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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.
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:
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
... 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.
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, $50,000 to the company? Which makes more sense?
When comparing percentages, it's always important to pay attention to what you're comparing to.
-Alison
Almost every site I've seen done in Flash could have been done in plain old HTML just as well. If a page has "Skip Intro" it has been badly designed, and whole-site Flash animations are almost always horrendous.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
Of course, the real problem is the choice of lowball labor for the task of website development. If you hire a high school webmaster wannabe or a disposable HB1 and pay them minimum wage to produce your website, this is what happens.
We hired a supposedly reputable company to make a simple but graphically pleasant corporate website. Browser compatiblity was an afterthought for them too. They did all kinds of funny things with tables that just happened to work in IE but not with anything else. I knew we were in trouble when I saw the first prototype and it included (for no apparent reason) a Flash intro that was really more like an infomercial. Our marketing manager insisted we needed more bandwidth to support the website, which led to an interesting discussion about page bloat and it's effect on load time for dialup users.
The people who develop websites for a living need to realize that browser compatibility is one of the things that distinguishes the professionals from the wannabes.
I totally disagree with the Coward and his attitude (that's nice, calling someone a moron because you don't agree with him). Many clients say "I want these features and I don't give a #@$% about Netscape 4.08 since it's gonna cost me more to have you develop it. I'm happy to satisfy 9?% of my possible audience."
Others say "I want it to do everything (DHTML, CSS, ActiveX, Flash, integrated Authorization and Authentication, SSL etc.) with every browser" until we tell them the price of the development, and the potential bugginess....
It's easy enough to say "make it standards compliant", but the different browsers implement standards differently Take CSS, for example, and how about printing? Why do you think there are so many pages devoted to cross browser functionality? BECAUSE IT'S HARD AND TAKES TIME. TIME MEANS IT COSTS THE CLIENT.
Not every client has the $ resources of an Amazon or an Ebay. Do you work for real live clients?
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
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.
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 ?
Thank you for the voice of reason.
Many times Slashdotters forget that it is not the web designer who generally decides what he codes for.
Almost invariably my clients don't care if the content doesn't display on anything but IE (granted, I do most internal web applications, but still). And I'm not going to waste my time (and it can take a lot of time) to make sure all the fancy stuff that the client DEMANDS is going to work in all browsers unless they are paying me to do that.
And one final note, I don't understand why in the post Flash is specically complained about. Honestly for robust web applications these days Flash is looking more and more sweet BECAUSE of browser incompatibilities. Flash in Netscape works just like Flash in IE or Opera or whatever (except for a few minor Javascript-Flash communication differences which are easily resolved.)
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 qualms about taking my business elsewhere when a company tells me that they don't want my business by coding a site that doesn't work in my browser.
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.
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?
No, the browser obeys the HTML spec and makes a best attempt at rendering the content.
This behaviour was specified by Tim B-L before Hakon, Ragget and the rest of us got on the case. Dave Ragget's Arena browser had a smiley face that frowned when you had bad HTML.
The lax processing model was specified to make writing scripts as easy as possible. Basically Tim thought that systems that refuse to show you anything on a page because a footnote was missing a close element were broken. I think he was right there.
The other thing that got messed up completely was the content negotiation mechanism which the folk at NCSA could never understand. First they had Mosaic sending 2Kb of accept headers ending with Accept: */* because they would go to the rescap file and look for viewers. Then after we told the this was not a good idea they cut out the headers completely. The idea of a happy medium never occured to them.
Netscape's current problems are a direct consequence of their own behavior when they began the company. Netscape went out of their way to kill any working content negotiation mechanism. They calculated that as the dominant browser it would be better for Netscape if they controlled the standard. So instead of identifying the HTML version number the browser could accept they promoted scripts that checked for the string Mozilla in the user agent field.
The news.com article actually misses the main point I presume Hakon wants to make, when Web Designers only write for IE they are only writing for people surfing from computer browsers. You lose the audience of PDA users, voice browser users, disabled users etc.
Unfortunately Javascript and flash tend to be used aggressively on sites which would often be better without. I particularly loath the Javascript designers arrogance in allowing the content to override my UI choices. If I say I want the browser to go back to the previous page I want it to go back boyyo. The only reason to deprive the user of those bittons is to pander to advertisiers, which of course Netscape did.
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