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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.
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
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
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
I was about to post the same thing. I have been running an up-to-date version of Mozilla/Galeon for quite a while, and things seem to be much better now that Mozilla has matured. The also plugins seem to be much better now - I usually find that Java Applets and Flash work just fine too.
I very rarely find a website that I can't view correctly. That being said, we still need to keep up the web standards pressure to make sure this trend continues.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
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."
That pretty much goes for all browsers, and it's not really MS's fault.
From http://www.xs4all.nl/~ppk/js/detect.html:
"When Netscape 1 was the latest and greatest browser, it used Mozilla as its name and identification. Since back then it was the only browser supporting cookies and other exciting novelties like , many web developers wrote browser detects searching for Mozilla in the browser string to send Netscape 1 users to advanced pages and users of other browsers (Mosaic, Lynx) to simpler pages.
When Explorer and the later browsers hit the market, they supported cookies and other advanced Netscape 1 code, too. Therefore they also started their identification string by Mozilla to end up on the right side of these browser detects. This has remained a habit until today, even though it's not necessary any more.
Once again, we see that the use of browser detects forces browsers to identify themselves differently (wrongly, if you like).
The other browser vendors generally put the real name of their browser in their string, MSIE or Opera or whatever. They also added compatible directly after the Mozilla version number, to indicate that they weren't really Mozilla but only Mozilla-compatible. This, also, has become a habit.
On the other hand, until Netscape 6 Netscape has never added Netscape to this string. Therefore there is no certain way to detect a Netscape 4 or lower. If it's no other browser and if there's no compatible in the string, we have to assume it's a Netscape 1 to 4."
Apart from the problem of not being able to being able to bookmark a page on the site ( since it is all flash ) and waiting ages for the site to load, web designers literaly shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to indexing. There was an article that I read recently that indicated that more people will make use of a search engine before surfing to the site of interest, so if your site is flash only your site is not going to get indexed, so nobody will know that there is stuff of interest, unless someone explicity says so.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
"I think coding for ALL browsers would be rather hard."
It's easy. Write standards-compliant pages, validate, and you're done.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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).
Close. The best HTML editor, ever, is BareBone's BBEdit. It Doesn't Suck(TM)
Its also one of the best Text Editors ever made, if not the best ever made.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Hands down, Dreamweaver - 4 was real good, MX in some respects is better. It beats the pants off of Golive, which is really meant as the "designer's" web development tool (when the designer doesn't have access to a professional developer, for some reason or another).
DW MX will produce code using CSS and the like (even XHTML if you so desire) that will validate to the W3C validator, for the most part.
Cheers!
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.
This won't work in Mozilla or Netscape; however, it does work in IE. There is a program called AdShield. It's some IE plugin thing. It keeps a list that blocks anything coming from a server. It will allow the blocking of images, html, flash, and pop-ups.
i p
To block flash with AdShield you just need to rightclick the flash movie and select "add to block list"
Get the main program from: http://www.adshield.org/
Get an ad list to import from: http://mywebpages.comcast.net/winhelp2002/block.z
The ad list is a pregenerated list that will filter out most wideknown advertising companies.
The best thing about this program is that it works, and doesn't add unneccessary crap to the UI. The only thing it force ads are three new options on the right-click menu. You can have an icon added to the button bar which then opens/closes an IE panel for configuration of the program (if you don't want to do it from the options in the right-click menu).
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
The only reason people have started manipulating their User Agent string is because fuckwits like you can't do your job properly by making your content fully accessible in the first place.
Look how many pages assume that MSIE and NN4 are the only possible browsers on the planet. 2 browsers out of 1000 -- that's shocking and idiotic.
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!
Authoring for the World Wide Web 101
Take just the content of one of your pages, and create a simple HTML document that correctly describes the structure of your content. Encapsulate that content within a div, and give it an id.
Now underneath, create another div for your navigation. Your navigation will tend to be a list of links.
Now create another div before the content div and stick your logo graphics in there.
Now you are done with the HTML and you have a page that displays in all html compliant browsers.
Now, and _only_ now can you insert your presentation, like this: Reference a CSS file in your document header. Now create a stylesheet that encapsulates the placement of your div's, style your fonts, colour with your crayons.
Simple when you approach the problem from the right direction.
The error messages are extremely cryptic. It's tough to run down problems when you get messages like "general entity." OTOH, if your familiar with CSE Validator, then you get good, comprehensible messages. And 9 out of 10 pages that validate in CSE Validator will validate with the W3C/SGMLS validator. Alas, CSE Validator is GUI only for Windows. Sigh.
The bottom line is though that standards put out by the W3C are USELESS.
And who would YOU propose invent the standards? The "market"? You know who THAT means... we DON'T want the web becoming the sad state that word processing has become: you buy Word, or you can't play nicely with 90% of the rest of American business.
The Free desktop that Just Works
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.
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.
Damn straight. BBEdit is simply amazing. Not just for HTML; it's pretty sweet for most programming languages too. It's handy to be able to double-click a command I've just typed, select a menu option and have it show me that command in the Perl documentation. On Mac OS X it can tell me whether the code compiles cleanly or if there are any errors, and show me where the errors are. Cut and paste some code into a function and need to indent it farther in? No problem, just a couple of keystrokes to shift it over. Too many features to begin to describe, really.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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.
Two links of relevance:
First, note this list of CSS bugs. Note that a number of valid markups CRASH NS4. That's why NS4 is a thorn in the side of standards compliance... otherwise valid code can flat-out cause the browser to tank. Not good. Just as a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, a little CSS compliance is a train wreck. In response to one of the above posts, I'd much rather code for Lynx than NS4. And I do code for IE, opera, Netscape 6, Mozilla...
But there are workarounds, some painful, some quite painless. Go here for an FAQ on dealing with NS4.
"Luck is the residue of design" --Branch Rickey
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.
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.
Preach on, bro!
BTW, site to avoid:
http://www.capitalone.com
For almost 2 years they have had the gall to claim that only IE and Netscape 4.x are secure enough to log in to their site. Konqueror, Netscape 6.x, Mozilla, and Galeon all return a page saying that the client in use is not secure enough.
I have talked to several people at Capital One over the past year or so trying to get a straight answer as to what they saw as 'insecure' with all of these other browsers. I never got a straight answer, nor did I ever get a satisfactory answer as to WHEN they would start supporting something besides an ancient browser and the leakiest browser on the planet.
I've given up waiting for them to clean up their act. I'm pulling my credit card business and moving it to a company that wants my money.