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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
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.