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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!
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!
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.
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
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.
-... ---
...flash is fun...
Until you hit your back button to see a previous page and get dumped clear out of the site. Flash sites are the worst at "Is that a control or a decoration?" syndrome. Sometimes I find myself aimlessly clicking to try to find the non-intuitive custom controls on some flash page, and worse you can't even expect the cursor to change when you hover over a link like you can on a web page.
Flash should not be used for your main page. It should be used for interactive demonstrations, small movie clips, or other highly interactive content. It should not be used for simple data retrieval (I don't want to fire up flash to find out what the stupid VCR codes for my remote control are), or your main website as it breaks the web UI model. It should also be used sparingly as some people will not be able to use it (blind people in particular).
Just my $0.02
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
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:
Flash is the bane of search engines. If the web all moved to Flash, we could kiss the harvesting of useful information from the web goodbye.
Also consider that 98% of the time, Flash is the wrong solution and only gets in the users' way.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
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
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.
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.
Yeah, but what IS the new standard? If it's a STANDARD, why can't they publish it?
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.
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
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?
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.
(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
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Boy, imagine if your code monkeys were saying that. Gee sir, I can code this up faster if I ignore all of the design standards and just stick GOTOs everywhere and skip the documentation. Or how about: we're not bothering to stick to the TCP/IP standard on our stack, we figure that it'll work OK with Win98, and it would cost more to actually make it standards compliant. What do we need standards for anyway, most of our users are still using Win98. Nobody in the software design field would last long with that attitude, but yet we allow it in our web designers. How odd.
I read the internet for the articles.
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There is no excuse for a browser to operate on pages that contain broken open and close tags.
Internet Explorer ignores/substitutes for missing close tags in tables.
Netscape 4.X incarnations at least do not.
Unfortunately users tend to blame Netscape for not ignoring a glaring error, and compliment Explorer for allowing them to view what may be error laden information.
There are standards that go deeper than simply being W3C compliant. Explorer fails at adhearing to these core programming standards.
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?
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.
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.
Your Flash peeve will be redundant, as the latest version of flash (MX) now supports the back button and will work with content inside the flash file, it's only a matter of time before most web sites are upgraded.
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
... 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.
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
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
Almost every site I've seen done in Flash could have been done in plain old HTML just as well. If a page has "Skip Intro" it has been badly designed, and whole-site Flash animations are almost always horrendous.
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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.
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.
There's no such thing as a WYSIWYG web page builder. HTML specifically leaves most rendering decisions up to the browser. Different browsers should render a page differently. One of the problems with WYSIWYG editors (for anything, not just web pages) is that people will do really bad formatting that just happens to "look right". Centering a line by using leading spaces or spacer GIFs, for example, instead of the "align=center" property. Looks great on their screen, but looks like hell if someone has their screen width or font set differently.
I'd also mention using physical <i> and <b> tags instead of logical <em> and <strong> tags, but that battle was lost years ago. It is an example of using the wrong markup just because it happens to "look right" on their screen, though!
If someone really wants WYSIWYG, maybe they should publish as a PDF document instead.
I'd really like to see a GUI HTML editor that does a good job using the proper tags, instead of acting like a paint program and producing crappy HTML to try to force the end user into seeing a pixel-by-pixel copy of the author's screen. I suspect this is what you meant by "standards compliant", and I'm sorry I can't help you there.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Notepad's your best bet
Correction, TEXT EDITORS are your best friend. If you're developing on Windows, I prefer CuteHTML. It's everything good about Notepad with a complete HTML 4.0 reference in its help file as well as syntax highlighting and basic syntax checking. It also includes code snippets for Javascript and whatnot, but the beauty is that it's ALL HTML. No WYSIWYG whatsoever.
I think there's similar products out there for linux, but I haven't seen anything that I really like.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
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?
Me: Well, since you wanted the site to be navigable in ways that would make it user-friendly and have it look good, IE was pretty much the only browser that could support that. Sure, we could have waited until all the Java virtual machines worked the same way on all browswers and made one big Java applet, but they have a better chance of creating the web standard that supports a lot of the UI features we use before that happens.
Boss: So when they create the standard, it will work?
Me: Probably not since some people think "standards" must mean feature-poor so that it is easy to implement incrementally, and doesn't make one browser totally out of date by favoring another. So everyone complains that Microsoft has historically stolen and extended instead of innovating like they say they do. Now, as it turns out, IE is actually innovative because of its rich set of features, making web applications easier to make. Now they are complaining that it is too innovative. If you can't compete, complain I guess.
Boss: What about Flash?
Me: Oh, it works well, is cross platform, and can deliver a feature rich user experience too. The only problem is that installing the rendering engine on each desktop comes with its own challenges created by each OS it is supposed to work on. Everyone also seems to complain about it since the mindset of Flash designers seems to be, "Because we can, we should," and you get these really nifty animated websites that are flashy, but useless for imparting the information you intended.
Boss: OK, we are uninstalling AOL when I get home and going to Earthlink. My wife can figure out how to use Eudora and Yahoo Messenger, and she'll have all she has with AOL, except for the unwanted ad bombardment and A/S/L requests.
If you stopped writing browser specific code checking the browser would be unnecessary. The only reason the Opera lies is because some sites will only let you in if you return IE for your browser.
Alex DeWolf
"The Brady Bunch is back...working homicide"
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 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.
Actually its a call to email $BIGCORP and tell them their site sucks. Suites won't pay extra for fancy features that scare away potential customers.
A couple of years ago designing web sites was a major pain -- IE and Navigator had different opinions about almost everything -- from HTML to Javascript (especially the Document Object Model) and Cascading Style Sheets (very, very broken Netscape).
Right now IE has over 90% penetration on the "market" and offers almost acceptable support for CSS and stylesheets (Remember, AOL uses various crippled versions of IE, too). Netscape prior to the Mozilla based code is out of the question. Opera has very little penetration.
What was a web designer to do? Write fast and easy code compatible with IE and maybe breaking for 5% of the users (less than 5% for some big, non-geeky sites) OR spending over 200% more time accomodating for alternate templates, scripts, etc.?
The light at the end of the tunnel comes with the now officially finished version of Mozilla which is less than a month old.
Some designers got sick of the agony of coding all workarounds and decided to go for standards (load alistapart.com in Netscape 4.5, load it in Mozilla -- see?) but big sites still go with the shit flow (IE).
The actions I personally am taking is coding with standards, and avoiding using features not supported by IE -- this way the layouts work in IE, Opera and Gecko based browsers, and is readable in Lynx.
g Here are some links:
http://Webstandards.org
http://bluerobot.org
http://alistapart.com
experience speaking. The bottom line is and always will be CASH for development. As long as MSIE continues to dominate the market, AND CONTINUES to effectively ignore standards, the smaller standards compliant browsers will suffer. It is a proven M$ merketing tactic.
**** 100% Flash free and proud of it. ****
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
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.
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 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
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.
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.
Fix the page widening bug in slashdot then get back to us about not creating cross-browser compliant sites.
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?
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.