Slashdot Mirror
Web Designers Ignoring Standards and Support IE Only
An anonymous reader says "According to this story on news.com, it is becoming harder for users of Microsoft-free systems and browsers to view the web. This seems to be a new call to arms from the standards groups, and it is something we should be thinking about. Without help from web designers, using browsers like Mozilla and Opera will effectively cut off our ability to view web sites 'correctly.'" My pet peeve is when sites hype and announce new-and-improved sites, and then they come out and they are simply a gigantic
flash application.
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
...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.
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.
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.
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?