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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 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
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.
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.
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!
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
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 $500 that I would have bought if only their site had worked with my browser. To bad for them.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
We had a supplier who switched from Apache on some flavor of UNIX to IIS /SQL Server on at least two WinNT boxes. BIG mistake, whoever did the work for them set it up so that Netscape browsers were denied online transactions.
We gave them a few months to try and fix it, meantime we phoned in our orders but we weren't going to switch to IE internally. Their IT head was stubborn and the business owner bought the marketing line about how much money he'd save. I'm sure it wasn't the only factor but they're gone now. I spoke to one of their workers who bailed to another company and he told me that they'd lost more customers than just us over the Apache-to-IIS conversion and general unworthiness of the new system and that the client loss plus absorbing the costs of the upgrade and running maintenance costs of a system that never worked as well as the old one took the company down.
All this so the CEO could have a pretty GUI to look at instead of a character-based terminal! Somebody should've bought him a Mac, put pretty pictures on it and told him they reflected some sort of reality and to leave the IT work to the pros.
On a similar note, I'd noticed that sites made with Frontpage 2002 lack most of the bugs and annoyances I'd come to associate with older FP sites. Guess M$ 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?