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.
As a web designer, it's in my job description to make sure the site is designed for "the majority of our audience". This means IE. I could go ahead and design everthing so that it's compatible with Mozilla, Opera, or any browser that begins with the letter K, but as I'm constantly trying to hit a tight deadline, it's easier to just go for the majority. As long as I *know* the site looks like it's supposed to in IE, I'm happy with it.
And so are the people that pay my salary.
Roadkill is yummy.
I personally enjoy using flash, and feel that it could easily replace html, if the world could all be broadband. However, that not being the case, I feel that major sites should stop using designs that are fitted towards the broadband user only, and instead make it accessible to everyone.
How Jaded Are You?
And I always hear him say stuff like "Well, *I* run IE, so I assume most everyone does". For awhile I had just assumed that Microsoft was sleeping with W3C, until I met a few web programmers. As I see it, there are really two types of prgrammers. Those who learned HTML in the beginning, and those who learned Frontpage so they could be 133t and have their own website. Since the latter outweighs the former, there you see the problem.
In their defense, from the user's point of view, the easiest tools out there are made by Microsoft. Click, click, click, oh look! I have a website. Sure, it's 8 MB in size without graphics, but it's all mine! Sadly only the geeks care about standards anymore.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Speaking only for myself, As a Web Developer, I code first for NS/Mozilla products first and IE last. My only complaint about NS is the lack of standards support in the 4x versions. However, as folks around the internet upgrade my job becomes better and better. The latest versions of Mozilla are very easy to build sites for, while M$ still gives me and some of my co-workers headaches.
Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
According to this story on news.com, it is becoming harder for users of Microsoft-free systems and browsers to view the web.
That's odd... I've been using Mozilla as my sole browser for a few months now, and I haven't had any problems at all. That's compared to a year and a half ago, when M18(?) was completely stymied by a lot of sites.
Seems to me that things are getting better, not worse. Then again, stories about things improving don't get the ad impressions.
--saint
"Wow. Now I see what you mean about web sites not being compliant." She told me. "Our site looks ok, why don't others?"
"They don't properly test them, or think some flair is really necessary that's only supported in IE 5.X. They forget Web Browsing is like window shopping in a Ferrari. You move on to the next one REAL quick."
Though I have to say Opera's pop-up management sucks compared to Mozilla's. Since I've installed Mozilla for her, I havn't heard a peep. Before it was "Some links just don't work anymore" - which was due to Opera not opening REQUESTED Javascript URLs.
BTW, I just didn't think it was a 'grand' idea to replace the presidents browser, but IE kept storing/retrieving some virus in it's cache (maybe from Eudora's preview?), and the calls from the president about viruses on her PC were getting annoying. Not to mention the reboot required to delete the IE Cache file that's ALWAYS open due to the wonderful Win98 integration! ;)
(*sigh* No, once the file is detected by NAV as having a virus, you can't do anything with it.. But it's open so it can't be quarrantined... get it? :P)
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
(If you hadn't noticed, the Web is meant to be an open medium, not controlled by a large, monopolistic and law-breaking American corporation)
Sir, I do believe you are a troll.
If you're reading this, thanks -- I've got a question about a topic that has been bothering me for a while. With Mozilla, if you see adbanners on a page, you can right-click on them, and then scroll down to "Block Images from this Server" and presto, no more ads. While this is simple with clickable imagemaps, its not possible with flash adbanners (at least with mozilla's builtins....).
Does anyone have any commnets/opinions or hints on how to "disappear" the flash adbanners?
Why did I post this? Ask me now!
Because it's a pain in the ass.
It's much simpler to write to W3C recommended spec. If it validates, stop there and be confident in knowing that IE will display it properly.
Defecation occurs.
Pretty soon AOL is going to be using gecko for its HTML renderer.
In short order, developers taking this tack loose about 30 million customers. Do you want to be the one to explain to your boss why the company site doesn't work on his wife's computer?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Make a repository of sites which break on non-IE browsers.. Basically, a net-wide site-bug watch. Launch it as a universal database, and submit the reports to each webmaster in turn (as well as publishing the information on worst-offenders)
Anyone know of something like this? If not, I'll take the initiative and build it damnit.
Oh, and how many of you complaining wussies are posting via IE on windows anyway? Go sit in a corner.
It's the same story from 7 years ago, in reverse.
It comes down to laziness in web application development teams and making users conform to the whims of the developers instead of the developers trying their darndest to be transparent throughout the web application process.
To make a specific browser an integral part of an application rather than making it irrelevant will be something web app teams will have to deal with well into the future if they truely want to cater to all PC users in the long-haul.
Just like error-trapping is necessary, there should a a browser-trapping standard developed for web apps.
Anyone agree?
Crapdot
News from birds. Stuff that splatters.
That's like saying if I want to wire my house a certain way, and the building codes from 88 don't allow me to, then I should just go ahead and do it my way because the codes are 14 years old.
If NS and Opera want to compete, they need to make *their* browsers compatible with the new de facto standard.
Hell, even when I tried making my stuff NS compatible, Mozilla is so full of rendering bugs that it was impossible.
No.. You just need to try harder, or do it differently. Sure, I have a site that works a little better in IE (the TD background color is changable - remotely - in IE, as a highlight, while not in Opera/NS), but if I used an image instead, it would work just fine.
There ARE multiple ways to accomplish the same thing. By not conforming to the existing standards, and buying into the extended monopoly, you're only screwing the rest of us into a specific browser.
And remember, just because it looked right in IE, before you tried it in Mozilla, doesn't mean you didn't account for IE's rendering bugs.
For example. Did you know that for absolute width, there IS no standard? Some browsers include the browser border, while others do not. It hasn't been addressed. This can easily be worked around, and is well-known. I think you just need to do more research.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
you don't have to code for "hundreds of little browsers" just ONE - W3C standards. It's easier to go for W3C anyway, as you don't have to worry about browser detection and it doesn't stop you using Java craplets, php, Flash or whatever other MM stuff you want. Browser detection is the fucking pits - exclusion from sites for no reason other than sheer laziness. The true horror is using IE on the Mac - a very standards compliant browser that virtually every detection script THINKS is IE WIn, and then the site doesn't fucking work - even more pathetic than not letting you in at all.
That was classic intercourse!
I admit that I am guilty of writing specifically for IE. The reason I do so is simply because IE gives me the best results. I find that when I place a tag in my HTML, it comes out looking just the way I want it on IE more often than it does on the "others". Take my job for example...here, the default browser installed on all the computers is Netscape 4.7. Because of this, the correct use of style sheets is damn near impossible. Most of the time I am forced the use incorrect HTML practices, such as using tables for layout, just to get a decent look.
Now when I'm home and designing websites, I am so fed up with stooping to the lowest common denominator that I end up throwing together a warning page and going nuts with CSS2. Granted I could probably use PHP or a separate style sheet to get a halfway decent look on the other browsers, but I have neither the time nor the patience to try to cater to everyone viewing my personal sites. I see web design as an art and I believe that IE best handles the "code" to present that art. Standardization would be wonderful, but don't go shunning IE just because it's easy M$ fodder.
And as for Flash, I honestly believe that it (or some other similar form) is the future of web design. To be able to get the exact same look regardless of the enduser's system is a web designer's wet dream. Add to that growing bandwidth of the average user and that clunky Flash site is looking more and more attractive.
"I strongly urge both the faint of heart and the faint of butt to leave the room at this time."
- Strong Bad
This is a link to the report on http://slashdot.org through the W3C validator.
Interesting.
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
For sooo many years mac users (and linux...and whatever non-M.S. platform you use) have felt the frustration of not having the same level of application choice. Companies develop where the money is, and that was in the big windows market.
So, the web designer says to the company looking for the site: "Hey...what customers do you want to reach?"
Company: All of them! (typical)
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"
Company: Do that. THat sounds good!
And that is the world we live in!
I absolutely agree. I've launched a fair number of sites in the few years that I've been in charge of production for WebProjkt and on the occasions that I've received an email, either directly from an end-user or indirectly from the client, the highest priority has been given to getting that problem or issue resolved as quickly as possible.
... but, then again, on some sites, I redirect Lynx browsers to a page indicating that our sites are in fact difficult to browse using that browser, so I hope I give the impression that WebProjkt is aware of the console browser crowd, but that we simply don't have the necessary resources to make sure everything looks right for that ...
The main area our sites are somewhat lacking is that they are not very Lynx friendly
the w3c validator.
Sometimes the webmasters of the site even respond and are surprised that such a thing exists. If people would keep doing that, web desingers might use the validator as well.
The real problem are those so-called authoring tools which produce invalid html in the first place. Everybody who bought such a program should complain to the manufacturer.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
Discussions like this show that browser wars are back on the agenda. IMHO that is largely the result of Mozilla adoption which has a modest but growing market share (yes also on my desktop). For a while the browser field has been fragmented you had netscape 3.x, 4.x, opera, mozilla milestones, various IE versions, konqueror. However, the non IE versions are all becoming more and more standards compliant (or disappearing). So effectively there's only two camps: the standards compliant camp and the MS camp.
While the latter camp has the largest marketshare (95% according to some sources), the standards compliant share is made up of a group of very active net users (mostly techies) who do a lot of online shopping, browse a lot of sites and see a lot of ads. For that reason, webdevelopers have an interest in keeping that part of the internet community happy and adhering to standards enough to make their sites usable in alternative browsers.
Jilles
#1 As a webmaster for an edu, I have to deal with strict government compliance issues daily, and coding to w3c spec saves time and money.
As a contract developer, developing for IE only at the expense of 9% of your audience saves the client time and money, and is a worthwhile tradeoff since a minimal amount of netscape support can be written in effortlessly.
#2 Web development is a field that constantly strives towards providing applications level functionality that rivals and imitates desktop software. DHTML and SQL are how we make those happen.Regardless of who makes it, IE exceeds css standards, and pushes the envelope for what will come in the next standards. Its a joy to use! I can give my users so much more. Having to make a site netscape compliant means sacrificing features. Its really not about "bells and whistles", its about bringing the user the best experience. while this experience comes from designing UI for custom database driven applications behind logins, it does apply to the front end as well, albeit to a limited extent.
the solution i have found is this: If you want a custom web-based software solution, you are bound by the same constraints that desktop users are, ie: mac, linux and pc softs are not interchangeable. behind the login, the functionality is what you want and the browser is what most easily supports the application.
SkizZy
OK, so people agree that the way to get people to listen is to complain, but whenever we do, we get the "No-one uses the browser you're using, please go away".
/. emails them to complain...
Now, a concentrated effort, whereby each week a particular site was targetted as being alternative browser unfriendly and everyone from
Suddenly, they have several thousand people complaining and management start questioning what their web dev team is doing blocking all these customers.
Anyone else feel like helping co-ordinate this effort?
Goblin
It's all fun and games until a 200' robot dinosaur shows up and trashes Neo-Tokyo... Again
That way other sites, like mine (www.mrpress.com :), will get the excess
:)
for a shameless plug
Netscape and Mozilla runoff.
I started designing/developing websites back in
1993. I eventually worked my way into management
before becoming a dotcom victim, getting fed up,
and starting my own business.
In the beginning many of the developers I worked
with were careful. They coded carefully and
tested carefully. Over the years that definitely
changed. You had younger and/or lazier people
getting into the business. Suddenly instead of
it being the standard, I had to fight with them
and with management to make sure that we at least
worked on Netscape as well. It was unfortunately
a losing battle.
Nowadays, though I'm not all that saddened by it.
As I learned, the majority of my current
competition (the custom shirt, mug biz) isn't tech
savvy enough to build anything much beyond what
Frontpage can do. So I use that to my advantage.
I keep I.E., Netscape 4.7, and the latest Mozilla
builds on my development machine. I make sure my
site gets tested in each of them in Windows, then
I flip on Linux and test it in Mozilla there.
Finally I usually give a graphic designer friend
of mine a buzz and have her check it out on her
Mac. End of story. 80% of my customers use I.E.
That's great. However, I'm not about to cater
exclusively to them at the cost of losing the
other 20% of my eyeballs.
As far as I'm concerned, as an e-business owner,
regardless of what browser you use, your money is
still the same color, and I'd rather you spent
it with me then elsewhere.
Rick
http://www.mrpress.com
this is a common misconception. rather than launch into a rather over the top tirade about the evils of one of the most standards compliant, user-responsive browsers on the market, you could have just LOOKED at the complete user string. it's not rocket science...
even when opera is spoofing IE, you CAN still see that it is opera. all you do is look at the entire string. here they are:
- Opera being Opera:
- Opera being Mozilla 5.0:
- Opera being Mozilla 4.78:
- Opera being Mozilla 3.0:
- Opera being MSIE 5.0:
spot the common thread? yes, that's right. the giveaway is the word "Opera" in the useragent string. tricky, eh? in other words, it can fake out all standard detection scripts, but DOES allow you to notice that is Opera if you want to make the effort to distinguish it anyway. in other words, it behaves perfectly. it isn't lying. it DOES tell you its Opera, but only to those people who care enough to ask. are you one of those people...?"Opera/6.04 (Windows NT 4.0; U) [en]"
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 4.0; U) Opera 6.04 [en]"
"Mozilla/4.78 (Windows NT 4.0; U) Opera 6.04 [en]"
"Mozilla/3.0 (Windows NT 4.0; U) Opera 6.04 [en]"
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT 4.0) Opera 6.04 [en]"
i'm currently lead on a project to interactively web-enable some reasonably hardcore financial analytics. i'm working for an investment bank. we have a relatively homogenous, controlled environment. i COULD just code for IE. however, i have spent some time and effort up front, and currently have everything running as perfectly validating XHTML Transitional. and it's not just a page of text. drop-down menu layers, and a lot of interactivity have been put into this, yet it has been tested in the following browsers:
Windows: IE4->6, NS4->6, Mozilla 1.0/1.1, Opera 5/6
Linux: Konqueror 2.1.x, NS4, Opera5/6, Mozilla 1.0/1.1a
yes, there are a lot of idiosyncracies that can be baffling, awkward to understand, code for, etc. but it can be done. and when you work it all out, it's really not THAT hard. once the project is finished, i intend to release the libraries i have created. perhaps they will be found useful by others.
my advice: the time spent working out all of the DOMs, coding cross platform, cross browser server/client-side libraries may look like a long time. but it's worth it.
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.
I'll disclaim this by saying I'm not a pro web developer, and I haven't used things like ColdFusion or GoLive...
Mozilla's editor seems really nice. It has WYSIWYG, "tag view", Source, and preview (using gecko) modes. And it's free ;-)
I guess that's what happens when you hire someone who just finished reading "Teach Yourself JavaScript in 3 Easy Lessons Using Self-Hypnosis While Sleeping". It's an easy enough language to learn, the trick is knowing when not to use it.
You claim that your site isnt targetted towards the Linux / Mozilla user, so you dont care anyway. The fallacy in your assumption is that your target audience could be Linux / Mozilla users too - and then imagine their estimate of your company when they find your website doesnt work with their browser. When I use a non-IE browser to visit websites (100% of the time when I'm not at work - which is also the time when I have purchasing power), my expectations arent too high. Basically, I need a site thats usable. The bells and whistles might be nice, but I can live without that. Sadly, I find that there are people like you out there who dont even provide that.
A case in point : Ikea - the furniture store. Just last week, I was ready to spend good chunk of money on buying a really good quality bookshelf. The site was unusable with Netscape on Linux. I spent my money at Walmart. Later, at work, I went to the Ikea site and looked at their catalog. There was a bookcase priced at $500 that I would have bought if only their site had worked with my browser. To bad for them.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
We had a supplier who switched from Apache on some flavor of UNIX to IIS /SQL Server on at least two WinNT boxes. BIG mistake, whoever did the work for them set it up so that Netscape browsers were denied online transactions.
We gave them a few months to try and fix it, meantime we phoned in our orders but we weren't going to switch to IE internally. Their IT head was stubborn and the business owner bought the marketing line about how much money he'd save. I'm sure it wasn't the only factor but they're gone now. I spoke to one of their workers who bailed to another company and he told me that they'd lost more customers than just us over the Apache-to-IIS conversion and general unworthiness of the new system and that the client loss plus absorbing the costs of the upgrade and running maintenance costs of a system that never worked as well as the old one took the company down.
All this so the CEO could have a pretty GUI to look at instead of a character-based terminal! Somebody should've bought him a Mac, put pretty pictures on it and told him they reflected some sort of reality and to leave the IT work to the pros.
Bullshit... the problem is that most of the monkeys out there use some wysiwyg web page design program that throws in more code than you need. A perfect example of this is GoLive, Frontpage, etc. People just need to take the time to learn HTML ( should not take more than an hour if you are competent ) and use a complient editor, ( not a drop and drag look at me I am a web designer ) People just need to pull their head out of their ass and take the time to learn how to do something instead of relying on a program to do it for you!
Stay negative.
On a similar note, I'd noticed that sites made with Frontpage 2002 lack most of the bugs and annoyances I'd come to associate with older FP sites. Guess M$ got tired of being the laughingstock of the HTML world :)
But here's a fine irony for you: On my WinXP machine, the IE6 that came with XP will NOT correctly render the M$ knowledge base pages!! In fact it doesn't even come close -- tables are mangled and some text simply vanishes.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Heh. I still remember M$'s catagorical denial (circa 1990) that they would ever ship a TCP/IP stack with windows. A time when all the clever little yuppie boyz and girlz at M$ were tell us nerds "you don't really need that" when we asked about network connectivity software; such remarks were usually followed by a condescending lecture about how "this internet thing" was "just a fad -- nobody will even remember it in a couple of years" ... so we wound up getting our fixes from some acid-head drop-out unix hacker at a dingy ftp site in the dark, frozen waste-lands of Scandanavia...
In retrospect, the M$ strategy w.r.t. internet could only have been perpetrated by the same minds that gave use the 640k RAM constraint. Windows wasn't "designed for the internet" -- if it was designed at all, it was designed for a 20-bit address space (everything since then is cruft), but it was defintitely a design without network connectivity.
It would be more correct to say that Windows was dragged onto the internet kicking and screaming and crying for its mommy by the big, bad, unix connectivity daemons that possessed a certain segment of the Consumer Society that Willy-Billy and his friends wanted to continue bilking....
"The Internet is made of cats."