Slashdot Mirror
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.
Sorry, this document does not validate as HTML 3.2.
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
Oh for fuck's sake, you can't argue that. Why should we have java? Why not code in ANSI C all the time? Why write programs for MacOS or Windows? Why not code straight commandline apps that eschew the GUIs -- which only fuck shit up by making shit platform fucking dependent?
Hell, why have USB? Why not just make PS/2? Why have IDE? Why not have SCSI? Why do we have to use HTML when clearly, XML is a better format?
It's a poor fucking argument. The real reason is that HTML is a shitty fucking file format that cares more about presentation than internal format. If people want to use IE -- so be it. They want more flexibility. For fucks sake: apply this bullshit fucking argument to printing: oh, woe! Why do people use CMYK? Why not use letterpress! It's a long established standard. Damn that proprietary postscript bullshit! Fucking assholes excluding black and white users.
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!
Netscape 4 users CAN go fuck themselves. Frankly, as a web developer, I CANNOT continue to build pages for Navigator 4 users. While I realize that it's a common browser platform, the only thing that I can do to stay current (meaning using CSS at all) is to stop supporting NS4. Everyone is saying that it's the authoring programs (which I don't use) or it's the Web Developer's responsibility (it isn't)... the fact of it is that it's the browser manufacturers' responsiblity to support the damn standards.
We've been going through this since 1994, people. Not one browser (no, not even your precious Mozilla) is 100% standards compliant. Not ONE. And I, the developer that has to "cover" for their mistakes, am being blamed for not making my pages "good enough" for your crappy browser? What is that?
It IS like error handling. I saw that comment a few posts back. But Netscape is an error. IE is an error. And Opera sucks. Sorry. I said it. I bloody hate developing for Opera. It's ALMOST easy but then the simplest things don't work. Although it IS second best if you develop for IE.
I only pray that Mozilla becomes 100% standards compliant (with abosolutely NO "extended" html) and storms the market so that my job is made as easy as possible. It's difficult enough to write SQL to XML to HTML conversions without having to remember 90,000 browser "distinctions" (aka: browser "fuck ups").
Sorry for the troll, I just get so upset at these "well it's the developers problem that I use the shittiest browser known to man" posts. At any rate, that's my $0.02.
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
The project I'm working on has created a webpage that only works with IE - it doesn't work with Mozilla not because of anything nasty, but because various bugs (namely, 35011 and 133567) prevent features that are supposed to work with Mozilla from actually working with Mozilla. When 1.1 or 1.0.1 gets released, I might get around to seeing if I can make the site work with the newer versions of Mozilla, but really, it isn't worth it.
Besides, the end users all use IE, and for those that use Netscape 4, they can go fuck themselves or pray to five dieties and sacrifice three goats and a sheep that it gracefully degrades properly. Which it usually doesn't due to a half-assed CSS implementation. Trust me, I have a Sourceforge project where I have to use server-side includes to make the page render useably in Netscape 4 due to the fact that NS4's CSS implementation removes my links from the menubar!
So, yeah, NS4 users can go fuck themselves - if Netscape 4 is your only choice, then shut off Javascript immediately because this also shuts off their crappy CSS implementation and might allow things to degrade in a proper way. Of course, with the site I'm working on, Javascript is required to make some of the more interactive elements work. (I hate requirements generated by people who want a webpage to work exactly like Excel does...)
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Depends on your web site and your audience, but Netscape 4 and Lynx can go F themselves. My "arrogance" is based on numbers, experience, and knowledge of the industry over many years. Yours is likely based on conjecture and personal preference-- which you are certainly entitled to. If I am building a text-based web site for research then Lynx is important. NS 4 is hardly ever important because it renders so incredibly quirky. I can code to make it look right, but it's such a pain in the arse when even Netscape doesn't sell it anymore. Upgrade or perish, vegabond! :-)
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
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.
What 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?