobody needs to know a single line of HTML anymore. Combined with software producers that practice point 2, this is a deadly combination. This is actually the worst group because the webdesigners (can one use this word) do not see any need to change. Hey, everybody should be using their tools and OS, because they are the experts.
2. Malice. Especially Microsoft uses a couple of well documented techniques to kill all opposition and different browsers is for them one way to kill other operating systems. In one particular case, they seriously funded a government related site and all radio audio streams were in wma format. When the webmasters were contacted, they admitted to this fact. Luckily some of the webmasters there are not in cathegory 1 and changes were made. (The site used to be unaccessible with anything but IE). Realplayer and MP3 audio streams are still on the way out though (even though there seems to be some sensibility with a couple of people that can influence desicions (http://www.vrt.be, http://www.radio1.be,
3. Standards. Some webmasters still do an effort to get sites accessible with most browsers (and, very importantly, to disabled people). This last cathegory is often "forgotten" when building another Flash and other extension enabled site, even though simple things (like tagging images) can help them a lot. It is nice to see that changes are made for the good after indicating a problem on the site.
Unfortunately, cathegories 1 and 2 are growing faster than cathegory 3 and when faced with "we got the server and bandwith to provide the streams for free" argumentation, there is, still, little one can do other than trying to get the people understand the value an need for standards
And the fact that government sites seem to be especially susceptible to these effects makes it worse: these sites should be accessible to _anyone_ (even when "best viewed with telnet 80") and, if the government practices something, it is to some an indication of "standardisation"
Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis. You can't simply say, "Today I will be brilliant."
Since people tend to do no more than is absolutely necessary, sites are essentially designed for IE because the majority of web users surf using IE. Also, there's the possibility that webserver logs show the majority use IE, thus it would be prudent to cater to them. Of course, this is all conjecture.
Don't get me wrong though, it still sucks. However that's just how it goes.
I don't know. I'm still waiting to figure out why after 5 years, Mozilla still hasn't implemented the W3C's standard for a click() method on an A tag. IE has supported this for many years.
I've been using Mozilla now for months and I can get to MOST sites OK, though I do miss a few features here and there. I typically send them an e-mail and they may or may not address the problem. I was wondering if anyone had written a kind of canned response to send to "bad" web designers when their HTML is too MS-centric?? I usually write these manually, but it would sure be easy to send out a standard, well-written and well thought out response to convince these authors to change their ways. Does anybody know of one?
Like it or not, the only way to enforce W3C on M$/IE is going to be when AOL (another evil giant company) includes the new NS browser (aka Mozilla) in their evil software. They have nearly 50% of the Internet eye balls.
Unfortunately, AOL has removed the great turn off "open unrequested windows" feature in their NS version.
Ya Sure! You Betcha!, The_THOMAS
(and I'm going to ignore that "complaining about flash" != "debate about coding standards")
Right now IE is the dominant browser. As we all know, the winner of a war gets to write history. Thus, IE is the standard as far as most business and personal users are concerned. Your average Joe Blow off the street doesn't know or care about any standards body making rules. All he cares about is whether www.whatever.www will work in his browser, which statistics show is most likely IE.
We can lament the failure of Opera, Mozilla, etc to be the Redmond giant, but that doesn't change the fact that programmers will be told to code for IE because that's what everyone uses. When time is an issue, the big suits are going to want it working on the majority of systems in the shortest amount of time. That means coding for IE and leaving the rest behind.
If you want to make a difference, go to the sites that are coded for IE only and let them know there is a demand for them to be cross-browser compliant. Word your email rationally and explain why they are losing customers due to their lack of support for other platforms. If they don't respond, don't go there anymore. Enough people doing that should get the suits attention (if they care, and if they don't then why do you bother). MS will only take over the web if you let them.
Electronic Frontier Foundation for online civil rights information
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Writing pages for just IE means you will be compatible with most people browsing. This seems to be "good enough" in these days of quick software releases without proper testing (or any testing at all frequently).
Flash is a cool technology but is still limited in many ways. Those using only Flash will end up with large downloads when incorporating other technologies and unusual methods. Even so, it is one of the best content delivery systems to date. Flash with sql is a decent combination in my book.
We should really take a look at the original concepts of browser detection and alternate views (especially with so many PDA's and web enabled phones). Most people don't want to spend the time and money on these things as they are out to profit, which in most cases is at your expense. Such people will utilize IE and ignore other technologies.
People that are making profit at your expense suck. It's hard to think of a company that isn't doing this which is why I don't see a solution on the horizon in the next year or two.
If more people running Windows just started running Mozilla or Opera instead, the percentage of people not running IE could increase to maybe, what, 5%? Even that would mean that owners of some sites will realize (through looking in their logs) that 1 out of 20 people visiting their site can't view their site and they will have an incentive to make their site work with more browsers.
Does anybody know what percentage "we"'re at now?
-- jaf
I worked at a very large web devolpment company (our client roster was all fortune 500s).
I worked in the Quality Assurance dept. And we tested any peice of html that we gave to the client on many many versions of i.e. and netscape on both the PC and mac... it's amazing how many things break on websites.
But it is very comon practice to make sure that your website is going to look good and work for 95-99% of it's viewers.
Also, let's not go bashing microsoft too quick on this one... Netscape started the trend... who can forget the BLINK tag?
Your mammas flamebait.
I hate to say this, but frankly, I think all of the Linux users who tollerate poor web design by using IE(tm) to view the web, instead of complaining to webmasters about poor HTML, are at least partly to blame for this.
I mean, I'm subscribed to the Linux kernel mailing list, and I frequently see people posting with Windows(tm)-based E-Mail cilents. I mean, why? It's occasionally because their Linux machines are all down, (who subscribes to the kernel mailing list, and yet only has one Linux machine, anyway?), or they're at work, (why haven't they talked their boss in to using Linux exclusively, yet?).
Frankly, the only way you are going to get through to webmasters, is to NOT USE IE(tm), because then it WON'T SHOW UP IN THEIR LOGS SO MUCH!
I'm seeing improvement even though I'm using Netscape 4.76 (for stability purposes: I want my work desktop **boring**).
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
I don't know what this article is talking about. I've been doing web design for years, and I always
br>
I still haven't found the "any" key.
People who develop websites seem to agree: Netscape has been a nightmare to develop for.
IE had the luxery of being able to focus on standards compliance (from a functionality standpoint) while Netscape was forced to differentiate itself by coming up with extra functionality in order to fend off M$...In my experience Netscapes implementation of style sheets has been abysmal until recently.
That said, I've been using Mozilla since the 1.0 release on both my windoze system at work and my linux box at home...both have performed well in almost all situations.
Your problems with sites supporting IE only depend a lot on what sites you frequent. I hit sites dealing with Unix, Linux and some odd news sites.
_ _
I have not had a major problem with site content itself. Sure, I do not have the Crossweaver's plugin for viewing QuickTime but if I did I would pretty much be in the clear for all sites I view in terms of seeing the content available.
I worried a bit when my wife started using the KDE desktop I set for her but Opera has done her right.
The biggest issue I have has been with IE and more precisely windows based web apps on my company's intranet. In fact, this has been the biggest problem for most people using a *Nix desktop in the corporate environment.
Out there in the wild of the WWW world I have not hit this problem.
Am I just sheltered in my web viewing?
_______________________________________________
ACK
I develop web applications for a living. If the app I am developing is targeted for a large user base and we can not dictate the browser app / version to the users, I make a site that renders correctly on NS / Opera / Mozilla / IE.
However, if I can dictate to a customer that you MUST use IE 5.5 or better to use this app, I will, unless that is a deal breaker for the customer. The reason for this is simple: I can make a better looking app more quickly with IE as the client software. Besides, most corporations have standardized on IE anyway. Even my old engineering shop that ran HP-UX made the engineers use Citrix to access MS Outlook and IE.
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
I do business online with my websites. Some arbitrary "standards" are irrelevant. What *is* relevant is making the best possible experience for the most possible users.
What are you talking about? Your website is butt ugly (btw, 'free pics' link is http500 - internal server error. Great customer experience there).
No, there aren't that many people using mozilla, but it doesn't take any more work to make a site that works in moz if you follow the standards. Unless you just needed to have that stupid cascading menu thing that covers the text on your page. Of course, no one with Javascript disabled will even be able to use it, and a lot of people do turn it of when surfing for porn, to avoid all the popups.
By the way, what are you talking about moz having rendering bugs? Every time I've had a rendering glitch moving from IE to moz it turned out to be because of Mozilla's more strict parsing rules (in other words, I had made a mistake and IE worked around it)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I'll never, ever, EVER make any of my sites render properly only on IE. I promise this to the world.
Of course, since I comply with W3 standards and use lots of CSS2 features, my sites look quite bad by default on IE (text-align: center; is NOT the same as margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;). IE is a giant pain in the ass. My biggest pet peeve ever is when people say IE renders properly while Mozilla doesn't. 99.9% of the time this is completely untrue.
Netscape 4 isn't woth supporting any more. It'll just make your code twice as complicated as it should be.
Anyway, browsing around the other day I found a neat site called the Viewable with Any Browser Campaign. Thought people might be interested.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
All the DHTML sites I visit are using standards compliant code so it just seems to work. In alt.javascript I've noticed people mostly give responces which follow the DOM standards.
I have found a few corperate web sites which don't work with my web browser. ati.com (Now it works, but it didn't in the past), electronic arts (Site redesign fixed the problems) and the government of canada's (un)employment insurance web site (It has a warning for nav6 users but I never bothered to look into it). But those are the exception to the rule.
In general, I don't really see this as that big of a problem. Just asking the web designer to fix the web site usually works. And if you need help figuring it out, the w3c always has their Evangelism mailing-list and Bugzilla has tech evangelism bugs where they will notify the author of a particular web site sending them information on how they can make their web site work in w3c compliant web browsers.
As a web developer I must admit that true, At times when I was designing the html layout and "looks" of a website, depending on what the website is and who it is for I would only view it under IE. It is easy to forget (not care?) about all other browsers when you know 95% of users that will visit your site use IE.
But!!.. Now that mozilla 1.0 is out, I look at them through both. My sites must meet mozilla expectations. Hey, sometimes I'm even curious enough to look at how bad they look under ns 4.x!
[alk]
This is exactly why I publically ridicule any so called "web designer" that does not code to w3c standards. You code for IE? then you are a NO TALENT HACK, a LOSER, a wannabe or ankle biter.
Basically someone that cant do crap. You code to w3c standards? then you are a web-designer.. anything else is a poser.
I did a small research in the Netherlands for uselab.com. We tested 22 municipal websites for accessibility using Mozilla 1.0 on Win2k and IE 5.1 on MacOSX.
The result: over 30 % of the websites had serious accessibility problems on Mozilla and on IE on the Mac. Problems where mainly caused by improper use of dynamic HTML and erroneous handling of the useragent-string (ie. trying to deliver a non-existant Mozilla webpage).
I see the Microsoftizing of these same commercial web sites as a good thing. By cutting themselves out of the browsers I like to use, they're effectively removing the part of the Internet that I'm not interested in from my sight.
I entirely support their efforts to make my Internet a less boring and less cluttered place. They can have their own Internet to themselves. Remember, the open Internet was around long before they got here, and the interesting parts will be around long after they've switched over to some proprietary format.
Seems like that wouldn't (or shouldn't) be the case but it's true.
Netscape, IE, Opera, ect... all have their own unique bugs or quirks that a web developer needs to be very familiar with in order to develop a page using existing standards that retains the intended visual style and formatting. There are also quirks that differ between not only major, but minor versions of browsers.
In order to comply with web standards you need to know all of these quirks ahead of time or you're going to spend far longer than you would like in development. But that is exactly how you learn about these quirks to begin with.
Rather than learning workarounds to the countless bugs and quirks of individual web browsers, developers find it much more time efficient to limit the target platform. In this case the most obvious choice is IE. Why? Because of its ubiquity. If 90%+ of Internet users are utilizing IE, then you've cut down your need for workarounds greatly while limiting the audience but only 10% (at most).
It's also a quicker development, especially if you're using FrontPage since it's designed with the IE engine.
Now all this, I think, can change. But to bring about change a few things need to happen. First web developers need to be able to drop their need to support version 4 browsers. Right now this isn't realistic but in 1 to 2 years it will be.
Next, Mozilla/Netscape 7 need to gain ground in browser usage. AOL's bundling of Netscape will certainly help this move along. Also people taking up the call themselves and introducing friends and families to the joys of Mozilla would help. Word-of-mouth works too but it all takes time.
It won't be overnight but in a couple years (I hope) the M$ domination of the browser market will dwindel. At that time you will see more and more web developers being forced to look to web standards.
So while what this article says is definitely true of the present, I think things will change as time progresses.
You do business on the web? Whoa. There's a new concept.
...
IE should not be the standard, because it's broken. Every IE release has different bugs, so you have to write stupid workarounds for every version/service pack/hotfix/etc. It's a nightmare, and anyone who has to support their website will attest to it. We get at least 10 calls a day because some client has a different IE on a different Windows version and theres some obscure thing that it does that none of the other configurations do. VMware comes in handy here, but it can still take hours to replicate the error, and come up with a fix.
We have not had a single problem with any mozilla release since 0.9.7. "Rendering bugs" is ambiguous. What rendering bugs?
To sum it up: Mozilla is great. It's standards compliant (yes, W3C is the standards body. It has been for years... there's nothing arbitary about it,) and is a great platform for web development.
Also, I've been using it as my one and only browser on my Windows box for about 6 months now, and I have yet to see it crash, nor render a website thats worth caring about incorrectly. It does flash perfectly. It even embeds Acrobat reader in there just like IE does.
Meh.
Slightly offtopic, but I can't help but sharing this awesome little utility that helps me avoid so much of the obnoxious, invasive flash on the web.
Check out www.flashswitch.com
Or for a great web filter, that catches just about everything other than flash, try www.webwasher.com.
I can't bear to surf with out them.
Why web standards:
webstandards.org
How to actually do it:
alistapart.com
I admit that I am guilty of writing specifically for IE. The reason I do so is simply because IE gives me the best results. I find that when I place a tag in my HTML, it comes out looking just the way I want it on IE more often than it does on the "others". Take my job for example...here, the default browser installed on all the computers is Netscape 4.7. Because of this, the correct use of style sheets is damn near impossible. Most of the time I am forced the use incorrect HTML practices, such as using tables for layout, just to get a decent look.
Now when I'm home and designing websites, I am so fed up with stooping to the lowest common denominator that I end up throwing together a warning page and going nuts with CSS2. Granted I could probably use PHP or a separate style sheet to get a halfway decent look on the other browsers, but I have neither the time nor the patience to try to cater to everyone viewing my personal sites. I see web design as an art and I believe that IE best handles the "code" to present that art. Standardization would be wonderful, but don't go shunning IE just because it's easy M$ fodder.
And as for Flash, I honestly believe that it (or some other similar form) is the future of web design. To be able to get the exact same look regardless of the enduser's system is a web designer's wet dream. Add to that growing bandwidth of the average user and that clunky Flash site is looking more and more attractive.
"I strongly urge both the faint of heart and the faint of butt to leave the room at this time."
- Strong Bad
... and if those 5% of people can see your page properly but not your competitors who do you think is going to get the sale?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
(did I just say that?)
This article on Webmonkey explains how IE6 is going to make it easier for designers to create web pages viewable by all browsers, by becoming more standards-compliant. It is over a year old, but explains IE6's use of the DOCTYPE declaration, which allows designers to write standards compliant code for almost any browser (and throw microsoft's old propriatary standards out the window if they choose).
I understand your concerns using FrontPage to build web sites.
Now, how about finding a decent standards-compliant WYSIWYG web page builder that will create web pages that look good in both IE 6.0 and Mozilla 1.0? What brands do you recommend?
I agree, I write to the w3c dom level 1 standard (later/latest versions of IE, Opera, Mozilla) with a function which adds support for older versions of IE up to 4. Older versions of Netscape (4 back) are just plain broken. Who ever heard of an object model with three elements (hyperlink, layer, form)?
With the amount of greif adding Netscape 4 support has, cuased me over the years. I hardily second the motion that Netscape 4 users have can go fuck themselves.
One thing that is rarely mentioned in web page standards discussions is the growing requirement to make web pages accessible to _everybody_ - this includes those with special needs. This is where a lot of the W3C work really comes into its own.
Standards make things like client side style sheets for translating pages into something a text to voice system (for the blind for example) can actually understand much simpler. Mainly as parsing and translating valid XML or HTML is much simpler than broken HTML (IE). Braille output systems are another example of where good use of XML/XHTML/CSS could make a huge difference.
Web designers who don't stick to the standards should especially take note of this as there is growing legal pressure to force accesibility of web pages. Many government and university pages already HAVE to be standards compliant for these very reasons.
As for flash - I have no idea how you convert those pages into braille?
Not relevant you say? Only a small percentage of the population? Think about how many wheelchair access ramps you've seen? Why do you think they were put there?
This is a link to the report on http://slashdot.org through the W3C validator.
Interesting.
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
And I'm using Mozilla on OS X - a combination that is at best 1% of the net traffic - and almost everything works fine. I'd say that the news.com article is off-base...
You are not even capable of aligning your bold tags properly...
"Hello,
This is the 3rd time you visit this website with IE.
This is a critical point.
Either you have to register now for $$$ or use an other browser for free access."
Privacy is terrorism.
Got that? Less well. If you follow what the W3C wants to the letter, people with "legacy" browsers will be screwed - people on NS 3/4 especially will see nothing but crap.
Personaly, I think people using netscape 4 should be shot. Baring that, showing them a fugly-ass page is good enough.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Well it's crap really, bobbie is a much better validator.
I like this quote from Shutterfly about the issue, blaming browsers:
What we want to do is write once and have it work with everything," said Russ Sanon, senior manager for quality-assurance engineering at Shutterfly. "But it falls onto the lap of the individual browser manufacturer. There's nothing that we do that's proprietary. Everything that we write should work with W3C-complaint specs.
Funny. According to an html validator, I would put their site in the not even close department. I wonder how the QA manager could claim his page is standards compliant, when the front page is so obviously not (although it would be a lot closer if it at least had the right DTD...). Could be because he doesn't understand what we are even talking about? Sigh.
On a similar subject I find it a real pain that Slashdot doesn't support w3m. This is the only site I use that requires me to keep a copy of lynx installed.
Tim Brown
Please show me one single page on w3.org where it mentions click() as a standard.
Wait, you won't, as it isn't.
From the article (I made the link a bit more obvious):
The referenced study actually reported 95.3% use of MSIE, down from 96.6% as reported the month before. I don't care if it's true, the audience of users to whom I serve web documents is far more diverse. I believe it would be foolish to permit numbers of overwhelming IE dominance sway you into the IE-centric camp of Web design.
Here are my overall use percentages. In cases such as those which feed the numbers below, I don't really have much choice but to be agnostic about the browser in use. Percentage of documents (HTML only) viewed by various browsers, top ten:
I really won't go into reasons why I've split AOL or Mac IE from Win IE ... I could rejoin them or
group all the Gecko-based browsers together, but
the above provides me with a pretty clear indication of why I shouldn't care whether 95% of
those not visiting my sites are using IE exclusively. Would I really want to forfeit over
1/3 of my visitors' experiences? Would you?
Numbers are great. Context is better.
Darn it. I'm one of the guilty ones.
... well, it makes sense to the bosses.
;)
I don't want to be, though. I use OSX at home, but since Win IE has a HUGE marketshare, my boss don't really want to pay me for caring about other browsers at work.
And, NO, it's not just a question of sticking to standards ( my HTML *does* validate ).
Rather it's a question about DHTML/Javascript.
For example, last time I checked, Opera didn't support createElement ( meaning, you can't create elements for a popupmenu, for example ).
One example of things not working as they should. If you are building relatively complex pages, these are the things you need.
Also, IE does have some nice stuff. Stuff which isn't "standard", but is pretty nice. One example would be "behaviors", which are great to use.
Mozilla designed their own way of doing stuff like this. They call it XBL or -moz-binding. As far as I know, not a standard either.
The point here is, that if I wanted to use these technologies, and support both IE and Mozilla, I would double the amount of work.
I really, really, really wish things weren't like this. But they are. It's as simple as that.
I LOVE Mozilla, but on some sites I would literally be able to count the amount of users using Mozilla on one hand.
It's a crappy state of afairs. It's there for a reason though. You cannot write complex code that works in all browsers without investing some time into it. And when other browsers marketshare are as a low as they are
I understand if you guys think this is stupid, but it's not my world. I just live in it
By sticking to the standards, and not to what current IE happens to implement, you have more chance that your site keeps working with future versions of any browser, including IE. So even in an IE only world (god forbid) it is risky to use non-standard HTMl/Javascript.
There has to be an independent standard for the code if there is going to be competition. If IE's rendering of a page and proprietary extension of HTML is what the industry caters too Netscape and Opera will no longer be able to compete. Period. Standards help even the playing field and keep things open and non-proprietary.
Fundamentally, web pages need to be *compliant* with an independent standard not "compatible" with a browser.
As a web site developer devoping web services that go beyond free information into e-commerce i'll quickly tell you why ie is the standard in today's market.
Money. Its as simple as that. It takes 5x as long to try and support multiple browsers than just ie.
Opera as listed in the subject CANT do 90% of the stuff i need it to. Most annoyingly is updating content after loading (which totally gets rid of any client side xml->display thats not static (read xmlhttp)).
Mozilla has a million and two rendering issues and css problems that it becomes a real hassle to get working.
To make things worse, microsoft controls the market and mozilla/dom sales dont equal the development costs.
Microsoft supports htc (html components) which makes dhtml development a dream with custom xml namespace tags behaviors and just an overall nice api for easily adding reusable effects to a page.
Moz on the other hand supports no such model and you would have to completely abandon this excellent technology to give mozilla support.
I go out of my way to write standard compliant code (eg using document.documentElement and not document.body) where ever possible but I wont redo my web services that cross over into client side xml.
And the answer is simply its not economical to do it. Why spend several grand making a system work on mozzila and downgrading the ie htc support to get 1% more sales for example.
In my business its not worth it. and i'll think you'll find thats the reason most pro firms that do this are.
Once you reach a certain complexity level you quickly reach the limits of dom browsers and standards and need to move into proprietary abilities.
And contrary to some of the more ignorant posts its not wysiwyg editors that produce more proprietary code. In fact most produce very cross browser code even if its not standards compliant.
That being said you cant do anything advanced with them and need to re-write anything that they would produce by hand.
So hand code support ie and unless the nix community starts voting with their wallette quit bitchin.
"My pet peeve is when sites hype and announce new-and-improved sites, and then they come out and they are simply a gigantic flash application."
If you comment on the news, then stay on topic and don't destroy the discussion with a holy war even before it started.
Don't answer me. Moderate. Slashdot is about moderation, not discussion.
For sooo many years mac users (and linux...and whatever non-M.S. platform you use) have felt the frustration of not having the same level of application choice. Companies develop where the money is, and that was in the big windows market.
So, the web designer says to the company looking for the site: "Hey...what customers do you want to reach?"
Company: All of them! (typical)
Designer: All of them? Okay...lets take a look at the possible conditions under which you can view a web site. You can have this generic looking site that will distinguish you from this peanut in that the peanut isn't on the screen, and it is dumbed down enough to be viewed by everyone. That's cheap. You can have this terrific looking site, but for every different scenario that you want someone to be able to view it under, it will cost an additional 'X' dollars. Or...you can develop for M.S., get 85% of the potential viewers, and have it cost the original quote"
Company: Do that. THat sounds good!
And that is the world we live in!
hi,
I found out a few months ago that Comcast's customer service web GUI only works w/ IE for security. When I complained to customer service, they [naturally] claimed they didn't support any browsers besides IE. Of course, they dont support any OS besides M$ either.
sTc
Most things worth doing are worth doing twice. -- me I think or was that my boss' methodology?
You people are just now noticing this? Score another for your friendly neighborhood on-the-ball slashdot weenie.
You'd actually be helping the standards effort a heck of a lot more by dropping NS4.x support.
No, I'm not saying move to IE.
I've been using mozilla as my target browser for over a year now. Wonderful side effect is that everything I write automatically works fine in IE and Opera.
Haven't written a browser based code fork in over a year!
No Comment.
And the W3C was founded in part by the guy who wrote HTML, the first WWW server, and the first browser, thereby inventing the web in the first place, Tim Berners-Lee. So I think his organization has some authority as originator in determining what is standard. And MS *participates* in the standards process at W3C, so there aren't really two standards at all: there're the standards, and the places where MS (or Netscape, or Mozilla) has decided to ignore the standards they participated in developing.
Slashdot comes up with a good hundred or so errors when put through the W3C HTML validator.
If there is anyone who wants to build a webpage and wants to use a web authoring program with a WYSIWYG environment, use Amaya. It's at http://www.w3c.org/Amaya. It conforms to W3C's HTML standards, it's available for Windows as well as Linux. And because it's available for a free download, there is no excuse for someone to be using FrontPage to build a website.
I recently had a browser related problem with my registrar, eNom.
They have a web based DNS manager, which is one of the main reasons I chose them. But when I tried to use it for the first time, it wouldn't work. Tech support said it was because they website has been designed for "IE 5 or Netscape 4.7 and above", although the part where you give them your credit card number works perfectly with any browser.
Now I'll have to wait one year before switching to another registrar! If only they had stated that I wouldn't be able to use their services, now I wouldn't have the problem.
The funny thing is that I use Mozilla 1.0, which is clearly "above" both IE 5 and Netscape 4.7.
If I have posted far, it is because I replied to giants.
The organization that is devoted to evangelizing Web standards is the Web Standards Project, aka The WaSP. They have been promoting web standards for years now.
Originally The WaSP targeted the browser makers to support standards in their browsers. They also targeted WYSIWYG Web development applications like Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe Golive.
Now that modern browsers are (mostly) standards compliant and WYSIWYG developers have released programs that generate standards compliant code, The WaSP has changed focus to the Web developers.
The WaSP agrees that the last bastion of old school, standards flaunting Web junk lies with Web developers. Now that we've got good browsers and good tools, there is no excuse why we don't have standards compliant sites.
Don't think of it as having to change your design for 5% of the people. Think of it a designing to gain 5% more customers.
/.).
Now tell this to jamie to fix the page-widening-bugs that plague slashdot. And change 5% to the real number of IE users (I'd really like to see real stats on who uses what browser to view
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
They have nearly 50% of the Internet eye balls.
What crack are you smoking? You must live in a pretty small world to think that the ~30 million AOL users represent 50% of the entire world. Some estimates have the World online population to be well over 500 million and growing. That makes AOL users less than 6% and shrinking. Considering that most AOL users don't even use the built in browser, AOL's switch is nothing more than a fart in a windstorm.
I think someone just took a year or two year old artical, punched it up a bit, and sold it to news.com.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Why do you feel it necessary to post under a dedicated trolling name?
I just follow this simple rule.
If the browser isn't ANSI compliant, then I don't program for it. I program following ANSI and ISO standards to an absolute tee. Unfortunately, sometimes the browsers can't handle those standards though (Netscape for example). IE has been quite good at matching the standards, and Mozilla and Opera have done reasonably good as well.
For all of the programmers out there who either program meticulously to match NS and IE, or just program using IE's little tricks. A simple solution that will likely please all of your customers. Just program using the standards and a textpad, no more WYSIWYG (Frontpage), or silly IE tricks. In the end everyone wins.
~ kjrose
Fuck NS4. It's been around far too long; if it were a pet, someone would have put it down a year ago. If you can't be bothered to update to a browser more recent than NS4, you should have the computer removed from your posession.
Take a look at the 5K contest this year. The rules were relaxed a bit this time around, and in my totally random browsing of the entries I found that at least half of them do not work in my trusty Mozilla sans java, flash, etc. Disgusting, what used to be a contest to showcase novel design has become a wasteland of cheesy javascript and flash.
Sadly, the 256b contest seems to be going the same route. Check the first 5 entries, they are all IE only or require javascript.
Web designers are sucking more and more latley. Learn proper CSS and stop designing broken pages.
i stuck with designing stuff with clean (by the book, w3) code, even though i knew that NS couldn't/wouldn't display properly...
i was safe in the knowledge that as soon as mozilla was available mainstream all my designs would suddenly look fine.
and they do.
they still look good in ie too.
webstandards.org/upgrade
the w3c validator.
Sometimes the webmasters of the site even respond and are surprised that such a thing exists. If people would keep doing that, web desingers might use the validator as well.
The real problem are those so-called authoring tools which produce invalid html in the first place. Everybody who bought such a program should complain to the manufacturer.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
I've been trying hard to Fight The Man and not use IE, but I am running into more and more sites that Netscape 6 can't decipher.
I plan to take a look at Opera and Mozilla, but if they can't do those sites either, I'll have to go over to the darkside....
Where are the standards? Why aren't web designers following them?
Cara Hart chart@eNOSPAMfurn.com Systems Administrator eFurn.com, LLC. and ARITEK Systems, Inc.
I'm a website designer.. and I know that sometimes when I'm designing a website I will notice that IE displays the page as it "thinks" I want it to be displayed.. rather then how I WANT it to be displayed.. where as netscape displays it as I CODED it.
.. well you didn't code correctly.
An example. If you leave the closing off of a website.. IE will usually display fine.. on the other hand Netscape will display a blank page because
The problem, as far as I can see is that Netscape follows code.. IE just haphazardly tries to decide what YOU want to do and "fixes" the code.
I'm sorry to say this, but people who have bought Windows OS is a potentially product buyer, while Linux surfers tend to search all day for the free solutions. So why should we ever support Linux?
So you're saying 30% of the effort for dual-maintenance needs to go into luring in 5% of the customers?
Yes, that's really bright. You should have a Ph.D.
Hi! My name is supabeast! and I make absolutely no sense. Please send me back to nursery school so I can learn the difference between simple things.
... is MSN's games page. (Note: You will see an error if you're not using IE.)
When my girlfriend tried to log in to play her favorite time-wasting game, she saw this message and told me (again) that Macs suck. It's so nice to see Microsoft mind control at work in your very own home.
What Bugzilla bugs? Keep in mind that if you reported bugs that basically demanded a return to the rendering model of yesteryear then they're likely to remain languishing for quite some time. Switching to standards-compliance requiures a little more than just slapping on a 4.01 Transitional doctype and praying.
You might try looking here: http://www.hut.fi/~hsivonen/standards.html
And as a small aside point, yes, you *can* choose to keep coding for MSIE; it's just that doing such is a very unwise course of action.
--
viqsi - See "vixen"
If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed.
well that's a surprise
...
i haven't read the article and i haven't read all the posts generated by this discussion but
i develop websites, i like developing websites and i will put my hand up and say i have in the past fallen into the 'it works' on IE only trap.
i do use an HTML validator now.
i think we should all realise there are a lot of engines out there that don't seem to support the standards properly
For example, my experience is an HTML page won't validate if tag exists without an ALT attribute set.
but i have tested sites with browsers other than IE on (yes sorry for this ) the windoze platform only to find the other browser doesn't display the ALT tag data.
how can i say well try it in Browser X or advertise that a site works cross browsers and platforms when i get that response from a modern browser?
i agree the engine parsed the page ok but i thought the alt attribute is meant to be there visually if the image don't load.
none of the alt data was displayed at all.
What made this particular case worse was that the browser had different bugs according to different platforms,
so not only did i experience a cross browser issue but a cross platform issue too.
With the advent of FrontPage unfortunately people aren't prepared to pay for the time invested
in ensuring that their web site works cross platform and cross browser and comes up to standard.
they see FrontPage output works on IE and they don't care about Opera, Netscape, Lynx or disabled access to their sites; they only see what they have to pay for the work involved.
so a web designer/developer can put the effort into standardising a site but that doesn't solve the problems
because so few of the browsers are working to the standards. which means that a web developer
then has to invest further time and money going cross-platform and cross browser.
The returns from web design and development are diminishing because any 'dude' without training can get something resembling a website up using FrontPage and it works on IE.
IE is unfortunately the most popular browser, with over 98% of all browsers visiting sites i have built being IE of different versions.
i have had the constraint of developing to IE4 through to IE6 plus Netscape 4 and seeing why a mass of javascript and java code won't work across a mass of other browsers for a commercial product. it's a nightmare to keep functionality going when so many browsers either implement in a non-standard manner or only partially implement any of the given standards that can affect a web page.
I think one has to take into consideration that a great deal of these statistics are compiled on the basis of free and paid-for webcounters.
The news.com article refers to stats made public by OneStat (http://www.onestat.com/). OneStat provides "free" counters to end-users much like Netstat, webcounter and others. I've had a Netstat counter for yonks and keep it there mostly because many of my collaborators on the site like the pointy-clicky graphics it produces; however, I have noticed a huge discrepancy between the stats that netstat compiles and those I derive from running analysis programmes on the server logs.
OneStat, for example, installs an invisible image on the page:
How many of us have browsers and/or software that blocks this kind of monitoring? How many of us have browsers that lie about what they are?
While there's no doubt that the large majority of users continue to use IE, I do not for a moment believe it's anything like the 95 or 96% that's being reported.
flash is the devil incarnate
© 2004 The SCO Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
You've just hit upon a recent pet peeve of mine. Why is it that people think they can apply their graphic design skills (in designing layout for newspapers, yearbooks, etc.) to the Web unchanged?
If I had a job playing a standup bass, I certainly wouldn't practice for it with a fretted electric bass. I guess what's needed is a good bash over the head with "Designing Web Usability." Unfortunately, that's not always an option.
This situation really isn't very much different from the software development world, though. Bad software is produced largely because of people (bosses, designers, and even the coders) wanting some flashy feature without really having a need for it, and bad Web pages often come about in the same way.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
This page on news.com wouldn't validate on w3c's validator (it doesn't even have a DOCTYPE declaration). Oh, the irony.
The incidence of pages rendering poorly has oscillated bewtween 2% and 8% for a long time.
But lately - within the past 3 or 4 months - my "gotta use IE for this one" ratio has jumped to about 15%. Clearly, page designers are defaulting to designing only for IE, and and the trend appears to be accelerating, not stabilizing.
As a mere user, I have no insight into the constraints web page creators are under, but I can say they clearly are, site by site, surrendering their freedom to Redmond, whether they know/care or not.
Fuck you asshole. I think he makes a better point than you do - he certainly isn't a jackass. You can code your website any way you want but I sure as hell won't visit it.
Discussions like this show that browser wars are back on the agenda. IMHO that is largely the result of Mozilla adoption which has a modest but growing market share (yes also on my desktop). For a while the browser field has been fragmented you had netscape 3.x, 4.x, opera, mozilla milestones, various IE versions, konqueror. However, the non IE versions are all becoming more and more standards compliant (or disappearing). So effectively there's only two camps: the standards compliant camp and the MS camp.
While the latter camp has the largest marketshare (95% according to some sources), the standards compliant share is made up of a group of very active net users (mostly techies) who do a lot of online shopping, browse a lot of sites and see a lot of ads. For that reason, webdevelopers have an interest in keeping that part of the internet community happy and adhering to standards enough to make their sites usable in alternative browsers.
Jilles
I have written to some webmasters when their site has:
It's not dual-maintenance if you adhere to the standards, moron.
HTML is for presenting content, not style. Style sheets are only in their second generation, thats why they arn't perfect. The worst thing is, IE is the browser that _doesnt_ display elements to the right standards. but because assholes always win, it becomes the standard.
I feel violated when people suggest i should use tables for formatting.
[warning, the rest of this post is off topic]
Or flash for a whole site. I've honestly never seen a flash site where i didn't think "Thats some dumb pretentious flash animation by some dumb art-failure. Its getting old, fast, and its making navigation a pain."
Please, for all that is holy, someone give me the url to a site made with flash that is decent!
SVG? whats SVG? ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
This is old news, I'm not sure why it's even worth mentioning today? The trend is already going back to standards. For example, IE 6 is more standards compliant than 4 or 5.X. Microsoft Office XP can strip the Word-specific XML tags and produce clean HTML. We the Open Source/Free Software Movement are winning this battle. Microsoft and other businesses are learning that open standards make them more money. For example, if MSNBC used IE-specific coding, they would lose many visitors using embedded devices like palmtops. And on the Linix and BSD side, browsers like Konqueror can get around browser-detection written by clueless developers by identifying itself as IE. Heck, IE identifies itself as Mozilla-compatible. Plug-ins from CodeWeavers, etc, allow non-native plug-ins to work. Overall, I'd say the tide has already turned.
"As flies to the wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for sport." - William Shakespeare, King Lear
How much will %30 of the effort cost? How much revenue will be gained if you lure 5% more costomers? Will the investment payoff?
If you design the website using the proper standards no dual maintenance would be needed. What you design would work on all browsers.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
AOL uses in their "browser" the mozilla engine, and i think the engine will be used more and more in the near future. so webdevs can't just ignore them, otherwise they clinets won't be really pleased...
The Any Browser Campaign has been around for a while to help with this. Read their stuff, it's sane and helpful. Follow their guidelines and write polite, informative email messages to the webmasters of non-conformant web sites. Include a link to the W3C's Validator along with a comment on how many HTML DTD violations their page has.
Follow through on your own site and add an AnyBrowser button and a W3C Valid HTML button to the footer of all of your pages.
Finally, here's a web page that I found this weekend that really does seem to be "yearning for the bad old days" is MenuScape. All you get from their site is a notice that you should be using IE! Although I wasn't as polite to them as the Any Browser Campaign suggested, I did point out that if they meet their customers expectations, the customers will be happy, but probably won't tell anyone. If they do stupid things like make their page IE only, then some disgruntled customer (no names mentioned) will probably out them on slashdot ;). Don't be too mean to them because, now that I've tested my link on the preview of this post, I've discovered that this message only appears on the first load. If you're persistent, they'll let you in even without IE.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
Coding the html parser as a plugin that could be updated faster?
Except those 5% are presumably not being targeted by any of his competitors. Let's say this company has a 10% market share. Adding another 5% that are virtually guaranteed to go with him is actually a 50% increase in sales, which is well worth the 30% increase in development costs.
Let's put it another way... let's say that this 5% of customers will bring in $1million in profits to the company. This 30% extra development time will cost, say, $50,000 to the company? Which makes more sense?
When comparing percentages, it's always important to pay attention to what you're comparing to.
-Alison
You have got to be the dumbest human being on the planet. That isn't a W3C standard.
1. IE *is* the standard. Not some document produced by a committee somewhere. You might not like it, and it may not be "right" but a standard is common set of rules and definitions, not a document and like it or not IE *is* the standard for web browsers. 2. I like flash web sites. If a site uses flash it's the best way to tell that there is going to be nothing useful on the site so not to bother with it.Probably not what the designers of "flash" hoped it would be useful for, but that's how it is.
Sig is taking a break!
From the article:
"What we want to do is write once and have it work with everything," said Russ Sanon, senior manager for quality-assurance engineering at Shutterfly. "But it falls onto the lap of the individual browser manufacturer. There's nothing that we do that's proprietary. Everything that we write should work with W3C-complaint specs."
A quick trip to the old trusty w3c validator and you'll find that the front page isn't even compliant!
Bad Russ. Anyone have Russ's email address? He needs to learn how to use the resources of this thing called the "web".
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
This is a totally disproportional estimate. Any good web developer digging into JavaScript e.d. alread knows the ins and outs of most browsers, and if not, can find them relatively easy (just install NS and type javascript: in the white thingy).
Estimates of 3x the development cost is just plain stupid, that means you're actually spending twice the time to set up the same site for the remaining 10% of all browsers. That is completely rubbish. It doesn't take a NS site much longer to be set up than a IE site.
In fact, only minor parts of code usually needs to be changed or dubbed for IE or -the-other-browser-, and this usually works with all the other browsers immediately.
A *real* estimate would look like this:
$X to create a 90% browser cover
(1.1 to 1.3) x $X for 98% cover
(1.5 or up) x $X for 99.9% cover
if you manage to get your boss to pay 3 x $X for that, well, go for it!!!
I absolutely refuse to use GIF format graphics in pages I design.
When I am given a job to "finish off", that includes GIF format graphics, I change them to PNG, and half the time the client doesn't notice anyway. If they do, they usually say "Oh, but some people are still using old browsers that won't render PNG". I usually reply, "well, they won't run all that JavaScript(tm) either, will they, shall I remove it?".
I am hoping that it won't be long before I can do the same thing with Flash(tm) animations, and MNG animations, but unfortunately MNG support is absolute rubbish in practically all browsers in the known universe, (apart from Konqueror).
So:
BROWSER PROGRAMMERS - SUPPORT MNG AS SOON AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN! IT'S HOLDING THE WEB BACK!
I've been expecting this article for a month now. What most people fail to realize is that when the webdesigners are forced into making an "artsy" website (most customers expect such things these days) we're forced to comply to the most compliant browser. My personal webpages as well as others I do for free are simple in nature. Everythings organized with paragraph and headline tags, and seperated by horizontal rules and divs. From there it's a simple matter of adding CSS to render the page in a half attractive matter. Using this method a browsers ability to display the page comes down to its CSS capability, a W3C standard.
I was saddened to see that Mozilla (yes 1.0 and higher) is less compliant than Internet Explorer with CSS2. This, of course, is important due to CSS2's positioning capabilities. Due to a certain Mozilla bug on the box model accurately positioned elements with borders are impossible to display in both IE and Mozilla. The problem is that mozilla measures alignment instructions from the edge of the browser (or parent element) to the edge of the padding, which is incorrect. It should measure from the edge of the parent element to the border. Meaning that if I say an element is 32 pixels by 32 pixels with a sixteen pixel border, the content of this element is not seen, and is instead filled by the border. I'm sad (you have no idea how much of a dissapointment this is) that IE 5.5 (the most widly used web browser) does this correctly while mozilla instead chooses to render the content and draw the border around that, making alignment between various elements difficult, if not impossible.
This was, of course, a pain in the ass and necessitated my using an unacceptable number of graphics in my last "artsy" page to make it look even somewhat acceptable in Mozilla.
It was from that day forward that I decided "to hell with working for browser standards." I will work within W3C's HTML 4.01 specifications (yes I actually read their reccomendations while working on a webpage, not some half-assed book reference). If browsers want to render my pages correctly they'll comply to set standards.
When it comes right down to it, mozilla and IE are nothing more than comparable when it comes to standards compliance. They both contain approximately the same amount of errors when rendering markup. Thus the only thing setting them apart is how many people use them. Given these facts it's not hard to understand why other web designers opt for IE over mozilla more often than not.
In short, STFU, stop blaming web devolopers and tell the organizations that create this software to invest more time in standards compliance. Then, and only then, will it be the web designers fault that you can't read penny-arcade. Because only then, will we not be forced to choose who we're writing this cursedly obfuscated markup for...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If mozilla is open source then why doesnt someone extend it to support these new types of tags, or better still come up with better, groovier mozilla html tags to fight back?
If enough people do something a certain way then it becomes the standard. IE has created lazy programmers because IE is so forgiving when it comes to poorly formed HTML. Add on top of that to the improvements (yes I said improvements) to how Javascript works. Javascript is an abortion of a scripting language that was rushed to market long before it was ready and IE makes happy with it. I know it's not cool to say nice things about M$ but that's just how it is.
Karma means nothing to me, so suck it...
I have created and supported numerous web site and web site applications over the years. Once I started to focus on standards a few years ago, I quickly found adherence is not the panacea. Netscape 4 and below has TERRIBLE support of CSS. Why anyone would argue otherwise, I can only conclude that they don't know what they are talking about. The problems range from mangled pages to forms that do not submit when the submit button is clicked. You can get it to work, but then it does not work on Macs. It's hopeless. So what do you do? You back away from standards such as CSS. If you do not back away, then you have some rabid puke like the many found here who accuse you of favoring Explorer. Explorer happens to have excellent (no, not perfect) support of CSS. But no, I am not favoring Explorer. I am using emacs to build them and if anything, I favor Unix.
/dev/null for all eternity, he started arguing that standards were not important.
I have a feeling that claiming a lack of support for anything but Explorer is misleading. Of course, Opera has perfect support of CSS too. But when the rabidly misinformed and militantly challenged load up a page in their hopelessly awful Netscape 4 (anything above 6.0 is fine), they erroneously conclude MS bias. Then they use standards as a rhetorical weapon when THEY OBVIOUSLY DO NOT KNOW WHAT THE HELL THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT.
I had this guy on one of my sites arguing this way. When I finally convinced him that Netscape 4 should be shat into
Let's make sure we have all the issues on the table when we talk about this. Shouldn't posters to Slashdot offer their sage input in addition to links? We are all supposed to be here because we are in the know and want to stay that way. But I guess I'm not surprised that some of us are striking poses. I guess it just bothers me when these losers are the favored ones on this conformityware site.
Strict obedience to the law is the key to liberty.
You are obviously not a business school graduate. No one calls them customers anymore, they're "suckers". And if they use an alternaative browser, chances are they're not nearly as retarded as your average "sucker". If they aren't idiotic, how do you expect to sell your crap to them? You can't force them to buy... unless you're a telecom or something I suppose. But if you can slam them, why bother building a website?
For the clueless, yes I'm being sarcastic. I'm for the total abolishment of advertising...
For example, try getting a list of all the DIVs in a really complicated HTML file using Netscape. It takes about a hundred times as long as IE, using exactly the same script.
Also, Netspace doesn't support "display" correctly, which is a major disaster. So I don't support Netscape. I support the intersection of IE and the standard.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
... it is the Java that kills me. I hate sites that simply use java for their menu systems. Java just kills my poor little PII 300, and as such I do not have it installed. The fun thing is that this makes so many sites simply un-navigatable, as the maintainers don't even provide a simple link to an index or something. Why do they bother getting fancy, when the fancy does not even work? (And when it does not work, I take my money else where!)
As a webdeveloper (programmer from the dawn of html), I do my best to make my sites compatible across all browsers. Not the same across each one, but workable. However, I don't go through this effort for the administration and content management areas, which are only done for IE.
Basically, my reasoning comes down to this: every browser has its bugs. I'm not going to fumble through dozens to alter my standards compliant code for each.
As far as the w3c is concerned, I ignore them outright. I don't recognize their worth or their authority in any way.
I'm sure you'll agree with me if you've ever tried their browser. Oh yes, they have a browser. You would expect them to adopt their own guidance. Oh but wait, it's ancient, incomplete, has its own bugs, and doesn't come anywhere near their document specs for html 3.
So basically, they are useless. They tell others what to do, but don't do it themselves. I'd quickly start using and supporting, and promoting their standards browser if they had one.
It's called limegreen, because some people out there seem to feel that it is more important that a web site has got a cool logo, in some trendy colour like limegreen, than that it actually works.
Of course, the real problem is the choice of lowball labor for the task of website development. If you hire a high school webmaster wannabe or a disposable HB1 and pay them minimum wage to produce your website, this is what happens.
We hired a supposedly reputable company to make a simple but graphically pleasant corporate website. Browser compatiblity was an afterthought for them too. They did all kinds of funny things with tables that just happened to work in IE but not with anything else. I knew we were in trouble when I saw the first prototype and it included (for no apparent reason) a Flash intro that was really more like an infomercial. Our marketing manager insisted we needed more bandwidth to support the website, which led to an interesting discussion about page bloat and it's effect on load time for dialup users.
The people who develop websites for a living need to realize that browser compatibility is one of the things that distinguishes the professionals from the wannabes.
OT
Can someone explain this to me? Cathegory, cathegorised, cathegories.... Is it a Australian thing, like sceptic and skeptic maybe?
Monty
most true web designers knew this'd happen when all those 3rd tier, low-quality designers jumped on the webdesign bandwagon to make some money. people who've had no interest in design their whole lives. the kind of people that do it just for the money...screw technology, screw true design, screw everything.
seeing piss-poor design makes me angry because of all the time i put into designing sites that are all-browser-compatible...charging far less than the half-ass "designers" that don't even know what opera is.
it's sad these people call themselves designers.
You need to write different stylesheets for Netscape 4 and IE/Mozilla, minimum. You probably need to write a different stylesheet for IE and Mozilla. Not too hard because you can detect that from the User Agent. Without server side scripting, it is more complicated to do it in HTML/Javascript, but its doable.
Opera is a special case. They LIE about themselves. They default to pretending to be IE.
I have NO idea if Opera is 1% of my users, 5%, 0%, or 50%. They LIE.
That really upsets me, and its short-sited. A button: fake IE mode, would work. Always faking it and making it hard (or impossible) to detect is outrageous.
The fact that all browsers fake being Mozilla (from Netscape's early dominance) is bad enough, but Opera is too far.
Alex
I know that websites can be written that crash IE - but does anyone know if it's possible to write standards-compliant HTML which looks shit in IE, but OK in others? A few sites like this might help the sheeplike IE users to notice the alternatives.
With some corporations, they have internal software recommendations for their employees workstations in order to prevent 15 different types of word processors, for example.
Usually, this means that the internal support will only help you with that one product: and with browsers, that's usually Internet Explorer.
So you've got employees that either cannot install other software (if their draconian internal computer staff doesn't allow it) or aren't given a lot of support for other browsers.
Now, some of these folks do Web development for internal Web sites and basically tailor sites to IE 5.0 and higher, since that's what the company says everyone should have. However, these same developers attempting to do external sites don't consider that real people are on systems other than Windows PCs with IE. So they don't test, they don't care.
However, had our company instead mandated that we use a browser that renders HTML 4.01 correctly, and that HTML 4.01 is the standard to code to, not a browser version, then these problems might at least be allieviated.
I still get deafening silence when talking to internal developers and external ad agencies when they ask "what browsers do you develop to?" and my answer is "we don't. We try to code to the standard." They don't know what I'm talking about. HTML 4.0what?
And it doesn't matter anyhow. If someone builds a site that can only be used on Windows with IE, and we tell them "no" they complain to higher-ups who say "it will go out the way it is." Then when the complaints build up, they ask us for help. Dumbasses.
I was recently asked to design a web page for some friends of mine for a small project.
Due to the fact I was asked when I was drunk I said yes, even though I hadn't written any HTML for 2 years. I used to live with a web designer and the nightly arguments about cross browser compatibility just put me off coding for a while. He used to think that MS was the devil. I thought that the fact is they do have 90% market share so you have to decide how valuable that 10% is.
I'm not making a big thing about cross browser compatibility as I only have IE6 installed and can't be bothered to install anything else. I used to use Netscape religiously until I went on an IE5 course to learn how to support it and realised it was actually a better product. I'm using Homesite and it picks up most of the discrepancies anyway.
I recently got a call about a small problem with the site in Netscape. A part of the site required the Marquee tag. I hunted for some Jscript to fix the problem and found it. A single IE tag was replaced by 15 lines of code. And you wonder why people prefer to code for IE?
>My pet peeve is when sites hype and announce new-and-improved sites, and then they come out and they are simply a gigantic flash application.
flash runs in all of those browsers, and on practically every platform, including:
linux
hp-aix
solaris
windows
mac (classic / osx)
pocket pc
win ce
be os
etc...
As a business owner, I ask anyone that tells me to make my pages W3C compliant to do the math. To make my pages compliant, it takes my employees X amount of hours, where they could be making Y amount of money doing other jobs to make my pages viewable by Z amount more people. Cost for compliance = X * Wage + Y * Billable Rate to facilitate Z people. Cost for non-compliance = 0 + business lost from Z Right now, Z is less than 3% of my page hits. Do the math.
Since when is this news? What, is it "state the obvious" day on Slashdot?
If Mozilla/Netscape 6 had a 5% marketshare it would be a no-brainer. The problem that it doesn't -- the numbers I've seen are under 1%, and the browser just isn't on the radar at all among the 'normal user' community.
I test my stuff on Moz as a sanity check, but nobody's ever written it into the project requirements.
Instead, your 5% is Nutscrape 4.x users, and catering to them could cause you to produce some non-compliant and/or ugly HTML/JS in order to get the thing to render correctly. That makes actually more difficult to support Mozilla in the longrun.
Maybe two thirds of the Intranet/Vertical stuff I've seen that is IE-only is only that way because writing a second javascript path for Netscape 4 isn't worth the trouble. If Mozilla supported document.all, the stuff would run unmodified. The other third uses client-side activex or data-binding or other nasty stuff.
(Also, Baki makes a good point about that using MS extentions is risky because they've been known to change.)
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
create a template email, be polite, state the facts, ask that the official html standards be observed, and NOT microsoft's version of standards, and send a copy to the webmaster of each site you visit that has bogus code. ALSO, cc copies to THE SITES ADVERTISERS. This is the most important point. If the site has a feedback forum, post it there as well. cc copies to every executive in the offending site's chain of command. They key is INFORMATION, be POLITE, demand compliance standards that are NEUTRAL and not skewed microsoft-only. No big anti microsoft rant, just the facts.
Another thing the slashdot community can do is to every day pick ONE big website that has bogus code, and everyone emial that site, do a force multiplier effect that can't be ignored. Let those sites advertisers marketing departments force the change, you aren't, but they WILL if it appears to be effecting the bottom line. Force multiplier by sheer numbers WORKS, I've seen it myself on efforts before.
That's because browsers like Opera, Omniweb, etc. are so damn buggy. I've found and reported several bugs in the past few months that affect basic functionality, like not being able to have Javascript change the style of an element that was generated by Javascript.
On the other hand, Mozilla rocks. The bugs in Mozilla are mostly cosmetic at this point, and the "advanced, flashy stuff" is well within reach, as long as you don't have your heart set on using the "filter" CSS property.
Do you play top 40 songs on local FM stations or short-wave?
Short-wave has an international standard. Everyone can get a short-wave radio. Everyone could also build a short-wave radio and stick a tower out to pick it up a station. So, why go to trouble to get a scratchy signal that will take twice the time and effort to pick up?
People have FM radios are similar to people who have IE. Fm radios and IE are both easy to get a hold of. They do not want to go to extra effort of switching to another âuniversalâ(TM) standard. What they have no is just fine.
Microsoft has gone outside the standards box and has created a piece of software that can do more, in more respects, then current standards. If any open source company did the same 'build a better mouse trap' thinking and created something better standard then what was already out there this forum would be praising that company to the heavens. Look at Mosiac compared to LINX? How about Linux to Unix? How about USB to RS-232 serial? How about ribbon cable to ATA Serial? How about 3.5' to 8' floppy disks? Eacfh was a good standard but something came along that had features the other did not have and was superceded.
- Do most people have IE? Yes
- Is IE easier to script for? Yes
- Does IE offer more abilities and effects with little to no overhead? Yes
- Does IE offer tighter integration into the OS for application such as CMS and program updates? Yes
- Is there a Basic-based scripting engine out now for Non-IE browsers? No
Why take the extra time to build a universal standard that isnâ(TM)t as flexible as the prevailing standard?Also as an aside, I did a census from Alexia on your two standards following sites. They came up ranked at about 1,100,000:1. That means that only 1 out of every 1 million people are visiting those sites.
Job 34:26 He striketh them as wicked men in the open sight of others;
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
:%s/cathego/catego/g
Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis. You can't simply say, "Today I will be brilliant."
My pet peeve is people who bitch about web standards, but then can't be bothered to follow those standards themselves.
Slashdot's html is not, and never has been, valid. This isn't rocket science. Its not hard. Stop playing sims, CmdTaco, and fix SlashCode!
When he co-founded Netscape Communications in 1994, Jim Clark introduced a Web browser that promised computer users a way around the Microsoft juggernaut.
Huh? IE came before Netscrape? hmm.. news to me.
-GiH
It's called research, journalists used to do it.
I run a site (which I will decline to name in this forum) which does about 1.5 mil cdn a year in sales, gets about 20K unique visits a month, and absolutely hates older Netscape (although looks almost perfect in Mozilla, way to go guys, only took 5 years!) At the site's inception, I was well aware of the W3C issues; at the same time I was also well aware of my customer's demographic. My deomgraphic is joe lunchbox who has never even heard of Mozilla, so designing a w3c compliant site was low on my list. Still, I have a little script that runs when someone hits the site that checks what browser the guy is using, does a reverse lookup of the ip, and keeps tabs on what they guy is looking at, and dumps the result into SQL server, so that if people's tastes change I can accomodate that / do data mining. The result? (these are no BS numbers:)
.25% NS
.25% Other (including spiders, etc)
99.5 % IE 4+
The masses have spoken and apparently I made the right choice on this particular site. I have gotten exactly 1 complaint in the past 2 years, so I look up the guy in my SQL database. Yep, he's there. What's he runnin? NS3! Sheesh! How long to I have to hold people's hands for??
That being said, of course if I was doing, say, a Slashdot type of site with a more nerdly demographic I'd design it first in Lynx then work up from there, with IE being last.
You guys may bemoan nonstandards compliance, but as a rule of thumb, the market has already decided that your concerns are irrelevant.
I actually haven't noticed any problems using Opera. In fact, I can't remember the last time it failed to render a page correctly while I was using it. Ditto for Moz 1.0, although I don't use that as much.
I think the problem really lies with IE being so forgiving of mistakes, and Moz being so standards-compliant. Bad code that works with IE is just assumed to work with Netscape because the web designer is too lazy to check.
Example: my mom is professional web designer. She spent like 5 hours looking for a mistake the other day that caused her page to not work correctly in Netscape browsers (recent ones, like 6). The mistake? She forgot to put a period in front of something. IE just guessed and moved on, Netscape interpreted it properly and didn't work.
At the end of the story, she finishes by saying, "So that's why Netscape wasn't doing things properly." I corrected her back: "No, you mean that's why IE was doing things improperly. Netscape was doing exactly what it should have done." I think she got the point. It'd be better if other people got the same point, too.
Unfortunately, the issue is self-propogating. I was writing some pages a while back, and they needed to convert text help files to HTML. There's a perfect tag for this (pre, which is deprecated but still should be supported by w3c-compliant browsers), but neither IE nor Opera supported it, so I was forced to a more computationally expensive hack to fix things. I would have loved to just give the finger to everyone using IE, since I was technically right, but that just wasn't an option.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
I'm using NS4 myself on a daily basis, since it's the standard browser installed through the company (30,000+ employees), and it's doing just fine.
Occasionnally we come accross a site which doesn't render properly (such as when the </table> tag is missing), but as someone said before, you just move right along and go surf somewhere else.
I work for a company that does a number of web projects for the US government, and the big buzzword here is Section 508 compliance. This is federally mandated support for web users with disabilities that use readers and other assistive tools. It is a requirement for all government websites, although enforcement appears to be highly variable. From what I have gleaned, the rule of thumb is make the site Lynx-compliant and you're not too far off. By time you have true 508-compliance, you're not using very many of the cute IE tags, you're not using Flash (I know it's theoretically possible, but Flash & 508 absolutely do not mix), and you've eliminated a lot of the useless JPEG/GIF/Javascript menu junk. Unfortunately, some of our (government) clients are just thumbing their collective noses at the regulations right now, but 508-compliant sites do render just fine in just about anything.
I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just. --Thomas Jefferson
When I think of web standards, I keep thinking how uninvolved I am. I don't know who runs the W3C, or how much money you have to pay them to have a say in it, but I know I can't afford it. Unfornately, I as well as the rest of you suffer from it. Here's some standards the W3C could adopt for REAL people, not corporations trying to sell products:
* Flash: In IE, at least, I have to download the flash plugin just to stop IE from nagging me about not having it. I wish there was a dummy plugin that just ignored it for me. STANDARD: Give the web user an OPTION to ignore this completely.
* Force images to have a description. When people don't want to see a graphic laden site, they don't have to download a picture of text (rather than text itself) to follow a link.
* Get the whole page at once, instead of making lots of smaller connections.
* Ban popups.
* Always give the user the chance to use window controlling buttons. Don't just fill the entire screen with irritating porn content. In short, give users the option to ban all screen hogging code.
Finally, users should be given real options, not just Hobson's choices. This means, if I don't want your page to take the whole screen, I shouldn't be prevented from seeing the rest of your site.
In short, make standards for USERS, not for people trying to sell things.
Skilled website designers will code a site so that it looks good in any browser. However, most website designers are lazy and just don't give a damn. The part that bothers me the most is when I have to set the User-Agent of Mozilla to identify as Internet Explorer to get around somebody's lame "Your browser is not supported" script.
Often the web designer has no authority. Some companies that I've worked at before but not in a web-oriented capacity, took a couple of weeks to push out changes. Like if we released a new version or patch of a product we would push it to the web department and they would have committees and edit change logs and set it up internally and make sure everyone's asses was covered and within a week or two the file would be put up... by which time of course it was usually obsolete and we had a new version to ship out to them already.
Stop blaming the web designers. Blame the businesses funding the web designers. They are stubborn when they read statistics that say IE has 90%+ of the market and Netscape 4.x has ~1%. They demand that the money they gave for you to build their website work with NON-STANDARDS COMPLIANT IE and bug-riddled Netscape 4.x. They don't even know what W3C or Mozilla is.
Web designers shouldn't have to do anything BUT follow the W3C standards, but the negative feedback loop of business and money prevents the standards from flourishing.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
My pet peeve is when sites hype and announce new-and-improved sites, and then they come out and they are simply a gigantic flash application.
Well, my pet peeve is an editer [sic] who feels he must make vapid comments before posting an article. This comment in no way adds to the content of the article and only displays Taco's hubris and inflatted ego.
By the way: LNUX $0.89. Shouldn't it get the trailing "e" soon and be delisted?
If you ignore web standards then I will not read your site.
If I must have a flash plugin, then I will not read you site.
If you require IE then I will not read your site...
But the best bit.....
I set the policies for the whole IT department... If I don't read your site, neither will any of the other 8000 people who work here...
The best part about holding a position of power is the ability to abuse it.
We changed everyone over to Mozilla when we got fed up with patching IE bugs all the time. Flash is blocked for bandwidth reasons.
Part of this is user and manager education. We should be watching IT initiatives and bidding processes to make sure that real web standards are being used (HTML 4.0.1 / XHTML 1.0 / WAI). Weedle your way into any "web" project and point out that rather than being held hostage to Microsoft, it would be a good idea to give management the flexibility to move to another browser should M$'s pricing/subscription/upgrade policy become untolerably abusive.
On the user end of things, simply point out that you can turn off pop-up advertisements in Mozilla and they say gimmie!
But you've got to get out and evangelize.
First off, let me say that as a web application developer, I have always supported cross browser development. That said, I must say that much of the fault for this lies with Netscape and the others who have been slow to adopt web standards. Anyone who has had experience developing cross browser apps has fully experienced the frustration wrought by Netscape's inabliity to live up to standards. Remember the for several years netscape was stuck in a 4.x version (which was not standards compliant) and then skipped 5.x to go right to the 6.x version, which was a piece of garbade. Today the AOL version is as bad as a porn site with garbage pop up ads and the like, which does not bode well for it being taken seriously as an web application browser. Mozilla has come quite a long way, but if we had been waiting around for the 1.0, most companies developing web applicaitons would have gone belly up. Don't get me wrong... I am not a fan of either IE and moreover not a fan of MS choke hold on innovation, but when you're trying to meet a deadline and you're stuck on a stupid issue between Netscape and IE [read: document.all vs document.layers, for example] well, you've got to err with the side who has the most users, which isn't the way you'd like to do it, but the way it must be done sometimes. By the by, I still write cross browser compliant code (the extra work done outside of my tasks on any given iteration), because I fully support web standards. But that's got to go both ways. Any browser that wants to be taken seriously needs to fully support ALL standsards, not just a piece of them.
In my years of working with data format standards (in particular the FITS format which is supervised by the International Astronomical Union) I have found that many developers cannot wait for standards to be debated and adopted. For FITS this can be years (not quite as long as the WC3). As developers we need this thing done yesterday. You are quickly forced to adopt some other set of standards, or roll your own. If someone has invented the nonstandard standard that suits your needs, you quickly jump on it and call it a day.
This is no different than all the cpp #ifdefs that litter all C++ code on Unix machines or configures doing its best to compile an application. Isn't this sort of web browser capability checking and telling you what will not work any different from GNU configure finding you don't have libjpeg.so installed and not putting JPEG support into whatever program you are compiling? As long as I can do what I need to do with the site (and they don't deny me partial access) then my choises are the same as compiling...either get the needed components or deal with the missing bits.
Of course most web users are not developers so they grow tired of being told they cannot do something with their browser. Its our jobs as a community to look at what they need and add the needed features as quickly and transparently as possible.
Today is a gift. Save the receipt.
Overall I have been doing web design for a while and all of our pages are 100% spec and there are a lot of reasons for that.
The first problem is that thinking IE is the only standard is a self fulfilling prophecy. The more you design for IE the less you see other browsers and thus the more you can design for IE since you don't see other browsers. I have seen this a lot of rewriting a customers page that was designed for IE only by another company typically increased the number of customers a fair bit.
When you piss someone off most of the time they will tell 10 other people that x company pissed them off. However if you make something good and cool they typically tell only 2-3 people. So how can it be a good idea to ignore these other browsers that are down in the 5-10% area? That would lower the overall usage of your site by a staggering amount which I have seen that it does.
Finally I have seen sites that only work on IE and block you if you are not using IE. Guess what guys search engines for the most part are not IE. Google is most certainly not IE. Ooh your company page is really good and will really help your company now that it is not on the search engines. Also sites that are 100% spec move up in the various search engines faster. I don't know exactly why but I do know that it happens.
Overall the data is the same between many views of a website so why not just do server side browser detection and change some of your layout code for each of the browser groups you need to make for you site to make it render correctly in all of them? The data is the same between all of them and changing your layout code should be fairly easy in any dyanmic environment. Then you can serve back to the browser whatever version best suits that browser and overall I have found that usage of web pages using that rises dramatically. Also with that we tend to see far more opera, netscape 4.x, konqueror and mozilla users and thus the percentage of IE drops a fair bit.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
If you were capable of writing HTML compliant code properly, then it would render in all browsers.
What you people fail to understand is that browser standards are defined by what browser people actually USE.
Most normal people (people who use deodorants, have girlfriends, etc.) use IE. Why should hard working web designers put themselves out to cater for a (relatively) small bunch of slashdot readers who use fringe operating systems and browsers.
Sure, this is going to create an internet full of haves and have-nots, but isn't that what real life is like? Come to think of it, most non-IE users probably don't know what life is like outside of their filthy, stinking bedrooms.
As someone already mentioned most previous usability/accessibility complaints about Flash are now moot with the latest MX release.
But one thing that is my pet peeve is with the geek web browsing elitists. You guys sound just like the elitists in the Drum & Bass DJing scene. They all complain about DJ's who use CD's with or instead of vinyl. CDs to a DJ can be compared to Flash to a web designer. It's all just another tool in the toolbox, the only thing that makes a difference is how well you use it.
- Jesper Erdfelt
- http://americandnb.com
- http://blueviking.com
I'm a web producer (not designer) for a major corporation and a lot of what I've seen written here about the way sites are produced is pretty ridiculous. Now, while I can't say how every company does things, there are obviously quite a few misconceptions about how developers and designers work.
For one thing, if anyone in my position assumes "I use IE, therefore everyone else does" (as I've seen someone quote here), they need to find another job. Simple as that. No producer/developer/designer thinks that way. It takes 2 seconds to check server logs or, more likely, the results of whatever tracking software the company happens to be using. Those server logs will more than likely show that more than 98% of users use IE (as ours do). This talk of developers making ridiculous assumptions sounds to me more like sour grapes from those using other browsers who are refusing to acknowledge the simple fact that IE *is* the dominant browser.
Now, that doesn't mean we consciously code for any particular browser. We code HTML primarily using Dreamweaver and Flash, with a bit of hand-tweaking along the way. Anyone who says Notepad is the best way to design a web site is stuck in the pre-frame, pre-table, pre-Flash, pre-html 4.0 days of around 1996. I mean you simply can't manage a large site by hand-coding - it's just not efficient, you'd waste countless man-hours. Time is money; we have to use graphical editors, and then we test on various browsers (including Mozilla) and if it works, we move on. If it doesn't, we fix it until it's perfect on IE and at least viewable on Mozilla. Given the dominance of IE, that's just the most time-efficient use of resources.
The point is developers and designers are neither as nefarious nor as stupid as a lot of people here think. Corporations exist to make money and one of the ways you ensure profits is by minimizing expenses. If we can make a site look right for 98% of our users, there's really no point spending hours and hours of wasted time trying to make it perfect for the remaining 2%. We've got other sites we've got to work on (we're constantly creating new sites for our various products). It has nothing to do with ignoring standards or purposely favoring IE... it has to do with balancing speed, quality, and satisfying the vast majority of our users.
Ironically, the use of Flash is reviled by some here but it's the one way you can ensure that absolutely everybody using any graphical browser sees the same thing. A Flash site in IE looks exactly the same as a Flash site in Mozilla. If you want a standard, there it is. Flash also allows for a lot more artistic freedom than pure html, and while I know a lot of you are old-school info-only types, the fact is not everything in the offline world is strictly text-based so there's no reason the online world needs to be either. Designing in Flash is the only way you get the same freedom as you do designing for print or for other forms of media. Obviously I'm aware of the limitations (search engines, etc.) but in some cases those limitations are far outweighed by the benefits. And one of Flash's benefits is standardization across browsers.
As a web designer, you really only have to follow the standards. Sure, are you using the latest ones, there will be old browsers out there that can't handle it. There are people still using Netscape 4.7, so you never know...! Personally though I test my homepages in the latest versions of IE, Opera and Mozilla (if it works there it works in Netscape 6 too). I am trying to use the latest versions of HTML and CSS, which sometimes doesn't render alike in every browser... Opera doesn't have 100% support for CSS2, for example. If I use .png graphics, I know that I can never use alpha transparency since IE6 does not have full support for .png. About Flash and javascript, I have to say that both have their place in web design, and actually I like flash sites, even if I have learned that a lot of people seem to hate it...
Will work for bandwidth
Quite frankly, IE is the best web browser out there. You Linux nutbags can go suck my ass.
I don't see any public hue and cry about this, but enterprises are increasingly deploying the Microsoft proxy server IAS that defaults to requiring NTLM authentication.
So far as I know, only IE knows how to authenticate to it. People behind these corporate firewalls *can't* use Netscape, Mozilla, or Opera.
This is exclusionary of the highest order.
Conceptually, the "World Wide Web" is dead, and has been for a long time. Ever since Netscape balkanized HTML with stupid non-standard tags, the dream of the Web was dashed.
Why? The original WWW, as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee, was a system that would be accessible regardless of View--the Web could be rendered on both graphical and text terminal alike. To do this, HTML was created--a loose markup system (emphatically NOT a presentation language) to mark up -content-, to give it a vague structure that would be rendered on any system (not identically, of course...and that was the point).
HTML was never designed to be a presentation language. The Web was not designed to work on a single operating system, on a single type of browser. And yet, today we have the EXACT OPPOSITE--HTML has been forced into being a terrible presentation markup, and the "Web" (such as it is) is being designed to work only on IE, only on Windows.
Folks, it's time we faced the fact that the World Wide Web has failed---what we have now is not the original web at all. If we are so hellbent on having an author-controlled strictly typeset system, why don't we all just use Acrobat? HTML is ill-suited for the tasks it is forced into performing today.
That %5 you mention includes Opera licensed owners too... People can afford $37.5 for a program does the same job (better or worse) as 2 others they can download for free or even comes with the OS.
Oh don't forget the iCab... Imagine a guy sitting in front of 22" Apple display can't access your site and gets mad...
Real interesting, no wonder why those dotcom crash etc happens...
Ahh, bullshit.
Perfectly standards complaint stuff will fail in "standards compliant" Netscape 6.0. You still need to test and work around bugs even if your markup and script is perfect.
That is exactly the mind set that has caused this problem. Why not just code to standard... That does not take MORE time.. Then maybe some of us that have another browser, might be able to view what I am sure if just a great page of yours
-Fish
> doesn't-that-burn-your-bottom
/. doesn't validate as proper HTML. Slashdot is one of the premier OSS sites; if we don't follow the standards, why should anyone else?
Yeah, especially since
In my web development travels I have -tried- to develop with many browsers in mind. The main problem that I have run into as I attempt to please all browsers is that IE and Opera have the best support for HTML and CSS. Netscape, who many tote as so much better, is crap when it comes to design using W3C standards. I would like to drop M$ as much as the next guy, but I do not find a compelling reason. The banners of Opera (which still is a little screwy with CSS) or the widely used, and decent devil IE are my only real choices. I have used Konquerer and like it, but I cannot expect KDE to be on the majority of desktops for a while. If Opera can get rid of the few quirks and the banners, I would procaim it "King of browsers" in an instant.
First let me say that I'm a big supporter of OpenSource, cross-browser and cross-platform HTML, and of the principle that a web page or web application should be viewable on as many browsers as possible.
Having said that, as a web developer (NOT designer), it's very easy to succumb to temptation and support only IE, especially when there are tight deadlines.
On the last major web development project I worked on, the QA people didn't bother to test on browsers other than IE, and none of the developers on my team (including myself) bothered to test on different browsers. This is curiously despite the fact that my browser of choice is Mozilla. The project manager sort of wanted us to produce cross-browser HTML and JavaScript, but didn't emphasize it all that strongly.
It got to the point where, late one night doing a criticial build, one of my teammates decided to run a few routine tests in Netscape 4.7. It turned out there was a MAJOR impairment of functionality in that browser. We couldn't get a hold of our supervisor, so we debated whether or not to rebuild, seeing as nobody was really concerned about cross-browser performance. We decided to stay even later to fix the bug, which was simple enough, but time-consuming.
The next morning, we told our supervisor what had happened, and he told us we did the right thing. Afterwards, he sent an email to QA and the requirements people, emphasizing the need to test the application on different browsers. It turned out that the HTML templates he requested well beforehand were to be specifially tailored to support ealier versions of Netscape.
Also, we dodged a bullet when there was a rumour that the client didn't even use IE. That rumour turned out to be false. Nonetheless, one of our potential clients apparently doesn't even use IE. The product has since been tailored to be cross-browser (NS 4.7, NS 6.2, IE, etc), right down to the JavaScript.
The moral of the story: Make sure your product works on different browsers, because you never know who your client will be. Furthermore, it's just good practice and the right thing to do. If you're going to do your job (web design/development), you might as well do it right, and not take any foolish shortcuts. Anything else is just the wrong attitude.
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Some of the flash ads will disappear if you disable javascript. I still see the occasional flash ad with js disabled, but nothing like the skyscraper ads or the animations taking over the web page. For example, Slashdot will display an IBM flash ad sometimes with it turned on. I turned it off and have it seen it since.
There really is no need to have javascript enabled for most browsing. You actually gain privacy with it turned off. Just go to Browser Spy to see the privacy holes you leave open with javascript turned on.
If you are looking for a job and it's a company HR department job openings site that's broken, you need the other browser to see the jobs. I see about 1 out of fifteen of those sites are broken on my machine. You can't say "I'd like to work for you because you are too dumb to even put up a usable web site," or even "I'd like to work for you, and, BTW you are too dumb to even put up a usable web site."
Flash is good when used in moderation and has its strong points. Flash is not 99% Bad.. :P Flash developers with no design skills are the ones to blame. Use it in moderation...
As for compatability, it all depends on what your target audiance is...
That seems to be the big thing I have noticed as of late, too many developers are building thier clients sites to show of these new little tricks they found out, are are ignoring their target audiance. Hell, most of the sites dont even function well in IE, let alone any other browser...bah...this subject scares me...
I like being the oddball and adding the extra line of code for the Nix guys accross the way, make them feel like a part of the process...
if (eregi("lynx", $HTTP_USER_AGENT)) header("Location: http://###.############.com/lynx.html");
Ok - here is my $0.02 worth:
What we need is a single language which is easy to use but which handles graphics and text. Or to put that another way: 3D, 2D, and plain text. It has to be simple to use (like HTML used to be) so mom and dad can use it. But it also has to be powerful enough so businesses will use it. And it has to be THE browser that everyone will use.
Neither IE, Netscape, Opera, or any other browser works in this manner. They are all pretty much bloatware. (No slight intended to the open source people. They have done a wonderful job of reducing the amount of code in Mozilla.) Having to support HTML v1.0, v2.0, v3.0, v4.0, XML, Java, JavaScript, VBScript, ColdFusion, Hot water, cold turkey, or whatever other language has caused the browsers to bloat-up. It is time to slim them back down. Yeah, I know, some of the above are plug-ins. However, let me continue...
If a single language was created with commands to handle graphics and text (which most Basic languages can now handle) and which would generate pcode or even compile an executable, then ColdFusion could be written in that language, HTML could compile to that language, and the compiled program is what is sent over the lines. Since binary programs are much smaller than text ones you not only save bandwidth, but the browser doesn't have to take as long setting up the page. (Because it doesn't have to re-interpret it each and every time.)
Now, some people are going to jump up and scream about Java. Ok - get rid of the VM. Instead, put the safeguards into the browser. Quit punishing everyone by making them carry around this additional program which has to run in addition to the Java interpreter itself.
So you want to know why people are going to IE and Microsoft products? Because they run faster and (sometimes) take up less memory. Want to know how to beat'em? Quit yacc'ing everyone. There is an inherent problem with how HTML was first set up. So fix HTML. Don't go making XML, VRML, SGML, and all of these literally hundreds of other xxMLs just to try to patch the problems. Fix the problem itself. Create one unified language that people can program in and make HTML just reflect a higher way of getting to the underlying program. (In other words: When you say <html> that should be compiled as a ClearWebPage() function call. <title>MyTitle</title> is nothing more than SetPageTitle("MyTitle"). And so forth.)
If you can't do that - then you are not going to win. It is as simple as that.
There's a coupla things:
The autodetect feature asks you to name each plugin (this is a little tough if you don't know which plugin goes with which browser!). In general, IE ises the .ocx file and everything else (Mozilla, opera, NN) seem to use the one in the Netscape folder (Mozilla will if it's already there).
If you're using IE, you can't turn flash OFF if the browser is on (it runs as a service or something), but you can do the opposite: keep it turned off and only turn it on if you have to (or want to?).
you can grab it at cnet or from my homepage. Any feedback is appreciated.
Hypertext Markup Language... Text...
If people want to watch T.V., they should watch T.V. Browser technology with a decent soundcard might be good enough to hear an mp3, but that's about as far as I'd push it. There's no bandwidth; with isolated exceptions. Most people don't use DSL or Cable.
Lastly, the browsers bleed way to much about the person viewing the content than appropriate. At least Mozilla and Konqueror give you the ability to modify this behavior. If you turn off cookies and javascript and the site flips you the bird, you're an idiot to return.
If people insist on using I.E.; they're just populating corporate America's dbs. Why do you think corporate web-sites insist on I.E.? Perhaps their VBStudio.Net web developers don't know how to collect all that data using server-side programming techniques. People seem to be commited to visit these sites, anyway. If all sites eventually require I.E., then my bookmarks.html will finally be empty and I'll be able to just check my e-Mail and continue with my day.
Wonder what's on the tube...
www.dedserius.com
VB != VisualBasic
You fool. I think of it as spend 100% more in development to gain an additional 5% of customers who are hard-nosed b@st@rds.
i work for the second largest portal site in their webhost division as a production engineer. i only use mozilla (since .9.1) to do my work and we have to test all of our pages in:
IE 4.0 +
Netscape 4.7
Netscape 6.0+
Everything, aside from DHTML tricks (of which we use VERY little) has to work in all browsers, including our CSS (simple CSS, no layout).
We even test on WebTV for our flagship project.
In a business standpoint, implementing web pages is a costly thing to do. And in this economy, costly is a "bad thing".
Coming from a failed dot-com, I constantly think of things that we could have done to save the company. Not that there is any one simple solution (other than selling our services two years earlier and retiring before the bust), I strongly believe had we dropped Netscape support from the beginning we would have had a heap of cash that could have at least let us survive a few months longer.
This obviously depends on our particular application, which was Windows-based (*nix-folks not even in the picture) combined with a browser feature. We spent a ton of time, resources, and VC dollars implementing and testing, reimplementing, retesting, etc all of our web stuff on like 8 different versions of 3 different browsers, when the only customers we were targeting were IE 5.0+ users. Made no sense. Anybody using another OS and/or browser would have never been our customer in the first place.
This doesn't apply to everything on the web, but web-sites should gear themselves towards their target customers. General sites should probably implement the least common denominator. Microsoft's MSDN site probably only needs to implement the IE 5+, it's highly doubtful anyone else would be viewing it.
links vs. lynx, I find links renders Slashdot (and many other sites) much better than than lynx does. I still find all-text web browsing somewhat less attractive than the whole beautiful tabbed experience of Mozilla (and soon konqui), but there are situations where it comes in very handy ...
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
last time I check web browsers were free but a designers time to test pages in an obscure browser like opera wasn't
flash is the future ladies
get used to it
As a small independent web developer, I often find myself developing sites that cater more towards IE on Windows than any other browser. That's not to say that my sites don't work on multiple browsers, just that most look best on IE. And the reason I do this is pretty simple. I deal with small budgets and small businesses.
In short, when you have a limited budget it's only natural that you're going to try and streamline the development process and shoot for the largest target demographic. However, you also can't overlook the fact that I'm not only at the mercy of my budget, I'm also at the mercy of my customers as well. So if Bob from Bob's Floral wants a specific feature that only works in IE (purportedly because his local competitor's site has the same feature) I'm stuck. I've got to accommodate.
What it boils down to is that Bob cares about making sure the site looks good on his browser, which incidentally is the same browser that his friends use and the same browser he assumes his customers use. He's not concerned with making his site work on Opera for Linux. He neither knows what Opera nor Linux is -nor does he care. Bob is in the business of moving merchandise by catering to his largest demographic. The truth of the matter is, he's willing to alienate that one Linux-using flower-buying customer for the sake of the rest of his customer base. That's just business.
DigiSquid Design.
I don't like being lied too.
It is certainly at the discretion of the browser.
You told me you were IE 5.01, you get the IE Stylesheet. If Opera provided a separate User Agent, they would get their own Stylesheet hacks.
As it stands, NN4 gets the Netscape Stylesheet, NN3 gets no Stylesheet, Gecko gets the Gecko stylesheet, and everyone else gets the default one. I want to add Mac tweaked stylesheets as soon as I can.
Because Opera doesn't want to follow some basic rules of respect, WebTV will get customized support before Opera.
Blocking people on User Agent is rediculous. If you tell me what you want (via an HTTP Get) you get that file. If you want a customized stylesheet, you need to tell me what it should be.
I'm not going to throw Javascript hacks in. My pages are straight HTML/CSS, almost no Javascript. I'm certainly not going to add Javascript because Opera won't follow Net conventions.
Alex
Do you folks have _any_ idea how expensive it is to regression test a large site for 'every' browser out there? I worked for many years for a consulting company that built large web applications (and back-end frameworks) for large financial institutions. We'd have 40+ hard-core techies plus lots of site designers, site builders, etc. etc. Doing full-site regression testing - even for a narrow set of browsers - is time and resource expensive.
Do the math. Let's say you are just supporting IE 5.0 up on windows-based machines; that's at least three browsers off the top of my head (5.0, 5.0 with service pack and 6.0) and platforms Win 98, ME, NT, 2000 and XP. There's also service packs, adds ons, etc. to consider on those OSs, but let's keep it simple for now.
That's 3 * 5 = 15 different browsers to test upon. And REAL regression testing (not "it loads and looks ok, it must work") takes considerable time per page, especially if it is a complex application. And these sites don't have 5-10 pages; start thinking hundreds. And REAL regression testing takes place every time an iteration of the site is released to QA, pre-production and production systems. And interations take place every week or other week...
If a user transfers money from her/his banking account to another, it better damn well work. The best way to guarentee it will is with good testing. The only way to guarentee good testing is to do good testing, which is impossible if you want to support every type of browser. Sorry.
We all want to develop sites that work on every browser. Most of the time that means no 'cool' functionality - meaning JavaScript - on the client (a concept not popular with designers, the client or end-users), even if it would be extremely useful. But when push comes to shove (client says "you want HOW much to QA the site????") you go with the majority browser.
In the end, I try to do only intranet projects. Having control over the end-user's machine gives you so much peace of mind. Supporting 'every' browser on the internet is a unbelievable headache....
In my experience, sites which cause problems in my 2 browsers, OmniWeb and Opera, are usually those which I discover I do not wish to visit - glitzy, low-content sites with lots of Flash and JavaScript. Sites which focus more on providing useful content generally, though not always, work perfectly. The big problem causes seem to be use of Flash, plugins, JavaScript, and occasionally Java. Tar-Palantir
#1 As a webmaster for an edu, I have to deal with strict government compliance issues daily, and coding to w3c spec saves time and money.
As a contract developer, developing for IE only at the expense of 9% of your audience saves the client time and money, and is a worthwhile tradeoff since a minimal amount of netscape support can be written in effortlessly.
#2 Web development is a field that constantly strives towards providing applications level functionality that rivals and imitates desktop software. DHTML and SQL are how we make those happen.Regardless of who makes it, IE exceeds css standards, and pushes the envelope for what will come in the next standards. Its a joy to use! I can give my users so much more. Having to make a site netscape compliant means sacrificing features. Its really not about "bells and whistles", its about bringing the user the best experience. while this experience comes from designing UI for custom database driven applications behind logins, it does apply to the front end as well, albeit to a limited extent.
the solution i have found is this: If you want a custom web-based software solution, you are bound by the same constraints that desktop users are, ie: mac, linux and pc softs are not interchangeable. behind the login, the functionality is what you want and the browser is what most easily supports the application.
SkizZy
In my experience, movie ticket sites are the worse in terms of things that work in IE but not in Moz (especially w/ pop-up off). I've not been able to buy movie tix in Moz with moviefone, moviewatcher, nor fandango. That just about covers all of the on-line movie sites...
The real sad thing about this is not that the web is becoming MSIEized, it's that web developers are not telling their clients that they are going to lose part of the market due to laziness, or the cost of supporting everyone (which doesn't take much more effort, or even less if you know the HTML 4.0 spec).
"It's here, but no one wants it." - The Sugar Speaker
I see a lot of comments here along the lines of "we're still going to use IE because thats what 99.99% of my users use and added development time costs money" and that just sickens me. Why? Because if coding a site to standards is even a question, then you shouldn't be in that line of work. Doing the job correctly is part of doing your job. If you write proper xhtml (all your attributes are quoted, every tag is properly closed including <p> and <li>, etc.) then your site will usually look correct. If you learn how to do a "neat trick" by looking at code generated by a Microsoft editor, then you'll have problems.
But, but, but... most of my users use Internet Explorer! If everybody tailored their work to "most" of their audience, there would be no handicapped spaces in parking lots, restaurants would not have vegetarian menu items, record stores would only carry "Top 40" music, and bars wouldn't serve Guiness. I don't want to live in that kind of world.
But coding to standards is more work! Yeah, and not falling down the stairs is more work than walking down. But that's the way it should be done. If you can't do it right, don't be surprised when somebody who takes pride in his/her work shows up and gets your job.
But I want to use those special IE-only features! Most of the world can do without page transitions. If you need some special eye candy, it can most likely be done with Java, Flash, or plain old DHTML coded properly. The flash plugin exists for the major browsers (and works under linux too) and can be done properly, but again that takes some work on the developers part.
And to those who are hiding behind their huge IE user bases, think about this: What if some other browser begins to get significant market share? Maybe current users will generally not notice that the gecko engine can't render your site the way you want it to look, but users next year might have some problems (especially if AOL does indeed incorporate the gecko engine in an upcoming release). Is it better to learn how to write proper HTML/XHTML now, or write quick semi-correct HTML now and then have to fix it in a year? And chances are, if you aren't writing proper HTML now, you're not commenting your code eaither.
In conclusion, I agree that blame should be placed on web developers who only want to develop for IE because that's easiest. If you don't want to do the job right, then too f-ing bad. That's why they call it work. If it was supposed to be easy, then they wouldn't pay you - they'd pay the neighbor kid because "he's good at computers." Do the job you're paid to do. People might not find out if you slack, but the more you slack, the harder it will be to correct it when the time comes.
Disclaimer: My site (listed above) is not currently XHTML compliant. There is a new version being developed which will be compliant, though. And if you see browser-specific features, that's because the template for the site is chosen based on the user agent string.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
I strongly believe that it is much easier to make Mozilla 100% IE compatible than to push millions of web sites with billions of web pages to be IE/Mozilla/Opera/etc compatible. Also I strongly believe that most guys who commented article are NOT web programmers because otherwise they will know how complexity of DHTML code rise if something other than IE also required. I'm not a snobby but while millions of Windows users will continue to use Windows (and they will are) they will continue to use IE (because it is far better for Win than Netscape/etc regardless of standard de jure incompatibility) and all site owners will continue to support IE as a must and include support for other browsers optionally only if budget will allow. So I think it's a time for Mozilla team to win "most compatible browser ever" name and include into the Mozilla not only standard de jure compatibility but also compatibility with standards de facto (IE). Including JavaScript object properties, object hierarchy and so on of course.
# That girl would go out with you, if you'd only ask
:)
Obviously you haven't been around Slashdot too long. Why do you think so many people here have such time to waste?
It's not the 3% who hit your pages now that you should worry about losing, it's the unknown number who are not hitting your pages at all anymore because they know they're broken. "Do the math."
At a world-famous corporation (that shall remain nameless here), the chief technology officer mandated IE as the official company browser. Compatibility with all other browsers was to be ignored for cost reasons, for all intranet sites.
The CTO announced the mandate on an intranet web page.
The page, when rendered in IE, crashed.
Of course it displayed perfectly in Netscape.
IE still has a more standardized implementation of CSS than Mozilla. If you use NS4 you might as well use NS1.0 these days.
For almost two years this author has been writing extensively and authoritatively on the need for, and the problems with not using, HTML standards. She's even developed test suites for CSS and other compliance. You might be surprised that Opera doesn't fare so well.
Overall, great tips I've not seen elsewhere -- so get CodeBitch to crack the whip.
I run a web development company and also maintain a few moderate-trafficed web sites.
One thing i've noticed about developing is that IE tends to allow HTML that is not properly formatted and sort of just re-form it so it renders properly. When that happens all of the other browsers die, and you get a load of vomit on your screen.
Half of the time I develop using Mozilla only, load it up in IE later on and realize that it doesn't work worth crap. (even when it is 100% HTML 4.01 compliant.)
I think that IE actually needs to require more properly-formatted HTML to stop all of these lazy web developers from writing sloppy html. For now I'll stick to Konqueror... the only scrollbar coloring browser that i've seen besides IE (=
The current stats for one of my main web sites are:
Explorer 84.1%
Netscape 4.85%
Mozilla 1.56%
Netscape 4 is used by about 1% of the browsing public. It's 6-year-old technology. Yeah, it runs great on a Pentium II, but so does IE5.5. Use that instead. Or use Mozilla and live with the slight slowdown (though, really, on a PII, there's not much of a slowdown, let's be honest.)
Kill Netscape 4, now.
Let it die. Let it be forgotten.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I look at it this way, if the site doesn't show up in my browser(Galeon) - then I don't go there. If the company is trying to make money from that site, they just lost some.
Businesses that are serious about making money on the web are going to make their shit work on as many browsers as possible.
Some businesses may not care about the 5 - 10% of the traffic that can't view their pages. I find that strange. That would be like 711 not allowing some people into the store and basically throwing money away. Some businesses may have such a targeted audience of IE users that utilizing the "extensions" in IE makes sense.
I have been a web developer for over 5 years now and I look at it like this:
1. You are spitting out HTML. Use the standard HTML unless there is some compelling business reason to deviate. Even in that case, you should still cover non-IE browsers.
2. This is off-topic. Don't rely on Javascript to make an online "application". Javascript is a supplement that should be used to make the user's experience more pleasant, but shouldn't break your site if it's not enabled.
3. Just make good clean HTML. If you are a web developer that doesn't understand HTML and can't created good clean HTML, you might want to buy a book.
4. Don't use WYSWYG editors. I don't care how much people complain about typing. No one ever said making a web site was supposed to be easy. Good clean code will serve you well into the future and something you can build onto rather than throw away everytime you want to make a change.
This is a statement that I think most web developers will get pissed off about but here goes: I think designers should design and web developers should make this shit work. Example: A web designer creates PSD's of all the pages and hands them to the web developer who breathes life into them. I think that the web developer should be an expert at HTML and should know how to cut up the PSD and make that shit work. The web developer should own the entire site, not just their little PHP or Perl code. That works best for me anyway. I love having total control of the process. And it frees the designer up to focus on designing, which is what they do best. A nice spec. from the designer helps too. Of course, in larger businesses replace the previous term "web developer" with "web development team".
HTML can be tedious at times, but you would be amazed at how pleasing it is to work on something that you know inside and out. Plus it is fun to break apart sites and simplify and eliminate duplicate html code and really make that site maintainable. Programmers kick ass at making things easy, that's what we do.
Don't be afraid of HTML, it's not that big of a deal. One last thing, lose the attitude toward designers. If it weren't for designers all web sites would like Slashdot. I can sitdown with a good designer for an hour and they can make my crappy site look like it's something I can be proud of. It aint shit if you people can't use it.
It always galls me when people talk of a site "supporting" Mozilla, or Opera, etc. I think that gives people the impression that a web designer has to add special code to make it work with those bad, non-conforming browsers. As those of us who write HTML know, that's simply not the case. If we're gonna bitch and moan about the situation, we've got to stop phrasing the question that way.
I for one don't demand that HTML authors build in support for my favorite oddball browser, only that they don't lock me out. That's not just semantics, that little detail puts the argument in the proper light.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Really? Literally? As in actually, and not figuratively... Maybe they shouldn't handle loaded weapons on the job then.
You're right about the indexing though. I used to work in a web development company. The other developers put out sloppy code that happened to render the way they wanted on whatever the latest IE was. I was always trying to push clean, w3c compliant code, but they'd always shrug that off as no big deal, "I don't care about old browsers", stuff like that. Then it hit me one day that search engine spiders weren't going to index a lot of their stuff. Adding that to my argument... put a stunned look on their faces. They had no counter argument, and often were open to changing their tune after that.
because I could join the chorus and perhaps suggest to webmasters that it's not just one person who's having this problem. I'd really appreciate some help to get Citibank to get their online banking site to work with Netscape (or Mozilla) since it only seems to work with IE and while I've complained to them, I get the automated "we'll look into it problem" and I don't think they're going to change until dozens of users (who they recognize as representing thousands of users who don't complain) respond.
See subject. It irritates me to no end to hear web designers (who sometimes refer to themselves as developers) call html (and/or the html generated by their favorite tool) code. HTML is markup. Like formatting a word document. Yes there is some creativity involved, but it is far from actual programming.
my 2c
Yep. I've noted the trend, too. Ironically, IE5.2 for Mac OS X isn't recognized by many sites that handle its Windows counterpart.
That's when I load up OmniWeb, which has an option in its preferences to proclaim itself as any popular Windows or Mac browser type, and can be customized as well.
This doesn't guarantee that OmniWeb will actually be compatible with the site, but at least it lets you in the door.
This is a nasty issue. Computers of all types need standards to communicate. While the W3C community has a standard, it's the effect of the mostly self-crafted and barely compatible coding of one company, Microsoft, that undoes that, and creates disharmony and incompatibility.
When my wife and I are online shopping and run into an incompatible site, we vote with our browser. If the business doesn't understand or care that the world does not revolve around Windows, fuck 'em. We take our money to a site that does. I may have to fight incompatibility at work, but I don't have to live with it at home.
Still, I now have to fight with getting my online banking to work in any Mac browser. I had to get my PC game box up to make a simple transaction. My PC box is for fragging chix, not for fragging checks!
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
so, the developers need to support all the browsers. Hey, if the browser manufactures would play ball and follow standards, this mess would have never happened.
As a developer, I am awfully sick of writing a version of my site for each of the 17 browsers (and versions) that are out there.
My personal sites are only viewable in IE6, IE5.5 and NS6.
At some point, enough becomes enough.
I suggest developing for mozilla and leaving IE out in the cold. The browser manufacturers should scramble to support the standard, which Mozilla has done. As developers, we should reward Mozilla for this. Otherwise we have what we have now, a disjointed set of docs that only work in one browser or the other.
If *everyone* on the internet, decided to follow standards, MS would be forced into submission, or lose their browser share, pay the price for making up their own rules.
I am an idealist though. Most of you marshmallows don't have the balls to put your foot down.
I challenge you to prove me wrong.
It's more than the boss. I worked on a project recently that was an intranet web app (hospitals). During discussions about web browser compatability, development's "solution" to the problem was to just put a statement in our docs that states the supported browsers. (IE and Netscape) When we (QA) started raising tons of bugs against the code because it didn't work in Netscape, they actually wanted to change it so that we only supported IE. When I objected, I got the line that everyone had IE, there was no reason to support anything else. (?!) Amongst our customers, this was true because we were a Windows-only shop. Even though it would have cut down a lot of the testing we had to do to support only one browser, I fought against it and won. Now we officially support both Netscape and IE.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
A couple of years ago designing web sites was a major pain -- IE and Navigator had different opinions about almost everything -- from HTML to Javascript (especially the Document Object Model) and Cascading Style Sheets (very, very broken Netscape).
Right now IE has over 90% penetration on the "market" and offers almost acceptable support for CSS and stylesheets (Remember, AOL uses various crippled versions of IE, too). Netscape prior to the Mozilla based code is out of the question. Opera has very little penetration.
What was a web designer to do? Write fast and easy code compatible with IE and maybe breaking for 5% of the users (less than 5% for some big, non-geeky sites) OR spending over 200% more time accomodating for alternate templates, scripts, etc.?
The light at the end of the tunnel comes with the now officially finished version of Mozilla which is less than a month old.
Some designers got sick of the agony of coding all workarounds and decided to go for standards (load alistapart.com in Netscape 4.5, load it in Mozilla -- see?) but big sites still go with the shit flow (IE).
The actions I personally am taking is coding with standards, and avoiding using features not supported by IE -- this way the layouts work in IE, Opera and Gecko based browsers, and is readable in Lynx.
g Here are some links:
http://Webstandards.org
http://bluerobot.org
http://alistapart.com
It seems to me that the web designers aren't the ones ignoring standards, but rather the web-browser designers (programmers).
According to this, the browser of choice is decidedly IE. The reasons behind these statistics are not relevant here in the least, so don't even go there. The fact is, most people use IE browsers, so naturally, most designers design with IE foremost in their mind.
If Netscape, Opera, Mozzila, etc. manage to get the majority of the user-base somehow, I'm sure that web designers will naturally sway their designs to those browsers.
You can't logically blame this on the designers. Instead blame it on the browser makers for not complying with standards, and blame it on alternative browser makers for failing to make people want to switch.
On another note, I'm really pissed that the current highway system doesn't better accommodate my motorcycle. It's smaller, lighter, faster, cleaner, and better in every way than those big ugly cars, but the road designers just continue to design roads with cars in mind....get the point?
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
I have been pushing sites which don't work with mozilla to shape up recently. However, the other thing i have been doing, is adding more and more Agent: Mozilla 1.0 tags to their logs. Remember, numbers and statistics are what the boss understands, not technobabble and The Right Thing to do.
At friends houses (ones with DSL mostly) I have been offering to install Mozilla. Most of the time all i have to show them is tabbed browsing, and the "blue modern" theme and they love it. I have even had success at selling it on a college librarian, who while not an uber-geek, likes to learn and be able to do things. She picked up all the little intricacies of mozilla in minutes and was loving it. When i went back over to one of my friends house, he had replaced IE with mozilla as the default he liked it so much.
With that being said, i've also managed to get the little CyberCafe/computer store place i workat/hangoutat to install OpenOffice.org and Mozilla on all the new PC's he sells. The owner of that store is anything but technically literate, but can be taught very easily (eager to learn), he's a manager. He picked up OpenOffice.org very quickly, and saw the appeal after about the third time he asked me "how much does this cost again?".
You may have a slow-ass computer, but there's simply no reason to continue using Netscape 4, no matter what you may say.
There are stripped-down versions of mozilla out there. You can use Opera or Internet Explorer 5, if you run Windows. You may even be able to stomach Mozilla or Netscape 6 if you've got a computer built this century.
The world does not owe you a favor for having a slow-ass computer, though. We're not about to sit idly by while your shitty 486 attempts to render our modern websites. Stop using NS4. Times are changing. Get with it, or give up. But, stop whining.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I've been using BannerBlind (http://bannerblind.mozdev.org/) for a while and it's great. It blocks things based on size, not location. So, just pick the proper banner sizes, and it will block them from any host, as images or flash. The only problem I've noticed with it is that if you're using tabbed browsing it will only affect a tab that is active when it loads. Once it has loaded you can switch back and forth as much as you want.
... compliant...
just try it on this site.
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/ I'd say a browser isn't standards complient when it doesn't render the w3c.org website properly...
And fuck all those blind users too. Who the hell do they think they are anyway? Why should they be able to read information off web sites if they can't see our inept layouts and worthless graphical garbage?
[cough]
a3c6 0e89 b1ec aa4d d630 26c8 d07e 7eed 8148 5503 02b4 dfaa 9922 b28d 0820 c4af
Possible Moz Feature:
;-)
Create a button that will send an "error rendered on http://web.address.here" to mozilla. Also put a space to provide the webmaster's e-mail. (Time spent 5-20 seconds. Someone at Moz will check out the most popular links and find out if it's moz's problems or html problems. Moz will then politely send an e-mail. (X,000 of our users have e-mailed us concerning using our browser on your web page. We have verified that our browser was functioning correctly.) You can verify that your page is not compliant HERE.
Especially in recent nightlies I have seen some render errors. This is expectable, but makes me wary to send in invalid HTML complaints. (And downloading moz 1.0 to check if it works there and then the most recent nightly to see if it works there is a lot of work on my 28.8!) I imagine webmasters also get pissed when they get complaints about build 2002893405209345802853.b, but it seems to be working on 2002893405209345802853.ba.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
- not supporting alternative browsers was losing roughly 10 per cent of possible visitors, which was particularly dangerous for a new banking service;
- not supporting alternative browsers was unethical.
The last was a pretty big lever to press, given that the Co-Operative Bank (smile parent) is very big on its ethical policyIt strikes me that the 'ethical lever' would be particularly powerful when charities are concerned.
My bank is running on IIS servers:( And wrote their pages in java + javascript + activeX
They have done it soo good that only MSIE || netscape 4.7x can use it
I have already askedt them to allow other clients, but they don't seem to hurry, or even to care
How could we force them to respect standards?
(To change of bank is not directly an option)
www.kbc.be on the left there's a "kbc online" picture; if you go to the username login, your browser is fine to use with, else not.
(even if java is correctly installed)
what a pitty
This is totally unitentional but the plus side of this is that advertising, particularly pop ups are much less annoying on unsupported platforms. Browser to browser this is true, and also OS to OS. moving from mac os 9.1 to win xp pop ups in IE became 10 times more elaborate and obnoxious.
You can get some interesting information from Google:
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html
Presumably, this is fairly representative of the web community at large. Interesting that the "other" browser is gaining. Want to bet that it's mostly Mozilla/Netscape 6? (Ok, they don't put actual percent for each browser, but you can probably guess).
> My pet peeve is when sites hype and announce
> new-and-improved sites
My pet peeve is attempting to support NS. Have you ever done anything more complex than a simple home page? Dynamic content, JS, plugin interaction is all broken. Standards compliant?! That's great it supports the W3C tags, but not great if you have to add layers of cruft to your plugins because sometimes the plugin is initialized before the DOM and sometimes it's the other way around. I'd rather have small differences from the standard than bugs that require workarounds. I'm hoping NS6 will fix some of this, but claiming that simply coding to the specs will result in code that works on NS is completely incorrect in every way.
He figured his client base would be using whatever came pre-loaded on the machine (i.e. IE), or AOL. After I explained they are the same. He told me not to waste my time with the other browsers.
Well, I ignored him and made sure my code ran under NS6 and IE5 to W3C specs (CSS and NS4 == TNT).
A few months ago I proudly showed him an article explaining how AOL would be dropping IE and going with NS in the future. He said I should look into supporting NS. I told him the code already does...scored some brownie points.
Point is...don't listen to your boss when you know your right. Especially when they are lawyers with money trying to start a tech co. Always do what you know is the right way of doing things, fuck the bosses shortcut suggestions. I've spent the past year showing my boss how clueless he is concerning computers, and now he listens to me.
Writing to standards would be nice except IE and Netscape have different interpretations of the standards! Need an example? Put an image in a table cell and IE will put it flush bottom but Netscape will put it on the font baseline (leaving space below for where decenders would go). Both are possible interpretations of the standards. Working around this is a pain in the ass. Sure, we can do it: but we shouldn't have to!
I'm all for different browsers but they should certainly display html the exact same was as IE. It is the default standard. Others can differ on security issues and other important things but should read html like the browser that already has a 90% market share.
I've always stayed loyal to html and images over flash. Flash is a newb tool used by newbs who find it too hard to develop a visually equal version in html.
It's just like an advanced version of imageready... you lay out an image... let the program cut it up for you, tada, a website.
But I'm not saying I hate flash, I am really impressed with those math/physic flash projects, and I think flash is a great movie/game tool. but a 100% flash website = tacky.
So far, I've been able to dodge the evil likes of flash at my school (parsons.edu), but teachers and future employers are most likely going to expect every designer to use flash, b/c it looks pretty. *sigh*
"And those complex features tend to be crucial when it comes to executing transactions on e-commerce sites."
;) So if they want me to buy from them, they've got to support *ME*. After all, who pays their salaries? The users do.
On private, personal, and come once sites, I just ignore it, go on, etc. After all, if the site is defective, then it's defective. I may live the web master a note that the site has bugs, just to be nice.
But on commerical sites, if you lock out customers, your loosing money. That's just downright stupid, but you got to remember. Most CEOs or supervisors or such barely know how to turn on a computer. Telling their web masters to make their web sites work in Opera or other browsers, well maybe when the next generation (the kids who grew up with the web site) become CEOs we'll see this problem fixed.
My own solution is, to send e-mails to the web master, and others I can and tell them that I'm an opera user, a Linux user, and MS will NOT support linux, hence IE will not be on my machine. (Even if they did, I wouldn't put it on
If we don't put our foot down on these companies, then who do we got to blame, but ourselves?
Besides if they don't make a web site I can use, then I just leave it. To me, it's defective.
Shadowwalker Delaforge
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That way other sites, like mine (www.mrpress.com :), will get the excess
:)
for a shameless plug
Netscape and Mozilla runoff.
I started designing/developing websites back in
1993. I eventually worked my way into management
before becoming a dotcom victim, getting fed up,
and starting my own business.
In the beginning many of the developers I worked
with were careful. They coded carefully and
tested carefully. Over the years that definitely
changed. You had younger and/or lazier people
getting into the business. Suddenly instead of
it being the standard, I had to fight with them
and with management to make sure that we at least
worked on Netscape as well. It was unfortunately
a losing battle.
Nowadays, though I'm not all that saddened by it.
As I learned, the majority of my current
competition (the custom shirt, mug biz) isn't tech
savvy enough to build anything much beyond what
Frontpage can do. So I use that to my advantage.
I keep I.E., Netscape 4.7, and the latest Mozilla
builds on my development machine. I make sure my
site gets tested in each of them in Windows, then
I flip on Linux and test it in Mozilla there.
Finally I usually give a graphic designer friend
of mine a buzz and have her check it out on her
Mac. End of story. 80% of my customers use I.E.
That's great. However, I'm not about to cater
exclusively to them at the cost of losing the
other 20% of my eyeballs.
As far as I'm concerned, as an e-business owner,
regardless of what browser you use, your money is
still the same color, and I'd rather you spent
it with me then elsewhere.
Rick
http://www.mrpress.com
My biggest pet peeve with Microsoft is for some weird reason none of their tools put quotes around HTML tag parameters. Not sure if the Gecko engine can handle that, but it caused havoc with older Netscapes.
I beleive the standard says to quote all parameters, and it's not like there is any advantage to not quoting html tag paramers (if anything, it makes things a bit cleaner). SO WHY THE HECK DOES MICROSOFT INSIST ON LEAVING OUT QUOTES?!
this is a common misconception. rather than launch into a rather over the top tirade about the evils of one of the most standards compliant, user-responsive browsers on the market, you could have just LOOKED at the complete user string. it's not rocket science...
even when opera is spoofing IE, you CAN still see that it is opera. all you do is look at the entire string. here they are:
- Opera being Opera:
- Opera being Mozilla 5.0:
- Opera being Mozilla 4.78:
- Opera being Mozilla 3.0:
- Opera being MSIE 5.0:
spot the common thread? yes, that's right. the giveaway is the word "Opera" in the useragent string. tricky, eh? in other words, it can fake out all standard detection scripts, but DOES allow you to notice that is Opera if you want to make the effort to distinguish it anyway. in other words, it behaves perfectly. it isn't lying. it DOES tell you its Opera, but only to those people who care enough to ask. are you one of those people...?"Opera/6.04 (Windows NT 4.0; U) [en]"
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 4.0; U) Opera 6.04 [en]"
"Mozilla/4.78 (Windows NT 4.0; U) Opera 6.04 [en]"
"Mozilla/3.0 (Windows NT 4.0; U) Opera 6.04 [en]"
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT 4.0) Opera 6.04 [en]"
i'm currently lead on a project to interactively web-enable some reasonably hardcore financial analytics. i'm working for an investment bank. we have a relatively homogenous, controlled environment. i COULD just code for IE. however, i have spent some time and effort up front, and currently have everything running as perfectly validating XHTML Transitional. and it's not just a page of text. drop-down menu layers, and a lot of interactivity have been put into this, yet it has been tested in the following browsers:
Windows: IE4->6, NS4->6, Mozilla 1.0/1.1, Opera 5/6
Linux: Konqueror 2.1.x, NS4, Opera5/6, Mozilla 1.0/1.1a
yes, there are a lot of idiosyncracies that can be baffling, awkward to understand, code for, etc. but it can be done. and when you work it all out, it's really not THAT hard. once the project is finished, i intend to release the libraries i have created. perhaps they will be found useful by others.
my advice: the time spent working out all of the DOMs, coding cross platform, cross browser server/client-side libraries may look like a long time. but it's worth it.
I just do in XHTML, which forces me to follow standards. Works like a charm and if your browser doesn't read the XHTML right, thats your browser's fault and I am not doing a damn thing to fix it.
Question
http://www.ironfroggy.com/
IMO, this is just sensationalist BS. It's been two years since I found a site I can't view in Linux. Opera has long been able to display any web site I've visited, and for the last 10 months or so I've been using Mozilla exclusively. Where are these sites that are unusable in Opera/Moz/Konqueror? Hell, even Lynx and Links can handle 90% of the web sites I go to.
Check out the Mozilla Evangelism site. They keep up a list of sites that are not standards-compliant (and therefore don't render well in Moz), including a list of specific bugs and their status for each site.
Not that I am defending Microsoft's not following the standards, but that is really a secondary issue at this point. Rather than stubbornly sit on their principles and go out of business, the other browser makers would be wise to make their browsers compatible with all the sites, including the ones that use various Microsoft extensions.
Microsoft was able to hijack the standards in the first place because they made a better browser and had a more effective marketting 'scheme'. The market leader has always be in the position to set the standards and extend them.
When Microsoft was behind, they ended up making their product compatible with the market leader at the time (netscape), despite there being ways in which netscape didn't follow the standards as well. Microsoft knew that to survive in the market, they had to swallow their pride and follow the beat of a different drummer for a while.
Now, it may be blasphemy to say this on slashdot, but perhaps you guys could learn a thing or two from Microsoft after all.
I never spend money at the sites you design, and I *always* tell the site owners why. If you design e-commerce sites that exclude customers, you're a fool, and the people who hire you to do it are fools too. The whole idea of e-commerce is to sell as much stuff as you can, designing a site that keeps people out is stupid.
I caught that too. It's great how you can click that link at the bottom (after reading a lot of hooey about the beta-status of Netscape support), and the site works perfectly in nearly any other browser.
The estimate is that 90% of the desktops in the world run M$ therefore 10% are running Linux, BSD, MAC or whatever.
When you find an IE only site bookmark it find a non IE only companies site. purchase whatever you want from them and then mail the IE only webmaster and point out that they lost xx.xx pounds, dollars, euros etc. due to their non standards compliant site. If you can get the CEO's address mail him as well.
Spread the word and when CEOs see how much the 10% of non IE browser users are spending with their competitors they may wake up.
As usual though it all depends on a determined effort. Bit like Open Source.
Hmmmmmm..... Deep fried and look like Squirrel.
I am a web designer who advertises on designs that meet standards compliance. I develop on a Mac and PC using Dreamweaver 4, and I test all my designs on Mozilla *and* IE.
One problem though, is that Dreamweaver created pages don't pass W3C compliance without tweaking them yourself. Maybe sopmeone should have a talk with Macromedia about this.
I simply tell my clients thatI strongly recommend against forcing the user into a certain browser because while many use IE, many do not, and I'll be happy to code it in a way that will break non-IE browsers once they understand they're losing 10% of their sales before they even get out of the gate.
I've yet to have a single client then insist on going with IE-specific code.
My
Limekiller
To all you self righteous idiots out there who advocate linux because it is the eternal underdog and use non-m$ stuff just becuase they are afraid of the evil empire and refuse to use IE... you can all go find yourself your own internet!
I was about to post something about how all ya'll Nutscrape lusers can suck it down, then I discovered that the Javascript for one of the admin pages on my personal site doesn't work in Opera 6.02 (fave browser for work). On the one hand, I now empathize with all ya'll. On the other hand, I now feel like a total idiot.
[o]_O
The site works fine in Mozilla 1.0, but try this.
Visit slashdot, hit ctrl-I and notice the rendering mode. "Quirks mode" instead of "Standards compliant mode".
Slashdot should follow web standards and set a GOOD example for the community, especially considering their prominence, influence, and the appearance of hypocracy if we preach about standards and do not follow them.
Try going to validator.w3.org and entering slashdot.org.
It is quite disheartening to see just how non-compliant the site is.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
IE might have the most users, but is by far not the best browser in the world. Netscape, Opera, Mozilla, they are all MUCH better than IE is, and it isn't fair to those browser to not be able to support the code for these websites.
Because there is no documentation telling you how to write web pages for all the "standard" browsers equally easily - with nice, dynamic cross-reference of objects and methods. Eiether that, or maybe there is no way to do this because even a simple script written to standard will run into a lot of bugs. Or w3c model is much more complicated than IE. Anyway, I don't think people would deliberately ignore standards if they were easy to use. I would guess most people use open() instead of CreateFile when writting Win32 programs.
Where I worked we used the 80/20 rule. "You use 80 percent of your time trying to fix what's wrong on 20% of your users."
;-)
That meant we didn't bother coding things to work in Netscape or Opera. I'd still do it on the side for grevious errors, but MS was a client of ours and so there was pressure to make it an IE only site.
My boss didn't care about anything else so I decided to look at user statistics. He didn't really like that I was doing this, but in the end the numbers showed that only 4% of the users were using anything but IE. Since I know that the world uses other browsers in higher proportion I noted that we were forcing some people not to use our site. It didn't matter, because he used the numbers to say we should waste our time on 4% of the market.
Statistics... pretty soon you start to believe them.
My home site .. is viewable in (almost) everything .. since its a hobby site .. some stuff probally doesnt work in opera .. but it all works in NS/mozilla & ie ..
.. well .. thats a whole nother can of worms. I try to make everything web compliant, but we are in bed with microsoft .. much as i don't like that .. its a fact .. and when our marketing team insists on doing something (microsoft) cool .. there isnt alwayas a choice.
work
especially when they insist on outsourcing something to a vendor who brags that their designers 'never had to do any of those certification things - they just loaded up the software and played with it.'
a fact that is evident when you get 'frontpage' generated shit from them at $250 an hour.
*sigh*
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
I run a pretty good-sized website that pulls in ~20,000 people a day. I occasionally get complaints about things not working properly for certain browsers. I do my best to correct these problems ASAP.
My navigation system is a JavaSciprt menu thing I found online, and it works on IE 4+, Netscape 4+, and Opera. I didn't write it, so there's not much I can do when people complain about it. But I got a nasty e-mail from a Linux user who was using some funky browser I'd never even heard of. He proceeded to attack me for designing my site only for IE (clearly not true) and using FrontPage to design it (I use TextPad and code by hand). I essentially told him to go piss up a rope, as I don't appreciate assholes bitching at me when they don't know the facts.
Complain intelligently. If you come in either ignorant and/or aggresively things aren't going to change...
"My pet peeve is when sites hype and announce new-and-improved sites, and then they come out and they are simply a gigantic flash application. "
People like to bash Flash because they came accross a poorly developed site. But that's unfairly singling out the Flash component. The problem is that the industry is rife with bad developers. THEY ARE THE PROBLEM!!
HTML is a horrible language, browsers are a mess. No one agrees on anything, so only those few "experts" out there have gracefully overcome the hurdles of the medium.
Where presentation is paramount, Flash IS designer heaven because like it or not, it looks and behaves virtually the same on all platforms, and all browsers. The key is to develop it properly...the same as with any other app. But you don't blame the app. for it's improper deployment, you blame the developers.
HTML is a JOKE, and nothing pleases me the more than an entire site run from a component embeded within 5-10 lines of HTML. The quickest way to a succesful site is to get HTML out of the equation.
The only thing you might have to redo in order to support a new browser is the web page coding. You also have to advertise, keep the prices for your products low, do graphic design for the web site, take phone calls from frustrated customers, design the backend for credit card processing, write and maintain a privacy policy, etc. I'm not a business guy, but my intuition says that web page coding does not account 30% of the money you use to lure customers.
The shareholder is always right.
that 90% to 95% of your total traffic is using IE while viewing your website, that doesn't provide for a very compelling reason to spend the time and resources it takes to make the experience just as good for the other 5%...and for the record, I refuse to design for Netscape 4 anymore...because it's a POS! However, I will not release a website that doesn't provide a great user experience across the board on IE, Netscape 6+ on Windows or a Mac. I'm not concerned with the less than 1% of linux, opera, etc. users because I'm not worried about C-level corporate types coming to our companies' website on a linux box...
If you want to be in the minority...you've got to accept what comes along with that...great websites are always designed with a specific audience in mind...otherwise, they'd all look like Yahoo! and half of the websites on Geocities.
Yeah, get over it.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
- Opera identifies it self (in the user agent string) as IE by default.
- several other browers have agent strings that can be set by the user
- some web couters do not seem to be cross platform. I have found at least one site using sitemeter do not seem to count my vists when I use Mozilla.
Given all this could someone tell me how reliable the methodology used to estimate browser market share is?As the parent said you should look at it in terms of gaining additional customers. Also, increasing your customer base by 5% would usually make a bigger difference to your profits, possibly a lot more if you are highly operationally geared (i.e. have high fixed costs).
experience speaking. The bottom line is and always will be CASH for development. As long as MSIE continues to dominate the market, AND CONTINUES to effectively ignore standards, the smaller standards compliant browsers will suffer. It is a proven M$ merketing tactic.
**** 100% Flash free and proud of it. ****
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
> Think of it a designing to gain 5% more
> customers.
At what cost? Developing for NS4 is a lot more costly - would you ever get a return on that? 80/20 rule might apply here...
The sad truth is that the standards the W3C makes are a fairy tale.
For a standard to be coherent, it needs a reference implementation. Only by having a reference implementation can you figure out "who owns the bug".
Additionally, for that reference implementation to have any power in the market, it needs to be the most popular implementation. Examples include: postscript, X11, and Win32.
In the Win32 world, application developers worry about making their applications run on one reference platform, Win32. If that application does not work on SoftWindows or Wine, the bug gets reported to developer of the emulator. Only in rare cases would the application write make changes to support running under an emulator.
The web works the same way. Today the reference for writing HTML is IE. It has the largest marketshare; It has the easiest to use documentation (on MSDN); And it is the most stable.
If you want the web to work on more browsers, you should put pressure on the browser writers to become compatible with the implementation that defines the standard... IE. You should also put pressure on the W3C to stop pulling new HTML standards out of their ass, and start basing them on existing implementations... They've been making this mistake since the early days of Netscape/Mosaic.
Does anyone know how to make this work in reverse? For example, are there any standard tags IE refuses to comply with that I can use on my site to prmote non-IE browsers?
Seriously, check it out for everything from HTML, XML, SQL, CSS etc. They cover a lot.
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
Have you seen Mozilla boot on even an 800Mhz P3? It takes forever
...You just need to have some basic knowledge of NS4 CSS bugs.
I run mozilla just fine on a 600mhz Duron. They also have a tool now that'll load moz when the system boots, so it seems as quick as IE. If you're using windows. And of course, windows users can use IE. On Linux you can use Galion(sp?) Konq, or Opera. Lack of system resources is not an excuse to use ns4. There are faster and better.
And why on earth would I want to do that? it's a complete waste of time. On one site putting CSS attributes on a table caused the table to simply not show up. Since it was the main layout table (this site used scoop, so getting rid of the layout tables would have taken forever) basically none of the site content showed up. I tried putting the table in a div, but that really screwed up the layout in IE and moz. So I basically told NS4 users to disable CSS. Do you know how annoying it was to have a lovely layout in IE/Moz, a nice one in NS1/2/3/mosaic/lynx and everything else but ns4?
On autopr0n, I detect NS4 and send a blank style sheet if they have it.
Using XHTML for simple markup and CSS for visual formatting, it's very easy to design a standards-compliant web page that renders fine in Netscape 4, without the fancy visual formatting you might see in Mozilla.
That's true. But with about 95% less work I can write a page that will display in every browser except Netscape 4 with it's broken CSS. Seriously, why should I spend time testing against a buggy implementation and looking up bugs when I could be spending my time working on the DB layer for my site, or graphics, or playing Gran Tourismo 3? Actually, if NS4 users just killed CSS all would be ok.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I happen to be a professional web developer and a fanatical linux user. I take pride in the cross-browser and cross-platform compatability of every site i create. The problem is not necessarily always at the development end however. While it's true that there are many web developers out there that don't REALLY know what they're doing (a high percentage of incompetance i've found is fairly common with most technical jobs in big business) alot of the reason why those web developers can't or won't support browsers other than IE is because the people paying to have the sites made don't understand the importance of standards compliance and why they should pay more money for a site that caters to the remaining 5% of the internet that (in they're flawed opinion) still insists on being different to no good purpose and should just wise up and use IE along with all the professionals.
This is a viewpoint i heartly disagree with, however i've found that it tends to be a viewpoint that isn't readily accepted by the bean counters and the marketing managers. After all, they're used to using an operating system that's nowhere near 95% reliable... a 95% compatable website is more than acceptable if it means they don't have to allow "hacker software" onto they're microsoft certified and approved workstations.
I hate my job.
Now try it with 128MB of RAM
The diffrence between 128mb and 512mb of ram is $46....
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I can understand why 'designers' don't spend much time worrying about anything other than IE, but I'd like to be able to take my chances. Give me a warning if you must, but then I'm pretty well capable of deciding whether or not a site is usable, thank you. However, I can't forgive the decision to block me entirely if I'm not using IE.
The Benjamin Moore Paints website doesn't allow non-IE browsers to even TRY to render the pages; to me this is far worse than a simple warning. That company lost me as a customer recently because I couldn't view their product information. Pretty stupid.
For the record, the arrogant, stupid people responsible for the Benjamin Moore site are Modem Media and some woman called Ellen Zaroff Brady. Please avoid them like the plague.
Here's a solution (that will never fly). Have a standard layout and rendering engine put out by the standars board. It's ensured to work the same on all platforms. Sort of like a standard library. Individual companies can then add functionality on top of that such as tabbed windows or whatever else. I guess the big problem would be figuring out how to encourage the library to be released under a GPL or something. Other wise I'm sure it would be subject to some ridiculous licensing agreement.
I suppose such a utopia doesn't exist. Or maybe I'm just naieve.
The only place where I could see standardizing on a browser would be for in-house stuff like this. Major companies tend to adopt corporate standards for software like this, and in my case, that software is IE. This is actually a good thing at this scale, because our IT support groups only have to worry about supporting one type of browser, etc. It's also beneficial for our Intranet web applications, because we only have to develop and test for one particular type of browser. Everyone in the company should be using company-standard software, so it's not a big deal if non-standard software doesn't work correctly with our Intranet sites.
On the Internet side, however, or where we do need to be looking at more than one browser vendor, you can bet that we test with just about every known browser. We actually have an organization devoted to doing this type of testing.
I mention all of this because there are some cases where you would want to write for a specific browser and not have to worry about everyone else.
Put an image in a table cell and IE will put it flush bottom but Netscape will put it on the font baseline (leaving space below for where decenders would go).
Just specify img { vertical-align: bottom; } in your CSS to get the IE behavior everywhere.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The article implies that the problem lies almost entirely with the web authors and developers. The fact is, even the latest versions of Netscape and Opera lag behind IE in basic interpretation of HTML. They'll add unwarranted pixels, screw up framesets, and generally make nuisances of themselves. If these browsers weren't so obviously flawed, more users would gravitate towards them and thus more sites would shift away from proprietary IE functions. In order for a standards-compliant internet to work, browser and WYSIWYG editor developers need to make their products effective enough to be competitive.
CNet's Tech News has an image next to the story's headline of a crown, perched over two Mac OS-style windows...
n g2 .jpg
http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/pg/070802browserki
-mj
What are websites for?
Websites are a means to get information to people. I think most website owners would like to get their information to as many people as possible. So why do site owners allow web designers to block out a significant percentage of potential readers?
Take a look at the following message I got from KFWB when attempting to view a story. I was using Opera, my preferred browser.
Note the final insultingly ironic sentence. If they respect my browser preference, why won't they allow my browser to view their pages?
You nailed it. If people can't use a website for whatever reason, they can't very well spend their money there, and will go elsewhere. And if there's one thing that's true about the web, it's that there's *always* another site offering what your site offers.
"My pet peeve is when sites hype and announce new-and-improved sites, and then they come out and they are simply a gigantic flash application."
My pet peeve is YOU. Pull your head out of your ass you fucking idiot. Check out the Broadmoor's website - without a doubt extremely cool, functional, and easy to use, and done ENTIRELY in Flash (MX). Blows doors off anything possible with sets of HTML pages. Get a clue faggot.
Webmasters/designers would change their behavior overnight if (search engine of choice here) presented hits which either rewarded/penalized web pages for standards compliance.
e.g. Your search for "Natalie Portman hot grits" returned 1,000,000 hits...
page 1. #1-50. web sites - (standards compliant)
page 2. #51-100. web sites - (non-standard)
The point being that a pass for standards compliance lifts you up the rankings whereas IE-only would drop you onto page 2 or later.
--cj
PS: I can hear it now. "Jetson!!! Why is Cogwell Cogs higher on this search site than Spacely Sprockets?!"
-- "In a time of drastic change it is the learners who survive; the 'learned' find themselves fully equipped to live in
I have no problem with Lynx. lynx into autopr0n and see for yourself. I used a server side hack to check for Netscape 4 and send a blank stylesheet if you're using it.
The thing is, I don't need to do that for any other browser.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
ROFL...
:)
Well done...
Funniest comment I've seen all day
I for one totally agree with everything you said.. i inisit on all of my work being html compliant (any new stuff will be xhtml-strict).. The only thing I disagree with is this : "And chances are, if you aren't writing proper HTML now, you're not commenting your code eaither. " I disagree... HTML by it's nature is commented. I never really felt the need to comment *MOST* html. I don't need to say "This is a table for...." when the markup describes it pretty well to begin with. Now I definately think on complex and dynamic sites there may be a need, but for plain static pages.. I don't see a need to comment them. And my perl code is ALWAYS commented when others might read it :)
Rick
Making something out of nothing : MD5 ("") = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
I don't know why blind people would want to go looking at porn galleries, but they can if they want to. Autopr0n will work in every browser out there. Actually it will work in ns4, but only because I put in a server side hack to detect NS and send it a blank style sheet.
On another site I did, an entire table disappeared because of the CSS I was using. It worked perfectly in Netscape and Mozilla. And in other browsers it degraded pretty gracefully.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
There are tons of great modern browsers for Unix out there. Moz, Konq, Opera. It's not that hard.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
In dealing with the US Government, you have to go with what they say.
They are "standardized" on IE 5.5, which makes some of the development harder in some ways and easier in others.
They wont even hear proposals that talk about faster extensions or browers (mozilla etc). MS owns the military for contracts we are bidding on now.
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
Has BBEdit ever fixed the backwards search? Last few times I tried it, hitting Command-E got the selected text into the find buffer just fine, and Command-G would search forward as it should. But BBEdit hangs on Command-D to reverse search, which I use all the time. Very annoying.
(This is probably not an issue for old Mac hands, but for an OpenStep junkie it can be crucial)
So the best you can do is make sure that your page displays on as many as you can get ahold of, and put in effort to ensure display as best you can on the ones you can't see. The best way to do this is to stick to standardized HTML, because then you are subscribing to a coding standard that those browsers are aware of, rather than your own arbitrary methods that the browsers are NOT aware of.
....and for those to refer me to w3c, don't bother. Thats ideal, but we are talking about the real world here.
:), and the standards change on occasion, so you could write code till your fingers bleed to make it "nicey-nice" with all browsers, then if theres a w3c revision, and the next wave of browsers come out *plop* there goes your work.
:)
I'm an old-schooler, Wordpad is my editor of choice as far as web coding goes, GUI's just add alot of extra crap in the code/pages, thats a given.
Browsers don't meet standards, the w3c standards that are set aren't enforced (which isn't a BAD thing, we don't need police for web code
I try to code for as many browsers to work as possible, in all honesty, the hierarchy is roughly:
IE/Netscape/AOL/Opera/Mozilla(s)
There's an app I'm doing now that works perfectly in all EXCEPT Opera, and I simply don't have the time to go thru the guts of Opera to find out why......and thats really the bottom line with the issue, Deadlines and how many can we cover the quickest in user base, sorry to say IE is it, IMO
I'd love for them all to work the same, but there's too many "sub-standards" out there and most of us don't have time to "troubleshoot" the ones that don't work 100%.
I will say I am shocked at the use, or lack thereof, of ALT tags....but thats just me
Also I find that ALOT of people don't care if a page is w3c compliant, as long as it looks good, they are happy....most won't even know what w3c is. And those who do know, instead of moaning online in message boards such as this, send email to the webmaster...consistantly, thats the ONLY way they will even consider revising their code.
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
ah aham I can access any supposedly MSIE centric site you name with Mozilla including Micfosoft.com itself..
I think you may be in error..
While its true of user of Opera its not true of users of Mozilla!
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Already have it!!!
http://themes.mozdev.org/skins/ie.html
NR
If Mozilla supported document.all, the stuff would run unmodified.
But both Mozilla and IE 5 and later support document.getElementById, the W3C recommended DOM method. You could create your site with getElementById and then have a site-wide js file that emulates getElementById through document.all for IE 4 users.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I actually don't mind a little loose html here and there. Small font types are more a problem for me than a table with a misaligned graphic. My biggest gripe, however, is when some webdesigners *program* into their page to redirect if not using IE. They won't put forth extra effort to create compatible websites, but they will go out of their way to prevent you from entering their site if you don't use a specific browser.
Incidentally, this is not a small problem. As documented by bugzilla, users can enter hotmail.com using IE or Netscape, but not Gecko (or lesser known browsers). while the impact is small now (99.x% of users on IE), as embedded devices crop up and more users try to customize their browsers, it becomes more and more a problem.
And if there's one thing that's true about the web, it's that there's *always* another site offering what your site offers.
What if your power company's web site is IE only? What about your natural gas company, your telephone company, your cable company, your ISP? What about a company that has a patent or copyright on the product you need?
Will I retire or break 10K?
At my last job I was a UNIX consultant. I had one PC (a notebook). I did not have (or want, to be honest) a Solaris license for the notebook. The upshot is that I couldn't use any corporate network services. I ended up using my personal server to grab all my corp mail with fetchmail via IMAP and using that for webmail. I found webmail to be indespesable but the coporate webmail was provided by Exchange (and only worked with IE).
I couldn't read the internal website at all because of bogus use of tables that netscape can't handle, but IE likes just fine.
Bottom line is that the only sane thing to do is to make all web pages adhere to a W3C recommendation and report failures to browser vendors. This whole idea of making crappy pages with frontpage or whatever and then trying to rig them to work with a particular set of web browsers is just nuts. It is more work for inferior results. Crazy.
-Peter
rant all you want, but the reason is because ie does everything netscape and others do, and more.. ok yes, it sucks that they're adding their own extensions to html and not following the standard, but the end result is that desiging for ie gives the developer more options, and if a few people insist on cripling their web experience (in the developers eyes) well then thats their own problem, but we will not limit ourselves in what we can do, to make a few people happy...
/end rant
just liek writing a game to be compatible with the 3% of the people out there who still have p1 133's with 2mb videocards... if you want to use that, fine, but be aware that we are always pushing the envelope to do more and more things and you are going to be left in the dust.
sorry
go ahead and mod -1 "non linux junkie"
I remember one my co-workers told me about this convention he went to. The presenter asked how many people did web developers. Around 90% of the room raised their hands. And of those, he then asked how many actual wrote HTML code. Only 5% raise their hand. The harsh truth is many of today's developers don't even hand code anymore. They use WYSIWYG editors like DreamWeaver, FrontPage, etc. that write the code for them. I get pissed off when I come to a major company's site and it says, "This site best viewed in IE". To me that shows a total lack of respect for me as the customer and a complete lack of talent and knowledge on the part of the web developer(s). The solution to our dilemma is to get rid of WYSIWYG web developers that pass themselves off as actual web developers.
grep >= ! == $your
Make a repository of sites which break on non-IE browsers
As illsorted pointed out, you should look into Mozilla Tech Evangelism. If you find a site that discriminates against Mozilla or otherwise doesn't work, search Bugzilla for it, and if it's not already listed, add it using Bugzilla Helper.
(I had to use a workaround to link to Bugzilla because Bugzilla refuses links from OSDN referers. It's not the goat.)
Oh, and how many of you ... are posting via IE on windows anyway?
I use a Mozilla nightly build on my home winbox, but when I'm on a public terminal, I don't have rights to install Mozilla, so I just use whatever's installed (IE 5.x, or NS 4.x with CSS turned off).
Will I retire or break 10K?
Opera could have 20% market-share right now, and nobody would know because 99% of them are probably id'ing themselves as IE to servers. right or wrong, those user-agent stats are the only thing web-designers have to go by when they're determining the percentage of their traffic represented by different browsers. If you're pretending to be IE, you're selling your own position up the river.
Love or hate MS, they have a killer web browser in Version 6. With over 80% of web surfers using IE, it's hard to even justify building a site to be truely multi-browser compatible, especially considering how badly Netscape/Mozilla handle CSS 2 and renders tables.
I build sites for a living and I try to make em compatible for NS 6.1, Mozilla, and Opera... but I gotta tell you, I don't break my budget in time or money trying to ensure every single lne of code will be compacetic with them and IE too.
One solution is multiple sites and a sniffer, but unless you automate the entire site with PHP or Perl/CGI for updating content, it's a tough task with large sites.
I didn't mean his comments were elitist, I was rather talking about the average anti-Flash comment on /. in general I suppose. It's sad that Flash as a whole is slagged to hell on this site when it's only a certain select of Flash developers who abuse the function and ability of Flash. I know people are mainly talking about Flash intros and sites done 100% in Flash but if people use it sparingly and in ways that actually improve the user experience or the usability of a site then I believe it is well worth it. I use it mainly as navigation on the sites I design. I know I could do some of the cascading/collapsible menus with javascript and DHTML but it's so unpredictable when viewed in certain scenarios on certain platform/browser configurations. Using Flash I am guaranteed what it will look like and how it will function on someone's machine as long as they have the Flash plug-in installed. More people have Flash installed then can view "cross-platform DHTML" I would almost dare to say. Plus the file size for my navigation is much smaller then it would have been if I used images controlled by javascript/DHTML. I don't know, I guess I just like improving my end users experience by allowing them the ability to get to any main section of my site from any page in the site from a clean, uncluttered, easy to use navigation. Plus Flash is also an excellent catalyst for streaming compressed audio synced with vector animation when presenting a multi-media rich experience, especially when your stuck behind a dial-up.
- Jesper Erdfelt
- http://americandnb.com
- http://blueviking.com
As a long time programmer and web developer, I have to say that MSIE is a superior browser when it comes to javascript and DOM.
... but it is the sad honest truth. I am a long time Netscape / Mozilla supporter ... and love nothing more than bashing M$ ... but the truth is the truth.
... My findings :
... it was just unreliable.
... nearly no real problem ... until you watched the Mozilla process from the Windows Task Manager ... and you noticed that mozilla was consuming upwards of 80% of the cpu (on a 2ghz test box) when it was repositioning and redefining the test layers ... or when you noticed that javascript was leaking memory like a sonofabitch ... 10 minutes of testing = 5 - 15 MB of memory... yikes.
... similar to Mozilla 1.0, it worked. My 50 test layers could be dynamically created, re-defined, repositioned, and resized. Watching from the Task manager showed low cpu usage (5 - 10%) on the same test as was used for Mozilla. Memory usage remained constant even after running the test for 8 hours solid.
... It failed the test outright when it wouldn't resize or reposition the layers using the same code as worked in Mozilla and IE.
... where is my automatic garbage collection in javascript on NS/Moz?? soooo close ... yet sooo far.
Now before you flame me, let me say that i hate saying what I just said
I recently spent a few days testing the feasability of a web application that uses layers (div objects of DOM)
Netscape 4.79, which was one of the 1st browsers to implement layers, was such a pain in the butt to work with that I had to write it off completely. Layers had to be pre-created when the page loaded, redefining the content of a layer occasionally caused browser crashes
Mozilla 1.0, the test case worked as designed. My 50 dynamically created layers could have their content re-defined, resized, and repositioned with no real problem. Well
IE 6.0.26
As an afterthought, I fired up NS 6.2 to see how it handled the test
What I REALLY want to know is
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." - Napoleon Bonaparte
That's funny. I ran their home page through the W3C Validator and found all sorts of errors.
But when I brought all of this to my friend's attention, they just said that nobody uses Mozilla and blew me off.
He blew you off. My god, you must have some very close friends.
The architect need to understand at least a *little* bit about construction, in order to connect to the real world.
Say that you design a very tall building; it doesn't mean that it automatically can be built on the earth. Now, from the designer perspective, it's perfectly rational to decide that you need another planet, one with lower gravity (ie IE7/Flash/whathaveyou) to see your vision realised.
The problem is that nowadays most people already have moved to, or was born on, let's say Mercury (~95%) and the architect can have his wish, while us poor lizards back on earth are having trouble convincing the others that normal earth buildings are tall enough, especially for people in wheelchairs.
Err, I'll stop now...
Is it really a standard if nobody or very few people use it???? Because if everybody is coding to somebody elses methods, is the "standard" really a standard or is the method that everybody else is using the standard?
Ok, you want to design your website in IE? Whatever, go right ahead and design it all you want. However if you actually want to make your site IE only, it had better use some IE-only features that make it uncompatable with other browsers. Your site had better use features that make your site unimplementable on any other browser.
How many sites are IE ONLY yet do not do anything special with their design, coding or implementation that could not be done with the same level of technical expertise on other browsers. One glaring example is the capitol one website as they only let in IE and NS 4.7. Why? I don't know, maybe they don't trust other browsers to do the 'right thing' on their site. This to me means that their web developemnt team should be sacked, as all web applications CANNOT trust their clients to do the 'right thing.' All web applications must have their guard eterniallly up to check every byte of input data for errors, so that a potential hacker CANNOT break in. A web application cannot assume that it is actually talking to a real browser on the other side.
Moral of the story is, if you are supporting IE because you are being lazy and don't want to, you should be sacked. If you are doinging something in IE that can only be done in IE, then fine go right ahead.
But I know something much more important: Netscape users are 3 times more likely to buy goods online!
I tried to find an answer for this:
- Netscape users are often hard-core veterans and more accustomed o use the Net for business
- Some users are online since 1996 or even longer, and at that time Netscape was the only real browser. They didn't *upgrade* to MSIE, but are still loyal to Netscape. Those same users have the money to buy online
- Young, 14-year-old freaks got their PC last Christmas and are surfing a lot. They visit also our mall, they do show up in the browser-stats,
... but they don't buy!
Here's the analysis of the buyer's browsers (as opposed to the visitor's browsers) for the month of June 2002: 86% MSIE and 13% NetscapeWhat if you school registration is online and you want to register online?
What if they don't 'support' Mozilla or Opera?
Oh well, I guess that you don't really need to go to that school, huh?
Allot of slashdotters here spend hours just surfing the net. One easy way to help out is to surf the net with Mozilla, and everytime you encounter a site that doesn't work correctly with Mozilla... report it to the web admin! Not only that, but web servers can see and log what browsers its users are connecting with. Surfing with IE may seem harmless, but in fact, you are continuously voting for Microsoft each time you use it to surf.
Honestly, how many of you guys posting to slashdot are using Internet Explorer right now? For shame, for shame. Even if you are at work, you could still install Mozilla, as it doesn't take up much space at all and you can still use IE alongside it if necessitated by work.
Funny, I've seen a few attempts at "real applications" running under browsers. They all have one thing in common. They are complete garbage and could have been done using a simpler interface (little-to-none client side processing).
For doing "real e-commerce", the biggest sites (Amazon, eBay, etc.) seem to get buy using simpler straight-forward interfaces. Its the hacks working on a their company's internal site that seem to use this browser specific garbage.
I'm really afraid of what will happen if all web sites are eventually coded only to IE. At that point, Microsoft will essentially OWN the web. SCARY!
Okay, so we see this happening everywhere. Some of the sites I manage get 80% of their traffic from IE users. Does that stop me from using 100% W3C compliant code?
No! Yes, its easy to do a site up in web design software. Thats nice and all if you don't care. I code in a text editor, and test each page, even though I know its okay. You never know when you might miss a <TD> or whatever.
The other thing we have to do is use other browsers. I run Opera (right now), Mozilla, Netscape 4.7 (and 6.x but I don't like it), Ibrowse, and Lynx.
Don't get me wrong - I have IE installed on my system, but I don't use it unless I'm testing.
How many of you are using IE right this moment? I'll bet a healthy portion of you are.
Sites have a hard time justifying properly coded websites because most of the visitors are using IE - so what if a few fall to the side? Using IE just adds to the domination of Microsoft, and lends credence to those who just support IE.
By *not* using IE, we can all help improve the numbers for the other browsers and push designers to support all browsers - its not hard!
When you visit a site that doesn't work in whatever browser you are using, COMPLAIN! You have to make yourselves heard! If you get dismissed by the web team, write an email/fax/letter to some one higher up.
To sum up:
1) Write W3C compliant code
2) Use other browsers (not IE!)
3) Complain when a site doesn't work.
Anyways, thats enough of me ranting.
in the past 3+ years of web developement, Ive found that if I code a website to display properly in Mozilla or Netscape, then it *almost always* displays correctly in IE, but not the other way around.
this includes, HTML, PHP, MySQL, Flash and even Javascript.
now if only Mozilla and Linux could get a decent Flash plugin....
the history of the world
The majority of professional web developers make every attempt at keeping the pages working across multiple platforms and multiple browsers. Any dev shop worth a lick of salt has this built into their QA process.
I personally use what I can on the server-side to adapt pages to the browser viewing them. For most modern browsers, this only requires slight changes to insure consistent look and feel, but for netscape 4.x some major tweaking might be required. For instance, if I have any DHTML that is required, I try to make sure the designers have designed any DHTML elements so that their is a fallback mechanism that works if the browser viewing the page doens't have javascript enabled, or their DHTML implementation is too buggy to bother with.
Being a microsoft shop, we use asp.net for development and it's proven quite easy to develop a set of custom server tags to enable this sort of adaptivity. It's really as simple as:
<ilab:Browser Browser="Netscape" Major="4">{
</ilab:Browser>
<ilab:Browser Browser="Default" >
{
</ilab:Browser>
Additionally with asp.net (as well as jsp) most of your page's UI elements are probably written as "controls" (or widgets) and you write those to degrade to lesser browsers, and give the full feature set to the capable ones.
In the end, it's all about rigorous QA and deciding what works best for what platform and making those changes accordingly.
Conspiracy theories aside, IE was a real boon to the advancement of DHTML for user interface in web pages. While netscape 4.x was choking to death, IE enabled developers to do a lot of new things rather easily. Unfortunately, this all occured during the web boom and a lot of developers were lazy or hurried and didn't take the time to strategize for multiple browser/platforms.
In-house is one thing, but what we are developing is for customers (hospitals). Sure, we can say that they must use IE, and it isn't much of a pain for them to do so - yet. What if parts of the system are opened up to outside traffic? Or some of the employees work from home or remotely and need to access it? All of a sudden, our software sucks because it doesn't work with other browsers. Maybe that will never happen, but if it does we look bad. It is ALWAYS "cheaper" to do something correctly up front instead of trying to fix it after the fact.
But, we are a corporate entity, where MS rules. I would love (hate, really) to see how much we are spending on MS licenses each year.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Of those, only the DMOZ homepage validates. Even linux darling Google is full of nontrivial bugs on every page.
Speaking of standards and supporting multiple browsers... I do some web development on the side. One of the companies I work for doesn't care if we screw over Netscape 4.x users. This makes development real easy (using XHTML, HTML 4.0, CSS, etc). The other companies I work for want me to still support Netscape 4.x. I HATE SUPPORTING NETSCAPE 4.x. Are there any opinions on how long old browsers should be supported? Is it safe to say that anyone using any half-way decent OS can get some flavor of Mozilla or Netscape 6.x? The only OS that I know is screwed is Solaris 2.5 or less. Anything else?
Handy little trick for dealing with all that here:
straight HTML in lynx; if it flies there, it's probably good anywhere. Then I take a look at the same page in moz, netscape, IE, _and_ opera. 9 out of 10 times, it's good.
C|N>K
It costs a lot more to make a site compatible with all flavours. There's a lot of stuff you can do in IE that can do in other browsers. This allows feature rich eye candy that you just can't do in a cross browser world. If the open source guys have an issue with it, then why not port Mozilla to support the "IE Only" stuff?
Then you'll see how much of the W3C HTML standard Netscape either chooses to ignore or is incapable of implementing.
Say what you want about M$, but they are World Wide Web Consortium compliant.
This isn't counting the 1720 Tech Evangelism bugs that have already been resolved. Sites like salomonsmithbarney.com, yahoo.com, cbs.com, citrix.com and many many more have all resolved improper coding issues that screwed up non IE rendering. But the positive news is that in 1720 cases web administrators have changed their websites to make them unbroken.
Here's an example. One of the most highly reported bugs (bug 114812) that has since been fixed was with hotmail. Due to faulty javascript implementation if you would select the "ALL MESSAGES" box in your inbox only one message would actually be selected, so to delete the mountains of spam that accumulate daily you had to click the box beside _each_individual_message_. Clicking 200 checkboxes after not checking your mailbox for a few days does not a fun time make. Anyway after about 6 months of pestering microsoft finally fixed it. The moral: If complaining can make Microsoft make its pages standards compliant well the sky's the limit.
Anyway if you want to do something to help check out Mozilla Evangelism The site is chock full of advice about how to report and deal with non-compliant websites. You can even use the Letter Writing Tool to write and send a nifty letter to website administrators who haven't yet seen the light. Obviously the site is geared to getting things to work properly in Mozilla, but the fact is, things tend to work in Mozilla if they are standards compliant.
1. Absolutely, web standards need to be adhered to, but I don't think it's reasonable for developers to spend more time working around a quirk in their code if what they're writing displays fine on the corporate mandated standard browser.
2. No, users in the company have company-purchased PC's with company-standard operating systems and company-licensed software. This cuts down support costs significantly over some company that may allow any old piece of hardware, operating system and software that the employee wants. There are always exceptions, but there has to be a justified business reason for that exception. People going off and installing whatever software they wan't will simply find that if it breaks the company isn't going to help them. Corporate standards are there for a reason, and part of that reason is to allow us to reduce support and development costs, which includes limiting testing to that on browser that employees should be using anyway.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm using Mozilla right at this moment. And like I said, for public-facing sites, you can bet we have a lab with all sorts of OS and software combinations where sites are tested to be sure they work fine (and that includes adherence to standards). But for Intranet, employee-specific sites, it makes little sense to expand your testing costs to non-company-standard browsers that should have no business being on most employees PC's in the first place.
I like to use the latest technologies and not all other browsers support CSS, DHTML and XML fully, especially XML/XSL. Why not?
When you grab data from the db and pull it back as XML, the user can quickly sort and filter data quickly, in the browser, without round-tripping to the database again. A big advantage.
IE has the market share and won the browser war. Get over it.
Besides, small companies don't have time to code for every freakin' browser on the market.
You don't *need* to use the power company or the cable company site, you can cost them money using the phone (and telling them their website sucks), and it's easy enough to get a new ISP. And nobody has a real lock on any product, if it's worthwhile there will be other products that do the same thing. 6 months ago I didn't buy a paging terminal from Zetron because their site told me I had to use IE. Screw them, they aren't the only paging terminal maker. If they think they can tell me what software I have to run just to see what they offer, they must be a bunch of miserable arrogant pricks to deal with after you buy from them too. Glenayre's site worked with Konqueror... page that, Zetron.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
If only /. would put an "Explorized Site Of The Day" link on every page, they'd quickly smarten up ;-)
I guess that's what happens when you hire someone who just finished reading "Teach Yourself JavaScript in 3 Easy Lessons Using Self-Hypnosis While Sleeping". It's an easy enough language to learn, the trick is knowing when not to use it.
You can also use display: block in CSS to turn the links into block elements -- although be aware that IE doesn't quite get that right.
DNA just wants to be free...
You claim that your site isnt targetted towards the Linux / Mozilla user, so you dont care anyway. The fallacy in your assumption is that your target audience could be Linux / Mozilla users too - and then imagine their estimate of your company when they find your website doesnt work with their browser. When I use a non-IE browser to visit websites (100% of the time when I'm not at work - which is also the time when I have purchasing power), my expectations arent too high. Basically, I need a site thats usable. The bells and whistles might be nice, but I can live without that. Sadly, I find that there are people like you out there who dont even provide that.
A case in point : Ikea - the furniture store. Just last week, I was ready to spend good chunk of money on buying a really good quality bookshelf. The site was unusable with Netscape on Linux. I spent my money at Walmart. Later, at work, I went to the Ikea site and looked at their catalog. There was a bookcase priced at $500 that I would have bought if only their site had worked with my browser. To bad for them.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
No shit sherlock. Where have you been for the last five years? It's called "losing the browser wars," and it is very old news.
Web developers need to take a cue from software developent and use HTML validation tools to check the syntax of their work. Such tools can also check for compatibility with different browsers and different versions.
This is all the more important because browsers are lenient in processing HTML with incorrect syntax. This convention has lowered the bar for letting non-programming folks write HTML, but has had the lousy side effect of having inconsistent behavior for rendering HTML in different browsers be the norm and not the exception.
Syntax checking. It's a good thing.
Senario: Small IT firm & software house, lots of legacy COBOL code, now a mostly Windows-app coding shop.
The senior developer has coded in COBOL for the past 20 or so years. Boss gives senior free-reign, due to company history & previous COBOL app quality.
The main development team codes in a certain cross-platform-capable Borland RAD tool.
The senior developer decides he wants a browser-based app, as he wants platform-independence as Windows is a "passing fad".
Younger generation team laugh and say "OK, if you think so, fair enough. Switch to an RDBMS back-end, middleware server integrating COBOL as CGI apps/ISAPI DLLs, possibly use SOAP for data-transport, with a thin Linux & Win32 client and/or browser-based app using PHP".
Senior ignores all the advice because "I know more than you upstarts, I've been programming for 20 years!" and codes the COBOL into straight-CGI apps called by a client-side Javascript browser-based front-end and the same flat-file db back-end!
Main dev team simultaneously place heads in hands and weep as the senior proudly unveils over 10 months of work: the new improved web-based "platform-independent" app, that turns out to be IE-ONLY! :(
Oh dear...
Fix the page widening bug in slashdot then get back to us about not creating cross-browser compliant sites.
It's like some of these people don't know what good design is. Total content accessibility via graceful degradation is an art that is totally lost on some of these pretenders that call themselves web designers.
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
[blockquote]#2 Web development is a field that constantly strives towards providing applications level functionality that rivals and imitates desktop software. DHTML and SQL are how we make those happen.Regardless of who makes it, IE exceeds css standards, and pushes the envelope for what will come in the next standards. Its a joy to use![/blockquote]
Yeah I love the way that IE exceeds at fixed positioning...
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
We discovered this when working with a client that wanted a fully interactive Flash site, but also wanted to track how people were using it.
Impossible, you say?
I thought so at first, but we came up with a solution... it inolved the use of frames (yech, I hate em, but they were useful in this case). We broke up the site into individual html files loaded into a seamless bottom frame, with each one an independent flash file, which could do a number of things (this was a music/entertainment oriented site, so we had a bit of leeway). There were a number of advantages to this:
1. Tracking of pages
2. The ability to bookmark individual sections of the site
3. It kept the flash file sizes nice and small, making them easier to use on slower connections.
Yes, it's a weird way of using the tools, but sometimes this kind of challenge can be fun!
I can't believe it's not lard!
I developed my site with Mozilla on Linux, and it was a pain in the ass to find a Windows box and test it with IE. If IE held only 10% of the browser market I wouldn't have bothered supporting it AT ALL.
It's funny how if I would have posted this, it would have been moderated down into oblivion for being offtopic, but it's apparently fine to post it on the front page.
I've found JS support in Mozilla/NS6 to be pretty sketchy sometimes.
In NS6.1, I would load some html to an iframe, then load the iframe.innerHTML to a div for display. It worked fine in NS4 and IE5, but NS6.1 url-encoded all href's in the innerHTML. I had to write an ugly hack to fix it. Now, NS6.2 doesn't do that...so I have to go back and remove the hack from 4000 pages of content. No big deal with a PERL script, but still.
I hate to say it too...but IE IS a superior browser to anything else...as far as DOM and javascript support go.
I wrote a WYSIWYG web editor for some of our clients to use, and it only runs in IE5.5+. It uses the CONTENTEDITABLE keyword found in MSHTML. At first I started writing it using javascript (the code for the arrow up and down keys was lotza fun!), but cross-support was to difficult to maintain. So, I went with the IE only solution. IE is ubiquitos enough that it doesn't bother the clients to be forced to use it.
M$ sucks donkey dingles, but COM is a really cool architecture.
The funniest part about this is that when you plan on supporting all the browsers from the start it's not that much extra work... Unless you're doing dhtml/javascript menus, but I code a long time ago that I've tested under ie, ns4, ns6, moz, and opera. Works fine with all those browsers, and I copy-and-paste it when I do ew sites that require dhtml/javascript.
Common sense is not so common.
These sites really aren't IE sites, they're Macromedia sites, designed for the Flash "browser". (And why are they all designed by the same guy: "Skip Intro")
Anyway, developers *are* following the Standard. The Microsoft Standard.
According to the W3C, "Amaya" is the browser against which to check compliance. Have you ever tried using "Amaya"? I thought so.
How feasable would it be to develop a Spam-Cop like system where, if you came across a page that did not render correctly, you could copy/paste the URL into a form. From that URL, contact emails would be intelligently parsed out/located and a polite email would be sent to the responsible parties explaining how their page was non-compliant, as well as the browser ID of the complaining user.
This might get more "Joe Average" users involved in bringing the issue to the attention of those responsible.
Amen brother. Lynx is 10 times the browser NN4 is when it comes to properly rendered pages. Thank god for NN4's @import CSS bug, where would we designers be without it? :)
... NN4 is the bully that actively seeks you out to ruin your day and steal your lunch money. NN4's bugs are so bad they can't be compared to other browsers. Two things make NN4 suck more than the other browsers: 1)The quantity of rendering bugs and 2) The *SEVERITY* of the rendering bugs.
... but come on. A 50-to-1 ratio is ridiculous.
Where the other "buggy/bad" browsers just suck in an indirect annoying way like some pest shooting spit-wads at you during class
I would guess I spent about 50% of my GUI development time "fixing" things to work in NN4 for a recent client. This is for a browser that has about 1% of market usage. This ratio is too skewed to justify. Here me out people: I'm not a "Standards Nazi." I believe in making a site look the same in all browsers even if you have to "tweak" things
Ok, enough ranting. Seriously, NN4 really and truly is worse than all the other browsers combined and only deserves minimal fixing.
I will not look at a site if it requires IE, no matter what the content. In fact, I have removed IE from ALL the Windows machines in my house - my single game box, my wif'e game box, and my son's game box - due to security concerns, so none of us even can if we wanted to. IMEO, any web designer that designs a site that will only work on a single browser, no matter what browser it is, does not deserve his/her job. There is absolutely no excuse other than not being qualified for the job in the first place.
Come on web designers, there is a "standard" (come on, say it with me, slowly...Good, now spell it out: s-t-a-n-d-a-r-d) for a reason. It's a big world, and it is NOT a M$, AOL, world, though each of these companies may want it to be theirs.
Another peeve of mine is web "designers" that have to use tools like Front Page (what an abomination THAT is), have to put every multi-media bell and whistle on the planet on a site, and can't make a site that is usable for the masses. Hello? The masses do NOT have high-speed Internet access. The masses are still on low-speed dialup and don't want to be sitting in front of their computer for days waiting to see your bloated, artsy-fartsy site. They want the info it contains, not the pretty pictures and cute sounds and crap.
I won't even go into the millions of sites that are out of the reach of the handicapped. Text to speach systems are few and far between and screen readers just plain suck and are expensive. These people can't see your pretty pictures and hear your cute sounds, and can't view your site and your content because they are hearing/sight impaired and you don't have a plain text, straight HTML version for them to convert.
Get a grip, follow the standards, provide some damn text for the less fortunate (though since they aren't subjected to the garbage on the 'net these days, they may very well be considered MORE fortunate!), think, and open up your site to the masses, instead of bowing to the corporate, Internet elite, few.
PGA
meant to insert (php, asp, perl, cf) after css. owell.
Find a way to show your boss's boss what you're doing :)
We had a supplier who switched from Apache on some flavor of UNIX to IIS /SQL Server on at least two WinNT boxes. BIG mistake, whoever did the work for them set it up so that Netscape browsers were denied online transactions.
We gave them a few months to try and fix it, meantime we phoned in our orders but we weren't going to switch to IE internally. Their IT head was stubborn and the business owner bought the marketing line about how much money he'd save. I'm sure it wasn't the only factor but they're gone now. I spoke to one of their workers who bailed to another company and he told me that they'd lost more customers than just us over the Apache-to-IIS conversion and general unworthiness of the new system and that the client loss plus absorbing the costs of the upgrade and running maintenance costs of a system that never worked as well as the old one took the company down.
All this so the CEO could have a pretty GUI to look at instead of a character-based terminal! Somebody should've bought him a Mac, put pretty pictures on it and told him they reflected some sort of reality and to leave the IT work to the pros.
Most Internet content is crap these days, and this is especially true for the content churned out by the brain-dead web "developers" who aren't smart enough to adhere to standards. I never have problems with any of the sites targeting topics for the technically gifted such as Linux users. Let Windows users speak ebonix. I don't frequent "their" type of bar.
Gotta love the Natalie Portman / Kirsten Dunst query graph.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
"My pet peeve is when sites hype and announce new-and-improved sites, and then they come out and they are simply a gigantic flash application."
:P It behaves correctly under NS and IE. If you think about it that's one more reason it has support from developers, oh and it is capable of some pretty snazzy stuff.
Flash designers pushed web desgn into the 21st century. Html was not originally designed to handle the kinds of things many people want to do with their site.
I'm a professional web developer, I am not aligned with any particular technology choice Microsoft or other. I use what works, Netscape contains far more buggy behaviors than IE, specifically in the era of 4.0 browsers. The developers noticed this and in turn stopped suggesting Netscape, which in turn helped wane the user base I will agree that Microsoft had a hand in this as well but the people ultimately still choose their browser. Just because someone serves you goat testicles doesn't mean you have to eat it. They choose of their own free will not to support a different technology.
I started an avid supporter of Netscape and hating IE, after developing for a couple of years I changed my opinion based on learned behavior. Sorry if this is unsavory to you but if your hammer was so awkward to wield that it hurt you every time you used it you'd get tired of it and find a new one, the same is true of browsers. Don't forget it is just a tool.
The moment something works better for the developers is the moment the microsoft browser monopoly ends.
But flash will still be there
Just my opinion you don't have to like it.
There is evidence to prove both Democrats and Republicans are lying cocksuckers. Vote independently.
Am I the only one here that is pissed I can't use Mozilla to log into Microsoft Passport? (No, I'm not suprised.)
If you design the website using the proper standards no dual maintenance would be needed. What you design would work on all browsers.
Uh uh. If you design it using proper standards, it will break on nearly every browser except Gecko-based browsers. You still have to use some bizarre CSS or HTML hacks to make it work on all browsers.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
ShutterFly.com (linked in the News.com story) does user agent detection because it requires a browser with hooks into the OS (uploads, etc.). It's not warning-off certain browsers because page markup will break, but rather because the service won't work as advertised without browser access to the local file system -- and ShutterFly will have already taken your money before you find that out.
'Course ShutterFly.com's pages don't validate to their stated HTML 3.2 Final doctype either, so ...
Standards-compliant markup and liquid design are easy if you make them a priority. Their greatest enemy is pixel-perfect layouts, which are rarely necessary. Forget pixels, code relative, and be free.
Well personally I think that the vast majority of Flash "developers" are misusing Flash. There is very little Flash that I've seen that was even neccessary. Try surfing the web without Flash for a week and then ask yourself what you're really missing. I found that I was missing nothing. And man Flash navigation in general is a pet peeve.
Just for the record, I like Flash. As a presentation tool it can be a Godsend. It just has too many limitations (can't resize, recolor, or otherwise modify text, no default settings that I know of - like always disabling sound, can't control navigation - i.e. opening links in new windows, can't search text via the find function, and so forth and so on) for doing any serious data presentation. It's great for audio synching like you said, and it's cool that you can make flash apps as standalone apps too. I just wish that these graphic / multimedia designers would understand that designing for the web requires more than a simple title change.
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
They've been dead since Netscape. Microsoft's just keeping the legacy of laughing at the w3c alive.
What I'd love to see is a movement against those moronic dolts who think that their site with black text on a dark background and enough animated images to freeze an Athlon is 'okay'.
All you need.
Let's get a couple of things straight: Web pages are there to provide information. Plain and simple. If your webpage requires DirectX extentions through IE, it's not a web page, stop kidding yourself.
If you want to write a Windows application, write a fucking Windows application, DO NOT pretend it's a web page. It's web designers with your kind of attitude that make browsing the web suck.
I have no problem making any of my pages display the same way in IE 5,5, Mozilla 5,6 Opera, Konquerer or even Links. I write standards compliant CSS and XHTML. Anyone who tells you that their CSS/XHTML pages don't look the same across all the later browsers is not writing their pages properly. Stick to the standards and everything works. If you find an aspect of your design doesn't work, change the design. Simple.
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
I got so tired of my compliant code being rendered improperly by 4.7, that I finally gave up. I have a relatively popular site, and I finally got to the point where I put a disclaimer at the bottom of the page that said if you were using Netscape, good luck, because I refuse to create time-consuming work-arounds for a crap browser that doesn't render properly.
So, even though Netscape 6x is probably fine with my site, I have no idea. And further, I honestly don't care. I'll code for IE, and hopefully Netscape will wither up and blow away. Yes, my anger about 4.7 is that strong. I will NEVER again lift a finger to make my code compliant in NS.
Microsoft might be the devil, but I'm glad IE won the browser war.
My pet peeve is when the editorial staff ads zero-worth commentary to the topic stream....
"My pet peeve is when sites hype and announce new-and-improved sites, and then they come out and they are simply a gigantic flash application."
Ahh, but then the site will work just fine for anyone who has the flash plug-in, regardless of what silly browser they are using, so long as the browser supports the plug-in standard.
Gee, I complained about this "feature" of the NWN website in a discussion a few days ago about their new support for Linux, and I was modded down as Troll :-)
If you are a professional, you "code" to meet documented
standards, design specs, or API. You test your code (or in
this case "web pages") with the target programs (e.g.
browsers). If the code follows the spec., the defect is in
the target program, or the spec. is wrong, so submit a
defect report against the offending part.
If the defect won't be repaired in time for your next
release, then code a workaround, preferably within the
spec. or as an exception to the particular target.
Contrast this with non-professionals: write the code to work
with what you think most everyone else has, and test with a
particular version that you have on your system. If it
works, you're done. Actually the non-professional method
might work, but ONLY if an attempt is made to fix 100% of
all the problems reported back to them.
A core software engineering axiom: high quality is achieved
*by design* not by testing.
This is true because it is impossible to remove all defects
from code with testing alone. If you have a problem
believing this, then this will really fry-your-brain: if
your code (or web page) doesn't work with the target
browser, then you might think that this is a defect with the
browser (e.g. because it used to work with a previous
version). But how can you prove that if there is no spec.?
The vendor will always tell you that this is a feature, and
that the defect is in your code!
Of course this particular topic of incompatible web
browsers has been around for some time:
"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with
Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be
yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when
you had very little chance of reading a document
written on another computer, another word processor,
or another network." --Tim Berners-Lee in
Technology Review, July 1996
See the "Viewable With Any Browser" campaign web site for
more details: http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/
You're behind the times. All new pages should conform to this de facto standard.
Web Designers will be quick to give you an email saying that they will not support this browser blah blah blah. They have been doing it for a long time, they are used to it.
The best way is to complain to the web masters boss. Now most sites don't have webmastersboss@domain.com but most have sales@domain.com if a commerce site. Simply state your case, ie was going to do business with you but it doesn't work with my browser. Let me know when it is fixed and I might consider doing business with you.
You will find things get fixed quick smart. Especially stupid things, like sites that have a flash intro, & a skip intro button that is also don e in flash so if you don't have flash you can't get into the site.
Go out and get sailing!
I use Mozilla for work. Stabler, no backdoor of the day, no asking if I'm sure I rather wouldn't use MSN instead every time I log into webmail.. It's just nicer to use, period.
However, as a HW designer, I have to spend quite a bit of time browsing the net for datasheets etcetera. I don't mind flash sites and I have zero problem using them. If done right. I really do hate fixed size flash windows. It's just *so* hard to understand that if you make a guy making purchasing decisions view your product listing via 600x400 window, he'll probably start thinking about competitors.
There are quite a few sites which will work with IE only but same flash(y) interface would work just as well with mozilla. In any case, high-density I/O connectors may be boring, but a gimmicky site design doesn't help as far as I'm concerned.
Is this published somewhere?
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Well, the corp standard here is IE, but I use Opera.
It's IE here too, but I use Mozilla most of the time. Like you, I switch to IE when I need to. So far it's a non-issue.
but what we are developing is for customers (hospitals)
Then perhaps this thread doesn't really apply to you. I was simply trying to say that there are situations where coding for one particular browser is not bad.
Or some of the employees work from home or remotely and need to access it?
For us, at least, we prohibit even remote access into the corporate network from non-company systems, so that's a non-issue for us also.
It is ALWAYS "cheaper" to do something correctly up front instead of trying to fix it after the fact.
This is completely dependent upon the situation. In my corporate environment, I disagree completely. We have hundreds (if not thousands) of different internal web sites. If 1% of these sites later for some reason becomes more of a public-facing site, it's far cheaper to go in after the fact and shore it up so that it's standards-compliant and functions with other web browsers than it is for us to double (or triple or more) our testing efforts and add development time to ensure all of our sites work with browsers that are not company standards. This just doesn't make good business sense.
One of the largest Issues I face each day developing our application is that scripting support for each browser is different. We develop a Web-Application that has a lot of validation and would like to have a lot of dynamic content. (Click a button, textbox appears).
Most people who have web-sites, with pages of mainly HTML should have no problem handling any browser compatibility, but we have to basically create 2,3 or 4 versions of certain things to make them all achieve the same goal.
All I want to see is some standards adheared to.
We need to look at enhancing HTML to support Web-Applications not just Web-Sites.
--- Book your game of golf now.
I tried to look into the HTML to pick out the contact link (to tell them there is has serious issues). But there was nothing there but javascript files. I looked at both. Neither had the data that I needed (from what I could see), and one of them had some strange looking code in it.
Thanks for your gentle advice, how thoughtful of you. The arrogance of the Web designers never ceases to amaze me.
It's a frustration that every web developer understands. I can design a web site using galeon, making sure to follow w3c standards; and when I'm done, it will display perfectly in konquerer, mozilla, ie and even lynx. But it will not display correctly using ns4. The reason being: Netscape 4 is broken! Some pages will have cosmetic problems, others will be completely unreadable. In order to fix it for ns4, I often have to mangle the code to the point that it no longer displays correctly under any other browsers.
Pretend for a moment that I decided to come out with a new x86 processor, but screwed up the interpretation of about 5% of the op codes. Still, I sold it really cheap and got it into, say, 2 or 3 OEM's computers. It might be popular and people may depend on it (and with the right assembler, you may even get it to work right) but developers would HATE it because it was broken.
Sure, a developer could skirt the problem by avoiding certain instructions, making his program "compatible," but limiting your program's functionality to support a broken system sucks. The correct response is to say (loudly), screw the people with the broken systems, we're following the spec whether it works on your box or not.
That is, in fact, the position I've taken toward ns4, and I'm not going to change my mind just because your browser's broken.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
Slashdot recently rejected a post of mine which was sort of related to this subject. Maybe now it will get through.
I've noticed something even more insidious than failing to meet web standards. Some web sites appear to be intentionally crippling their pages for browsers other than IE. I specifically noticed this on Yahoo! Mail when I couldn't find my address book when using Opera. When I enquired to technical support about it, they responded that it just didn't work right with Opera and I should try using a supported browser. Funny thing is, when I configured Opera to identify itself as IE, the links reappeared and everything functioned just fine.
Now, maybe it's within the legal rights of companies to serve up what they want to whatever browsers they please, but it sure seems anti-competetive. Does Yahoo have some kind of deal with Microsoft? If not, what possible reason could they have to cripple features? Has anyone noticed anything else like this going on at other web sites? Is there any recourse?
This page is in pure handwritten HTML which can be easily displayed correctly by any browser (though it's in German, sorry...) - i once used M$ Frontpage (shame on me), but after i had tried to get it rendered in Mozilla, i screwed the entire Frontpage crap and started over again from scratch. In my opinion no one really needs those sometimes annoying Flash sites - just plain graphical overkill. Good ol' plain HTML should be sufficient for most private homepages (like mine, i'm not speaking of commercial ones) - faster loading times as an added bonus :-) Just my personal opinion...
What I would like to know is . WHY is it assumed that standards compliance is not possible to maintain if some form of compatibility logic is introduced into the browser. Surely your base should be close to 100% standard compliant and the rest should be the whistles. Ie. why force designers to be compliant and just fix the damn browser to acomodate for their lazyness. Beggers can't be choosers as they say. And lets face it no matter how good mozilla apparently gets until it has more of a foot hold it is a pointless debate. The redesign time for most sites is quite involving and long and its plain nuts to ask everyone to redesign their site. I have nothing against standards I just don't see that the browser needs to break its standard compliance to include extra non compliant features. I use both Mozilla and ie. but I do find myself forced into IE alot becasue Mozilla just cant do the job on some pages. So by this arguemnt I would what wait for them to fix the sites or get the job done with IE?. What path do you think is more cost effective in my time?. Well just my 2 cents worth.
There is a web www.muchoviaje.com< /a> that sucks a lot, when you enter there is a javscript that redirects you to a "netscape" page in wich they say how sorry they are, but download IE.
. com</a>, so far the javascript continues to be there, and nobody asked me. I was polite and explained my arguments in a clear way, but they don't seem to care.
<p>I changed the user agent of mozilla to match IE 6 in windows 98, entered the page, notice that everything worked and feeled ok and mail to <a href="mailto:info@muchoviaje.com">info@muchoviaje
<p>It's a pity, but all I can do is to direct all the people who ask me to mozilla and to standard compliant web pages.
<p>Just my 0.02€
I generally use Netscape 4.78 about twice a week for sites that Opera won't render. I'm beginning to run into sites that work on Opera 6 and not Netscape, when I run into them in significant numbers, I'll upgrade my Netscape.
Opera doesn't render in most cases because:
The only site I couldn't get into with either Opera or Netscape was when MSN declared itself offlimits to everyone not running IE.
As someone else pointed out, cross-platform compatibility is one way to tell developers from wannabes.
Also, the browser-specific stuff tends to be bloated bandwidth hogs done by dipshits who forget the rest of the world generally runs dialup.
In the great majority of cases, any site that isn't platform neutral has a direct competitor who is, whether the site is informational or sells products/services. Patronize the competitor and leave the IE-only site to Darwin.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Shit, I clicked the wrong button, sorry :(, here is the post again, this time I hope it's ok.
There is a web www.muchoviaje.com that sucks a lot, when you enter there is a javscript that redirects you to a "netscape" page in wich they say how sorry they are, but download IE.
I changed the user agent of mozilla to match IE 6 in windows 98, entered the page, notice that everything worked and feeled ok and mail to info@muchoviaje.com, so far the javascript continues to be there, and nobody asked me. I was polite and explained my arguments in a clear way, but they don't seem to care.
It's a pity, but all I can do is to direct all the people who ask me to mozilla and to standard compliant web pages.
Just my 0.02 (EUR)
While you may want the web for just information and nothing else, some of us like to occasionally visit a site that's only point is to entertain via graphics, or demonstrate some very nice interactive graphics, sound etc.
Why are you determined to LIMIT the web to be a text only domain?
Sure my main use of the web is for text rich informative sites, but I don't want to be using a browser that can't support the entertaining flash driven sites with some very impressive graphical artistry if I wish to see them.
Just because YOU only want text and static pictures does mean EVERYONE wants that out of the web... remember, when reading and posting on Slashdot you are conversing with a very limited subset of the web community... don't let your view of the web community be overshadowed by that.
Of course this is happening. That is the whole point of 'embrace-and-extend'. Microsoft isn't stupid. This was carefully calculated and is obviously working.
As a web designer I visit the forums and what I hear from many people is "I designed this site for IE6 under 800x600 resolution."
So now I am going to throw down some statistics for april 02.
IE6 32%
IE5 55%
IE4 3%
Other 5%
1024x768 41% (this surpised the crap out of me last time I checked it was at 10%)
800x600 51%
640x480 3%
other 5%
And dont' forget the 11% that don't use javascript.
So the majority is prolly just designing for 32% of the population in the browsers and 51% in the resolution.
This is not to say that the other 50% don't get a decent experience. But lets say that 10% - 20% don't get a good experience.
So taking this lets go and sugest a senario.
Your in a meeting with a client and your giving the client a go over on why you should build their webpage for them.
"You can design this beautiful site for you. It is wonderful and it fits your image perfectly. and it only sacrifices 10-20% of your viewing audience. So do we havw a deal?"
What do you think the response would be here? I am sure some questions would be raised as to why your firm feels the need to sacrifice this large portion of their viewing audience.
I know that most companies want the most exposure possible, and that 1% of market share means a lot. So why in the world would they want to alienate that many viewers. The answer is they would not.
Now. The solution is easy, and it is not relying on old outdated practices.
There are a couple of new developements they are XHTML and CSS (PhotoShop / Gimp can come in handy as well).
But by simply using and validating your CSS and XHTML you can quickly and easily design a page that reaches the majority of your viewing audience. Includeing Lynx. There are millions of resources available on both of these different technologies. the w3.org shows you most of them.
You will end up in the long run saving time. By using this stuff well you will no longer need to worry about the tables hacks and the rest. You design your page and code your style sheet and your page is done. Easy to change easy to modify. No fuss no muss.
Using XHTML and CSS has already alleviated the problems with the browsers and the resolutions. Those who study this don't have to worry much about their compatability, it is almost given once it validates. And even if it doesn't look right you can go in a modify a few lines to make it work on them all, not hacking your 18 tables that position your 2 images.
The new discussions of these technologies are not browser compliance but making your webpages printer, wap friendly, accesible(handycap), and text only.
It is not a big deal except that people don't like to take time to actually learn.
But then all in all I just went preaching to the choir, and probabally rehashed the same thing you have been hearing for the past 3 years since CSS really started hitting hard.
At the large astronomy research organisation where I am webmaster we still use Netscape 4.x as it is the only common browser that currently works properly on the older Solaris boxes. We tried Mozilla, but encountered problems - it's also a comparative resource hog.
Don't think even NS4 runs on our Vax machines though.
What is the inverse of the Matrix?
I am a web designer by trade. I love Internet Explorer. It rocks my world. Everything looks so nice in it. I also, by the way, love to develop in PHP and hate Flash.
I hate Netscape - this article was written by Jim Clarke who co-founded it. To me, this article is akin to Mohammad Omar writing about how no one likes Taliban Afghans anymore.
People dropped Netscape like an anvil in a WB cartoon in the late 90's because it simply an ugly, awful piece of software. Netscape 4.x is NOT a version 4 browser. It supports only a tiny fraction of HTML 4. Trying to do anything with Style Sheets in Netscape 4.x is like trying to do drag race in a Robin Reliant
Then there of course was Netscape 6.0, which was at least HTML 4 compliant, but was as stable as Norman Bates.
Only a while ago, Netscape 6.2 came out, and this was FINALLY something I would consider using as my default browser. But I had already switched to IE, and had no need to go back. At any rate, why would I want an old version of Mozilla packed to the sky with AOL propaganda?.
When I develop sites, I make sure they work in Mozilla/Netscape 6.2+, IE 5+ (Mac/PC) and even though it pains me, Netscape 4+.
The reason Netscape lost the browser war is not because of the Microsoft Evil Empire. Well partially - but the nail in the coffin was the fact that when IE 5 came out, the best that Netscape could manage was something like Netscape 4.72.
Most users don't care what they use, the have no real software political agenda - they just know what they like, and what they don't like. And users just didn't like Netscape. I remember the vehement attack my own Mother launched on Netscape after using IE for the first time (after using Netscape 4 for a few years)... "my goodness, Netscape is really AWFUL!! I am so glad I've got Internet Explorer now!".
--- Why are you wearing that stupid bunny suit? | Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?
If all the sites are designed for IE, then why do i keep getting JavaScript errors like crazy? For anybody thinking of saying "I don't get them", keep in mind that by default IE just hides the error messages and continues as though nothing happened. I think this is the source of most compatibility issues, and it's not so much a case of "only supporting IE" as it is "being to stupid to realize that IE is hiding the error messages generated by your seriously bad code".
I'm not really a big fan of Microsoft, and I've been using Netscape ever since I first started browsing the web almost a decade ago, but you know what? Mozilla and Netscape DONT FOLLOW THE DHTML STANDARD.
I'm down with open source, I'm down with Linux and all that good stuff, I run my own server and whatnot, and I've had plenty of sysadmin and web development experience with Linux and open source software, but the harsh reality of the situation is that Mozilla is at fault for not following the DHTML standards correctly, so no offence, please stop bitching and start fixing the problem instead...
-- www.RoachMcKrackin.com
(though most developers worth their HTML-salt will prefer DW over Golive! without exception)
I find myself to be more productive and faster with Golive.
Since when is HTML programming?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I hate to say this, but I think IE will dominate the browser market, the same way Windows has dominated the desktop PC (if it isn't doing already). I think IE's only challenger was Netscape but after that "browser war" the winner was IE. I gave Netscape 6.x a go, did not like it at all and haven't used it since. I think Opera is quite good but since it can't view all web pages properly, I gave that up too. Not a good trend.
As a web developer I am tired of making sure that my site(s) work for Nav 4.x. This year I said screw it and I only support IE 5.0+, latest Opera and zilla.
Time for 4.x to be killed off.....
This is like saying "My site is in Japanese, and only 5% of my visitors speak English..." Well, no shit.
If your website only works under IE to begin with, do you really expect much traffic from people using Mozilla/NS/Opera/Konquerer/etc?
I sometimes break Mozilla simply because I don't have a good source of information on how it works. I use this when building dynamic websites:h or/dhtml/re ference/dhtml_reference_entry.asp
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/aut
That is the most detailed and complete DHMTL reference I have seen and I would love to have something similar for Mozilla.
If it's not easy to be standards compliant I won't because I'm not getting paid for it. I like my pages to be standards compliant but I don't like to waste hours trying to make a page work in Mozilla if I'm not getting paid for it.
For me, simplest is best. If I want exciting piccies, I'll watch a movie. Fair enough for a site that must have moving pictures for whatever reason, but otherwise I just want the sleekest experience that lets me do stuff and get out.
Oh, ogk, where can I put my face. Almost forgot the URL:
http://www.uie.com/moreart.htm
Its not the the Web Developers ignore the standards its the to brosers themselves do. Face it the only good product ever turned out in Redmond is/was IE. I have tried to design cross platform sites, but its impossible. The best I can do is IE compatibility and Lynx compatability.....I hate to sound elitist but if you visit one of my sites using anything but IE 5+ you get plain text. Netscape is another story... I Netscape doesnt even follow its own standards... IE is the only standard available...its just a matter of time until its ported to linux..... As a matter of fact I do the majority of my code in QuantaPlus on a Slackware box......Yet after I have previewed my code in quanta the only browser that properly displays it is IE, not Mozilla, Not Konqueror, Nor Netscape.....
(not sure, either Ns4.7 or Mozilla 0.9.1) but
I didn't have any problems other than their unintuitive navigation.
Well, that's interesting.
Me, while I still give due consideration to IE, I design first for Mozilla.
All the QA folk here use IE, though, so I have to be careful.
Me: It doesn't work because the browser she is using only supports the capabilities set forth by some standards comittee. You know, a bunch of people sitting around a round table, arguing about some base set of features the web should have.
Boss: How do we get it to work?
You're already off in dreaming wish land here. I've had this conversation with bosses and clients hundreds of times in the past 6 years, and the actual response is:
Boss: I don't give a damn why. Just make it work, or I'll hire someone who can.
Install MSIE 2.0 and try to get anywhere within www.microsoft.com
:)
Last time I tried, I just got a bunch of error text. How's that for compatibility
Designer: All of them? Okay...lets take a look at the possible conditions under which you can view a web site. You can have this generic looking site that will distinguish you from this peanut in that the peanut isn't on the screen, and it is dumbed down enough to be viewed by everyone. That's cheap. You can have this terrific looking site, but for every different scenario that you want someone to be able to view it under, it will cost an additional 'X' dollars. Or...you can develop for M.S., get 85% of the potential viewers, and have it cost the original quote"
Me: You're incompetent. Next designer, please.
I design and build sites for a living. I worked on the campaign that got an accessibility law analagous to the U.S.'s Section 508 passed in Germany. For very little additional development time (like less than 5%), you can build a site that will function correctly in damn near any browser you throw at it once you know what you're doing.
You probably won't get fancy DHTML menus in Netscape 3.x, since that browser doesn't support DHTML in any form. It may look pretty bland in a browser with weak CSS support like OmniWeb. But it will function just fine in all of them.
If you really must have the thing look 'the same' (not possible, really; never was; there's always a few pixels here or a differently-styled bullet there) in all browsers, I'll use a valid and accessible table layout (yes, it can be done) and call it a day. If you really want it done fast, I'll do the whole layout in CSS and use @import for the fancy stuff, then do a quickie stylesheet for NN4.x and bring that in via the <link> tag. NN4.x users will get colors, fonts, images, maybe even some of the JS goodies. The layout may be circa 1995 top-down boring, but it'll be perfectly usable. If another browser has issues, I'll just use one of assorted browser hacks to hide that bit of CSS. We're talking a couple of hours of testing and hacking, tops.
Things do get ugly if you try to do a CSS-only multi-column layout that works perfectly in NN4.x. (I've done it, but it was a royal PITA). So what? If NN4.x is that big a deal for you, use tables and have done.
Barring developer incompetence, there is NO reason on God's green earth why a site can't look great in Opera 5+, IE 5+ and Gecko-based browsers and function perfectly well in the rest without spending ungodly amounts of development time on it.
Period.
Which one, N64 or GC?
What I don't understand is, in pre-OS X versions they DID support CVS (in combination with MacCVS). Since OS X, that support is gone.
Of course, MacCVS and the UN*X CVS included with Mac OS X work rather differently -- MacCVS would write the CVS tag info in the resource fork of each file, whereas UN*X CVS has a directory "CVS" to store that same info. But I can't imagine that it would be that hard to change BBEdit's old CVS support to look in a directory named "CVS" rather than in the resource fork.
Ah well...maybe they will have it again soon.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
The issue is not about being compatible with a specific browser. Everybody's missing the point here - as long as you're creating standards compliant web pages any standards compliant web browser will render it properly, be it IE, Mozilla, etc. As we all know, standards is the way to go as it benefits everybody.
I tend to think the blame should fall on both web authors and vendors of authoring tools. Even web browser vendors to some extend. IE is largely standards compliant, but the big issue is that it doesn't enforce standards compliance. Not good considering it's widespread usage.
Even if a web page has been designated as HTML4 strict via a DTD, and thus rely on CSS to deal with the presentational issues, IE will happily render whatever you throw at it, falling back on old rendering mechanisms if necessary, when it shouldn't, ie. ignoring what should be displayed as block content or inline content.
This doesn't help to teach would be web authors good maners. Most people are ignorant of these facts, and this is why everybody believes that IE is a better that any other browser - because it can render anything. Well, the truth is that it's only because IE doesn't exactly adhere to the standards, and it's sad when you think that MS is a member of the W3C. You would think they had some interests invested in the W3C and the adoption of web standards.
MS could learn greatly by Mozillas way of rendering pages. Mozilla will react on the DTD of the web page and enforce standards compliance if the author has designated the page accordingly. I guess if MS did this, most pages created with FrontPage would break based on the DTD used, but then again everybody would learn the truth. In the end this would be a Good Thing, for all. Web authors would learn to adopt the standards, and vendors of web authoring tools would be forced to do so too.
The end users using old browsers would have to upgrade for this to work. This is not much too much ask, really - it's easy to install a new browser, and the end user can pick any browser he or she likes, as long as it's standards compliant.
Granted, some proprietary extensions to web browser will remain dependand on the particular web browser and indeed on the platform you're using. But if you need a flashy web page, that's fine, lock out some users, but remember to bug the creators of the proprietary extensions about it in the process. Maybe this will motivate them to support more browser and platforms, whatever.
Remember though, much can be done with Java and you can make it work on most platforms. In my country (Denmark) some banks have successfully created complex homebanking solutions based entirely on Java. It's possible, think about it.
Glory me, joy oh happy days! My first post, maybe I should register.
Cheers,
z
I've found a few bigger named ones, but this might be prevalent in more british based websites, but there are often multi-million companies who have non conformant websites.
Just give them a bit of publicity...
www.tesco.com
(I got an email from one of their customer service people saying my order was being dealt with, when I complained).
Often I can't remember them now, because this has been going on for years (we can't upgrade our browsers in work, multi versioned solaris's, which needs OS patches to run netscape 6).
If I had an online source of somewhere to submit my non compliant website, I would have probably submitted hundreds by now.
The games site at blueyonder.co.uk (an isp?)
www.bensonsworld.co.uk (told they don't care about my type of customers)
www.gamesdomain.co.uk (after it got took over by BT open world)
www.pcworld.co.uk (not joking. they assume you have a PC running windows and IE)
I've found computer hardware sites being the worst, with over 60-70% of the ones I've tried in uk to cause my browser to core dump. Games sites come next, causing all sorts of problems.
At one point hotmail wouldn't work with my browser for months. Still has java bugs with mozilla at home...
Why not let Microsoft create the standards, and let them enforce it, document it, market it and support it, because obviously the current guys can't do any of that. Then they also have to pay for it.
Or why not produce a product that is actually better than IE??
----- I refuse to have an argument with an unarmed person
I assume this would be for his site so he would be privileged with such information, or it's just more /. bullshit...you decide.
Just wondering if the internet usage of IE is simply because there was no real alternative to match its user experience. Most people drop NN4 as it became dated, and choose IE because it was there. For a while I had to use and develop for IE, although most of the time the page rendered in NN4 as a by product. Perhaps subconsiously I was still developing with NN4 in mind.
NN4 is a real B* (infer word as you wish) to develop for, in fact its so buggy it gave my coding the same asthetic feel as speghetti junction. I decided about a year ago not to develop any more web content for it and adopt a motto if it aint compilant it aint worth bothering with and that goes for IE 4 as well. Simply put I develop for W3C compliance at work and home and modify for IE at work. Mozzi (sorry three sylabols is far too much) is fine with it, and hopefully so is K.
As an aside, Nature does not cater for the obsolete, and evolution is the norm so why should web developers or the web cater for the dumb terminal browsers. Old browsers should all be consigned to the waste bin of evolutionary dead ends along with Flash, Java Applets and HTML 3.1. The web evolved and these browser didn't, and like nature, they should not be (and are not) catered for.
IE and Mozilla are free so there is no excuse for users not to have uptodate versions of both on their system.
Now there is an alternative perhaps once again users will have more than one browser on their machines, hell, I have even persuded my employee that that should be the case.
I'm a big fan of BBEdit for Macs, just wanted to mention that in the Windows world hardcore handcoders continue to swear by UltraEdit, which has a lot in common with BBEdit (also in the history and ethics of its development).
This Like That - fun with words!
Every time I go to a new site that works flawlesly with Mozilla/Linux I drop a quick mail of appreciation explaining why I used their site.
People that stick to standards and do the right thing normaly answer back and are very grateful for the encouragement they receive from paying costumers (then they can show evidence that sticking to standards does really pay).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Their brain-dead online account services web application only allows Internet Exploder and older versions of Netscrape.
The only way we can get these idiots to support browsers other than Micro$oft's virus-friendly browsers is to not use their services and swamp them with complaint email.
This is not just a problem for PC users, it is a bigger problem for alternative access devices, for example STB's for Digital TV services which are increasingly Web enabled. A large propotion of web-sites do not work [well] because the web developers make assumtions that the access device is a PC.
l
This plays into Microsoft hands, because most alternative access devices are disruptive technologies that could break the Microsoft monopoly because most IP enabled STB's are Linux based. Some examples: http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS4506518394.htm
Consider Slashdot & Google, these render poorly even on fully standardised DTV & STB's.
The biggest problems are:
1) Hardcoded widths in tables and frames instead of proportional.
2) Colour Saturation levels are too high for TV's.
3) Using proprietary web extensions like Flash, PDF, Real.
4) Poor Standards (www.w3c.org) support.
The most common Browser for on DTV systems is ANT's NC Fresco Browser (a Mozilla derrivative).
So if you find 'NCBrowser' or 'NCFresco' in the User Agent, you now know that it is a DTV/STB.
If you want argue that you get few/no visits from STB's, well you won't if you don't support them, so build it and they will come.
I want information, relevant information, not idiotic flash snipets.
How is people going to use search engines if everything is in Flash...???
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
As much as I wish it were otherwise, the market dictates the technology, not the other way around. The funny thing is that this discussion is taking place on Slashdot, which is horribly uncompliant with any W3C standard. Unfortunately most of the tech community are hypocrites that would rather spout off than work together to find a solution. Which is why Microsoft is still around...(sigh)
Look at my karma - I'm bad, just like Michael Jackson!
I think the phrase "legitimate business reason" was removed from my original post in the drafting process. I needed UNIX more than I needed corporate email, to be honest. I had manager approval, etc.
The point, however, is that if the site 1. complied with some W3C standard and 2. worked with IE, I would have been fine. I'm not demanding testing with my browser. That's, in fact, my core point. Testing with one browser and an SGML parser is no harder than testing with two browsers, but it puts the onus on the browser vendors when stuff breaks. Writing valid code is certainly no harder unless you have developed bad habits. Debuging valid code is easier.
-Peter
Try assigning a class to that TD and then assigning a hover value to it. Or even doing a p hover. Some derivative of that should work on NS 6+ or Mozilla.
Since you're getting specific ;)
Check out testsite.valeoinc.com/valeoinc.com
You'll see basically two options. In IE, the menu lights when you do either a hover on the menu or a hover on one of the two images. Granted, I could have the Javascript code wrong.
Yeah, I COULD make the menu work with just a hover, but it doesn't seem "right" to me.
Last time I played with it, Mozilla would change the TD background, but the text still had a black background. So I left it without a highlight. The link is functional, and it's an obivous menu item. I saw no reason to spend more time on 'flair'. I don't think the 'experience' is affected at all.
BUT, if you have a suggestion, I'm welcome to it. :)
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
<style type="text/css">
@import url(/path/style.css);
</style>
Or is your solution the proverbial triangular wheel, eliminating the extra bump from the square wheel implementation?
I only ever use Visual Interdev now (HTML view only, of course). I used to use textpad, but found Visual slightly better for projects and stuff.
My main focus of work is to fellow employees, and I know they all use IE. There are *some* people who access from home PCs, but it doesn't matter if they can't see it properly 'cause they can still come in to the office.
Roadkill is yummy.
I agree that developers should ensure that their output passes a validation test. We're actually starting to move some stuff to XHTML, so this will be even easier as time goes on.
Our testers, though, are still just going to test exclusively with with the company-standard browser for internal company sites.
So in theory, keeping the applications honest will allow them to be used by a number of different browsers. In practice, though (and this is becoming less of a problem as browsers standardize), even standards-compliant apps will fail to render as expected in different browsers. For our specific situation, though, it's not worth it for us to go that extra mile for stuff that isn't public-facing.
Why should all the web developers be forced into developing for multiple browsers? Aside from IE, Opera, Mozilla, etc., there are a ton of other browsers such as Web TV, AOL, and alot of no-name browsers. How can a developer be held responsible for making sure their site works on every browser. I think the browser developers should take a stand and start conforming to some standards, all of them, including Microsoft, Netscape, etc. It's like Java, anyone can develop Java and it will run on any machine because their is a common language interpreted by a JDK developed for multiple OS's. If html tags, javascript, dhtml, etc. had a common "interpreter", there would no longer be an issue. This is not Microsoft's fault, it is an industry problem caused by every browser developer's lack of conforming to a common standard, no matter what that standard may be.
So you installed Frontpage as an FTP replacement ? *LOL* Uninstall Frontpage and run iexplore click on the File/Open. Type in the URL to your webpage. Check of "Open as webpage".
Now why the heck did you install Frontpage....
Both you and your boss...
Well, the problem I have is that there is no emulator for "all" browsers. I test pages with IE 5 & 6, Netscape 4.7 & 6.x, k-meleon and Lynx. I happen to have an iBook, so I also check IE & Netscape on that machine.
The real problem, at least for me, is that it is fairly inconvenient (no to mention unrealistic) to test sites with every browser that has ever existed.
I don't design out of preference to one browser over another, but the truth, there is not one web browser that interprets HTML 100% correctly. Different brands and different versions have introduced their own particular bugs.
Its true that 90% of my visits are from users with IE running some version of windows. But I do take the time to make sure someone can view it with Mac browsers (mac's IE 5.0, for example had several bugs in it when loading tables, fixed in 5.1).
The best I can do for everyone else is use a browser based on the Mozilla engine (K-Meleon) and lynx, the theory being that if the site works with these 2 browsers, it should at least be viewable for any others.
The results aren't always pretty when you aim for wide interoperability. But at least they work.
I hate flash. IMHO, the only thing more pathetic than a flash intro page, is an HTML page that says "click here to see our Flash presentation".
::.. check out some Cell Phone Reviews
Well, as often is the case, the debate has become one of semantics.
If your "XHTML" isn't valid it isn't XHTML, is it? If you are testing (as opposed to validating) with an out-of-compliance browser you don't even really know if you are writing XHMTL, do you?
And, as I said, I don't expect "you" to make any special allowances for my browser, and I certainly don't expect you to test against it. But if you don't write some form of valid HTML I can't even write a useful bug report for my browser vendor.
That makes you part of the problem. Internal site or no.
-Peter
I've got a 1600x1200 resolution screen. I'm being discriminated against through table widths that are too small. About 20% of the websites I visit that have images or tds that span the width of the page aren't wide enough. CmdrTaco, you're guilty too!
HELP! I'M BEING OPPRESSED!
so forget lynx...what about Omniweb? it does a pretty good job (CSS/JS/etc). It's not IE or Moz, but apparently your javascript doesn't seem cross-platform enough. What I'm trying to say it that you aren't just having problems with console browsers, dude.
When I designed www.bitsmack.com (shameless plug) I always look at it in Mozilla first and IE second. So far I haven't run into any compatibility issues. There is an upside to this article, if companies started making their sites compatible with Mozilla they might find a way to get their stupid pop-ups to work (so far using Mozilla has all but completely stopped pop-ups).
Forcing XHTML means we're forcing XML, which tends to enforce better HTML coding habits in the first place, and is easier to validate. That's all I was trying to suggest.
I simply don't understand how you can label me part of the problem when I've said multiple times that we have a very extensive lab that we use to verify that public-facing sites function with a diverse set of browsers. I don't make the decisions as to how that testing occurs, be it with an HTML validation tool or other forms of software and human testing.
I also can't believe you'd advocate two to three times the testing and extend development times simply to support non-standard browsers that make up a stubborn 0.01% of employees that might use them. This does not make good business sense. Coding to standards is only part of this picture.
In an ideal world, all code would adhere strictly to standards, and all browsers would render those standard-compliant documents perfectly. This is not an ideal world, and development time and testing cost money. While I personally (like you, I believe) do not feel this should be neglected on web sites that have a non-specific intended audience (e.g. public-facing Internet sites), I see no reason to not apply only a subset of these development and testing measures when you have a very specific target audience. This in no way reduces the expectations of public-facing code, and simply allows us to reduce development and testing times (which cost money!) for internal sites.
Perhaps we'll just have to agree to disagree here Sometimes the needs of the business outweigh technical wants. Even though I am one of the biggest supporters of W3C standards and validation in the web group at my company, I nevertheless recognize that there are overriding business needs to take into account here as well.
We seem to be hung up on testing and validation. Think debugging vs. compiler errors and warnings.* Somehow it became okay for "web designers" to pass off code that isn't HTML as HTML. How did that happen? I guess the same way it almost became okay to pass off non-Java that works with J++ as Java . .
So, yes, my opinion is that web sites, even internal ones, should be based on actual, valid (and by implication validated), HTML. Are you trolling me or what? I specifically said that I don't expect you to guess what browser I am using and test against it. My suggestion, in fact, was to do more (some) validation followed by less testing. In fact, I'd wager that the over all testing cycle would be shorter if you started by validating your HTML. You clearly didn't comprehend my previous posts. Allow me to spell it out a little more clearly.
I worked at a company who's internal website was unusable in any browser except IE. (It was the same story for the corp email.) Running UNIX was a job requirement for my position. The company gave me 1 PC. I had neither the time nor the disk space to dual boot. They wouldn't buy me a VMWare license.
You tell me how to reconcile all of the above without buying another PC (or VMWare) out of my own pocket.
Explain to me how it makes business sense to go out of your way to write a web site to a specific browser, to the exclusion of all others, when you have employees who cannot run that browser. I'm not prepared to agree to disagree based on that premise.
The fact is that writing actual HTML is no harder than writing non-HTML (at least for someone who legitimately claims to be able to write HTML), and it is considerably easier to debug. The fact is that anyone who claims to be writing HTML and isn't is a twit at best and a charlatan at worst.
The reality is that people are promoted to their level of incompetence and web designers are generally at that level. Most have no understanding of the technology that is their "area of expertise" and are just GUI monkeys that can drag shapes together to make flash animations and follow "Dummies" books to make barely-working sites that are "cool" because the menus expand when you hover over them (in IE, it crashes NS4.x (which is a separate rant), and causes newer browsers to be unable to render the page due, at lest in part, to undefined use of HTML tags).
The bottom line is that most IT employees suck at their jobs, and most IT services hover around the line of total uselessness due to incompetent design and administration.
-Peter
* God this pisses me off. In my mind this is analogus to saying "Our C program throws a gazillion warnings, but it compiles with the particular sub-version of the compiler we are using at the moment and it seems to work with the test data. Any more testing would be a waste of money. Fuck it; were shipping it."
Beyond this is the fact that so many "web designers" are frustrated wanna-be artists who think that their site is a work of art, and that the media is the message. I've got news; the message is the fucking message**. I don't give a shit that you graduated top of your class in graphics design at Shitheel Technical College, I actually want to know what the number to HR is, or what's for lunch in the cafeteria or how to change my 401k. Get over yourself and give my browser the INFORMATION (That is what the "I" in "IT" stands for!) in a format that my browser, whatever it is, has a fighting chance of parsing and presenting to me however I damn well please. If I want to use FooBrowser2000 on a black & White monitor at 320x240 with a gigantic font that ain't your fucking problem, Monet.
-P
** I think I have a new sig!
Running UNIX was a job requirement for my position.
It sounds like your job requirements were counter to your company's standards. You have a legitimate gripe, but it's against your company, not the web designers. They made a conscious business decision to accept what may very well be "faulty" code in their web sites and/or to hire designers without requiring them to adhere to standards.
I think you should petition your higher-ups to spend the extra money to train your developers to learn how to standardize their HTML output, purchase better authoring tools that generate clean HTML output, and get more testing time against your sites to ensure everything validates cleanly and appears as expected in your web browser. What do you think they will say to that?
Being simply standards-compliant is not enough. Standards-compliant code may still appear differently in different browsers. Testing must be performed if you want to view that page as designed in your browser of choice.
In fact, I'd wager that the over all testing cycle would be shorter if you started by validating your HTML.
I agree, where "testing" in this discussion refers to the look-and-feel of the site. With full-blown usability testing, you're primarily checking the functionality of the site, and that's generally done once for each set of browsers being targeted. Look-and-feel is part of that, obviously, but isn't all of it. It's arguable how much testing time would be saved by having your developers take the extra effort (if any) to ensure their application always outputs valid HTML.
The fact is that writing actual HTML is no harder than writing non-HTML (at least for someone who legitimately claims to be able to write HTML), and it is considerably easier to debug.
This is fantasy-land, or for small firms that may wish to spend more money to hire people that really understand what they're doing. In the real world, your bottom-rung "web authors" do not have an exceptionally high degree of training, which is pretty much what you say in the next paragraph. I'm not saying this is good, but it's the real world.
In addition, some web sites have content backed by more than one application, possibly done by more than one development group or even generated by 3rd-party applications. Fixing a web page that doesn't validate 100% is frequently a little more complicated than calling Bob the web guy and having him clean up his code.
In my mind this is analogus to saying "Our C program throws a gazillion warnings, but it compiles with the particular sub-version of the compiler we are using at the moment and it seems to work with the test data. Any more testing would be a waste of money. Fuck it; were shipping it."
HTML validation problems aren't nearly as severe as warnings pointing out a potentially serious vulnerability in code. You are unlikely to find exploitable buffer overflows in HTML. I understand and empathize with your point here, but it's a bit of a stretch.
I've got news; the message is the fucking message**. I don't give a shit that you graduated top of your class in graphics design at Shitheel Technical College, I actually want to know what the number to HR is, or what's for lunch in the cafeteria or how to change my 401k. Get over yourself and give my browser the INFORMATION (That is what the "I" in "IT" stands for!) in a format that my browser, whatever it is, has a fighting chance of parsing and presenting to me however I damn well please.
Agreed, 100%. However, the people building our web site content are not the ones designing HTML. Frequently our content managers have no knowledge of HTML. They just click the bold button. It's those back-end systems, 3rd party applications, and developers in another group that actually get all of that turned in to HTML. This may be the key bit where our environment may differ from what you're used to. If we were talking about one person drawing up HTML documents all day, you're right, it's nothing to just pump these through a validator before slapping them up on a web site.
Look, I hear what you're saying. Coding to standards is really the way things ought to be. The reason I threw testing in there was because it seemed like your gripe was actually due to the fact that things did not render in your browser of choice. I was trying to point out that even standards-compliant code may not render as you expect. I frequently come across code that actually does validate with no errors whatsoever on some of our internal web sites, but the site fails to render as expected (sometimes making it very difficult to use) in browsers not supported by the company. Coding to standards only goes so far, and for internal use, actual usability testing is given precedence over ensuring that <p> tags are properly terminated.
All that managers look at are numbers. When figuring out how to design and test web sites for internal use, they go with the cheapest method for developing the sites safely, and the cheapest method for testing these sites completely, so that all employees should theoretically be able to use that site without problems with the minimum of expense. Things like strict HTML or XHTML validation are perks at this point.
Your case is peculiar because somebody made the decision to go with this site development model while simultaneously requiring a percentage of its workforce use alternative web browsers. That sucks, but it was a business decision. Estimate the costs involved in getting all of the company's sites viewable in your browser (include training and additional development time to get these sites validated and standards-compliant if you prefer) and compare that with the costs saved by letting you view these sites at your PC instead of another company-provided terminal and make a managerial decision.
I've spent 6 years in web design and have seen seen the evolution from no tables to CSS, Javascript and more. Same problems. As the browsers continue to use their audience as political pawns by refusing to follow the spec, this will inevitably be a war that will only be won by people who STOP playing to the browsers. This means:
1. Stop using browser-specific code.
2. Just because the majority use IE doesn't mean that all others should be excluded from using the Internet (since when did Microsoft become the democracy?)
3. Use cross-browser AND cross-platform code. It if doesn't work, don't use it. Why? Because when people keep using it then eventually browsers support it above the spec. Stop using it and stop allowing the browsers to use YOU as their political pawns.
4. Sometimes webmasters *do* care. Don't judge people by their position in the company. As a webmaster, I've had to be forced to design IE specific pages because Marketing pushes to tell me I have to because it's "the" audience.
5. Make a statement. I can't stand the political practices of Microsoft and refuse to use or support IE as a browser. This doesn't mean I don't test in it - I do. I just refuse to use it myself.
I think anyone who can justify design for IE only should take a look at the history of the Internet and to think seriously about WHY it exists - for everyone to SHARE information and ideas.
I think the other issue that is often not addressed is the rise in designers/webmasters using editors. I have seen people who claim to be designers or developers and don't have any idea of HTML. Or they know HTML but don't know what to do when it breaks in the browser. And don't understand what the section 508 spec is about or even what the w3c is. I think that's sad. Very sad. And that's the future of the Internet: misinformed designers/developers, company politics, browswer wars, lack of standards, etc. It's as if we were in kindergarten.
A previous post mentioned that their resume says that they have to design for the majority, that is IE. I definitely hope I never hear that on my staff or that person will be fired immediately. That is completely unacceptable. If you can't design for everyone then don't call yourself a WEB designer/developer. Call yourself an IE Pawn.
Coding for all browsers is easy - if you know the code. If you don't, of course it won't work well. Know the limitations of each browser and refuse to use code that doesn't play friendly.
Consider it a challenge to let ALL USERS see your website and not just IE. How would you feel if you didn't like IE and wanted to see a website?
The arrogance in this industry peeves me.
If you are in technical management and you keep someone like this in your org for more than a month you need drug out and flogged. Woah! Exploitable bugs are a miniscule portion of the bugs out there (and are unlikely to throw warnings besides). I know they get all the ink, but let's be for real.
I'm just talking about quality, and how disturbing I find it that "our current dot version of IE" is the gold standard of HTML quality in corporate America. Disturbing on several levels. Ah Ha! Now we've hit upon something. The problem, clearly stated is that web sites and web browsers both approximate the specifications to widely varying degrees. This causes a less than ideal coincidence of interoperability.
There are two general approaches to resolving this problem. First, pick two (or maybe more) particular release versions of particular browsers. Write some gross approximation of HTML (or "better yet," let FrontPage do it for you) then make ad hoc changes until it happens to mostly work in both (or all) the selected browsers. Second, write actual HTML, then resolve any issues with your selected browsers by eliminating problematic elements.
The first creates an unmaintainable mess of javascript browser detection routines and hacks that are sure to break in the next few point releases of you pet browser. It also reflects a defeatist attitude about browser standard support, which I believe to be self-fulfilling.
The second attempts to add to the harmony between web sites and browsers. The only actual disadvantage of this approach is that it doesn't give web designers the opportunity to masturbate to DHTML menus.
The real point, however, is that you can only positively influence the situation by 1. writing (and encouraging others to write) valid HTML and 2. reporting failures to properly render valid HTML to browser vendors.
Key to this is the fact that I believe that this can be done not only without additional expense, but at a development savings long term. (Yes, "long term," that magical phrase that sounds like silence to a manager's ears.)
To illustrate. Before the UNIX consultant gig I've been talking about I worked as a phone drone at Dell. Dell took exactly your attitude towards web development. When IE4 was released we were forbidden to install/run it (but were expected to support it, which was fun). They worked and worked on the site, which had been designed around IE3's quirks. It seems that IE4 has a completely separate set of incompatible quirks. Finally, because of Dell's "special" relationship with MS we had to start moving workstations over to Win98 which includes IE4. What a fiasco.
Things really haven't changed that much since then. The fact is that if you use "advanced browser features" you end up locked into a browser brand and version. Who wants to be in that pickle? Or, if you'd like, who wants to go to the CFO to explain that the web devel budget needs to be doubled for the next three quarters so that the crufty IE8 site can be refactored into a crufty IE9 site?
I guess the same guy who in the late seventies wanted to go to the CFO and explain that only IBM peripherals would work with that spiffy new IBM mainframe, and cost 230% of what everybody else's peripherals cost.
-Peter
Microsoft-Free Fridays
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
hat about Omniweb? it does a pretty good job (CSS/JS/etc). It's not IE or Moz, but apparently your javascript doesn't seem cross-platform enough.
OmniWeb's CSS and JavaScript (ECMAScript) support is not complete, and therefore, will have problems in some situations, even if the site is authored to spec.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
A lot of the craziness involving nested tables goes away if you use CSS, like W3C recommends.
It's not perfect, but I can't imagine going back to all those nested tables, single pixel hacks, etc. It's such much easier to maintain.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Do you know what flash-pages look like on Pentium 233?!
Do you know what it looks like on an SGI?
And do you know what they look like to the illiterate???
How about to the blind and disabled?
(Assuming you're not just trolling, given the title of this article...) Virtually every line of the source of that page contains invalid HTML according to recent (2+ years old) standards. Since you don't specify a DOCTYPE, I'm assuming it's supposed to be using the current standards, because, since you don't tell me what it's supposed to be, I can assume anything I want. And so can a browser, which might be one reason why it doesn't look the same on different pieces of software.
Perhaps you should read & conform to the standards before being so quick to blame it on browsers... Stop using obsolete & invalid HTML. XHTML 1.0 is 2.5 years old already, and you're still not using it? It really isn't that difficult.
Check out the XHTML Recommendation, specifically Chapter 4 which will give you the basics on making the transition from HTML 3 or whatever you're using into the current, mature standard. View the source of that page as well, as it is composed in proper XHTML 1.0.
The fact is that if you use "advanced browser features" you end up locked into a browser brand and version.
Agreed. My comments were geared more towards testing and supporting a particular browser, though, not towards writing for a particular browser. We discourage writing for proprietary features of a web browser just on general principle.
Aside from that I mostly agree with all of your other points, though I still think less of the mainstream web guys than you do. Maybe all of the companies I've worked for have just been dominated by below-average employees that should not have been in those positions, I don't know. We certainly have a number of people that do know how to write clean code, and how to build applications that output clean, validator-friendly code, but generally these guys are in positions a little more advanced than a typical web monkey.
-Peter
Hmmm...
And yet when I go to your site, http://www.hardcoregamers.com/ I see halves of paragraphs chopped off for no apparent reason (IE 6.0). To be fair, I checked it out in NN, and it looks fine.
But... still pretty lame.
The first three months of last year (jan - mar 2001) were even more interesting:
- visitors: 71% MSIE, 23% Netscape
- buyers: 49% MSIE, 51% Netscape
So again: Netscape users are 3 times more likely to buy something, than a visitor which uses MSIE.For the same period of 2001 we analyzed also the visitors for different sections of our mall:
- Fashion, T-Shirts: 80% MSIE
- Coffe-related products: 56% MSIE
- Wine: 44% MSIE
- Gourmet products: 40% MSIE
We hardly sold any t-shirts, but the mall is selling lots of wines to lots of returning customers.The numbers have now obviously shifted towards MSIE, but still Netscape is *very* important for anyone doing e-business.
Markus Senoner
I wasn't aware you could do that. Next time I'll do it that way.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Of course it isn't a standards-based technology. I never said it was. The reason I suggest flash as an alternative is that is is supported under popular browsers in Windows, Mac OS and Linux. Also, the swf file format is open, so that you can actually create swf files with other tools, such as PHP.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.