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.

Comments

And write multiple stylesheets

[alexhmit01]

You need to write different stylesheets for Netscape 4 and IE/Mozilla, minimum. You probably need to write a different stylesheet for IE and Mozilla. Not too hard because you can detect that from the User Agent. Without server side scripting, it is more complicated to do it in HTML/Javascript, but its doable.

Opera is a special case. They LIE about themselves. They default to pretending to be IE.

I have NO idea if Opera is 1% of my users, 5%, 0%, or 50%. They LIE.

That really upsets me, and its short-sited. A button: fake IE mode, would work. Always faking it and making it hard (or impossible) to detect is outrageous.

The fact that all browsers fake being Mozilla (from Netscape's early dominance) is bad enough, but Opera is too far.

Alex

Re:NS4 is NOT YOUR ONLY CHOICE.

[Isofarro]

I take it contradicting yourself while correcting others is one of your endearing qualities :-)