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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.
You are using: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
But I guess that MSFT has succeeded in polluting the standards to the point where
IE can totally ignore IEEE compliance.
Not a troll, just a lament
Don't read this!
This is, er, total rubbish. While a lot of smaller web designers may be MS focused, most large sites will try very hard to make their sites work across platforms. Just check out most of the discussion on alistapart, which primarily deals with new web technologies, and how to implement them in a cross-platform manner. While a lot of the 'amature' web may be strewn with proprietary tags, a lot of the larger sites really do care about users who use different browsers; from Netscape 4 to WebTV.
--jon
Cleanstick.org: Dumb weblog about nothing
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.
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
...instead of just using Frontpage for everything, we wouldn't necessarily have this problem.
Oh, and what's the point really, of a Standards Body, if they can't to an extent enforce the standards? Just a thought.
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
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
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.
I have put together a few well used sites and have forgotten to check something new on IE and I feel stupid when somone tells me that it don't work on the browser they are using... Nothing works like shame.
Unfortunately, Microsoft and Macromedia have used the embrace and extend model successfully and if you want to add something fancier to a web site you are starting down the path towards platform dependency.
Any news on standards based vector animation?
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:
"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)
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
So not only is this a problem with web designers targeting IE, but IE on Windows.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
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.
Not any bits of the web I actually want to use, I haven't come across anything I want to see that isn't still Netscape 4.x compatible, let alone compatible with Mozilla 1.0. As far as I'm concerned the web is still working just fine...
Al.The Daily ACK - Eclectic posts by yet another hacker
(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.
in the past, this has not really bothered me. I've come across several sites that really only worked with IE, but they were sites that I could ignore, or limp by with poor rendering.
on more than one occasion, I've sent letters to the company sale people (not the IT people) saying that they just lost a customer because of their stupid IT / Web people.
I agree the problem has gotten worse. Just yesterday, a site simply did not ALLOW access unless there was an IE tag. It was the AC2 game website. Thankkfully, Opera's "Identify as..." feature got around the server block, but it just as well may not have.
Even though all the major browsers are considered to be up to snuff on standards compliance, some Web authors still find it easier to code directly to IE--and test only with IE--rather than to open standards.
Ah, but what version of IE? IMHO, just because is works in 5.0 and 5.5 does not mean it will work in 6.0. Service packs have a huge impact as well. From a testing standpoint, this is STILL a huge pain.
I find if it works in Mozilla, it will probably work in most everything. IE tends to be too forgiving, rendering bad or malformed HTML too well. For that reason alone, I prefer to test with Mozilla first -- then a cut or two of IE...
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Rediculous. W3c is far from irrelevent. If you comply to HTML 4.0 your website renders just fine in Internet Explorer!
"The best possible experience". Are you saying that you can't create a good website experience without Microsoft HTML? I know enough sites that display just fine in Mozilla and Opera but still have a good website experience (easy to navigate, pretty animated menus with JavaScript, etc.)
Let's face it, you don't need Microsoft HTML to create a good-looking website! W3C standards are good, dispite what all the Microsoft fanboys say. There's no excuse for not complying to W3C standards, except when you're creating a site like Windows Update.
I've been creating websites for years, and the fact that people refuse to comply to W3C standards is totally rediculous.
And there's one more thing: our rights. People have the right to choose whatever they want. If I don't want to use Windows or IE, then that's my choice. Standards are created to make sure that I can still view the Internet, no matter which OS/browser I choose. But people like you are effectively taking away our right to choose.
"Hell, even when I tried making my stuff NS compatible, Mozilla is so full of rendering bugs that it was impossible."
Then either you're using a Mozilla build from a year ago or you just don't know how to code HTML properly.
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!
The Pope is Catholic
There's a war in Afghanistan
CmdrTaco's grammar and spelling leave something to be desired
Your cat only loves you because you feed it
That girl would go out with you, if you'd only ask
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition
Let's meet our next contestant, Sybil Fawlty. Special subject: The Bleeding Obvious.
Best. Post. Ever.
I hate it too, but the sad truth is, there are not enough users of other web browsers to justify $BIGCORP investing $BIGNUM bucks to make their website 'standards compliant' when someone can hire a monkey that knows how to point and drool in Frontpage to make a pretty website. This isn't a call for more standards commitees, its a call to make your neighbor/friend/guy on the street use something other then IE. Only then will we see a standard compliant web.
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
Yeah, but what IS the new standard? If it's a STANDARD, why can't they publish it?
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.
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)
I took a DHTML page I made in Visual InterDev that would simply not work in non-IE browsers and re-did it in VisualStudio.NET - it worked 100% perfect in all browsers (well, except Konqueror). Sure, not everything works or looks 100% right (some tricks I tried didn't have as good results but they did the job) but for all the fuss that Microsoft is trying to shut out non-IE users, .NET sure does seem to be doing a lot to try and keep all the browsers happy.
Schnapple
Some website designers are not aware of the difficulties of non windows users. A couple months ago I went to www.mancow.com and it was flash only. I e mailed a note to the webmaster and a few days later received the following:
An apology and explanation that no attempt was being made to alienate users
A request to view his NEW page the front page was graphically cool enough and then it linked to "Flash version or HTML version"
So, not everyone does this deliberately.
BTW As a courtesy (if his servers can take it) this was also a plug for www.mancow.com.
Karl
Oh for fuck's sake, you can't argue that. Why should we have java? Why not code in ANSI C all the time? Why write programs for MacOS or Windows? Why not code straight commandline apps that eschew the GUIs -- which only fuck shit up by making shit platform fucking dependent?
Hell, why have USB? Why not just make PS/2? Why have IDE? Why not have SCSI? Why do we have to use HTML when clearly, XML is a better format?
It's a poor fucking argument. The real reason is that HTML is a shitty fucking file format that cares more about presentation than internal format. If people want to use IE -- so be it. They want more flexibility. For fucks sake: apply this bullshit fucking argument to printing: oh, woe! Why do people use CMYK? Why not use letterpress! It's a long established standard. Damn that proprietary postscript bullshit! Fucking assholes excluding black and white users.
Why should designers need to program? Programming is for programmers. Designers design. There are lots of people who are both, but you can't expect good design from someone just because they are a good programmer.
Also, designing a web page hardly ever involves anything that could be called "programming". (since back-end stuff has nothing to do with how it's rendered in different browsers)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
My school [www.mcmaster.ca] is re-designing it's page. It's about time for a new web page since it's currently old and bulky. But the company that has been hired to do it worries me a bit. Their site is built on flash mostly.[www.cossetteinteractive.com]
Mac's site will not be a flash based application, because the content is the most important but I have a feeling we are looking at IE & Netscape > 5.0 browsers for CSS and java code (my mozilla doesn't have a java plugin!).
Anyway, it's going to be interesting to see how the university reacts to this change.
It's nice when things look pretty, but if it doesn't say anything, or not everyone can read it, then you've just spoiled your "target market" and your "branding" doesn't matter any more?
Chris
Are Microsoft's "changes" intentional or are they errors? If they are intentional then they should be submitted to the W3C for acceptance. If they are mistakes then they should fixed.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
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?
I maintain several sites that do lots of nice things using CSS and HTML...they work on and have been tested with multiple versions of Netscape, IE, and Opera (at the very least). As a Government entity, we've also got to consider ADA accessiblity and have accounted for that.
Making a site so that it works on only one browser demonstrates a lack of talent.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Then either you're using a Mozilla build from a year ago or you just don't know how to code HTML properly.
Nice troll. My bugs have been languishing in Bugzilla for months. I was writing something that was in the W3C spec that IE supported and Netscape did not
. Jackass.
And there's one more thing: our rights. People have the right to choose whatever they want. If I don't want to use Windows or IE, then that's my choice. Standards are created to make sure that I can still view the Internet, no matter which OS/browser I choose. But people like you are effectively taking away our right to choose.
First off, I can *choose* to write my sites any way I'd like. Secondly, you can either choose to visit them, or not visit them. You can choose what browser to use. It sounds like you're trying to take away my right to *choose* how I code my own websites. Jackass.
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.
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.
"(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)"
An open medium? Well then, I guess Microsoft should be free to do any damned thing they want to with web standards, developers should develop for any platform they want to, and consumers reap the benefits of openness. As for who controls the standards, how is Microsoft any worse than a bunch of dorks who write white papers about which standards to use?
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)
Since a couple of months, we've been active in a local group to support and promote open standards (http://www.openstandaarden.be). While decent use of html is not the only aspect, the current replies of webmasters can be cathegorised in 3 main groups:
...)
:((
1. Incompetence. Let's face it, with the advent of WYSIWYG editors, nobody needs to know a single line of HTML anymore. Combined with software producers that practice point 2, this is a deadly combination. This is actually the worst group because the webdesigners (can one use this word) do not see any need to change. Hey, everybody should be using their tools and OS, because they are the experts.
2. Malice. Especially Microsoft uses a couple of well documented techniques to kill all opposition and different browsers is for them one way to kill other operating systems. In one particular case, they seriously funded a government related site and all radio audio streams were in wma format. When the webmasters were contacted, they admitted to this fact. Luckily some of the webmasters there are not in cathegory 1 and changes were made. (The site used to be unaccessible with anything but IE). Realplayer and MP3 audio streams are still on the way out though (even though there seems to be some sensibility with a couple of people that can influence desicions (http://www.vrt.be, http://www.radio1.be,
3. Standards. Some webmasters still do an effort to get sites accessible with most browsers (and, very importantly, to disabled people). This last cathegory is often "forgotten" when building another Flash and other extension enabled site, even though simple things (like tagging images) can help them a lot. It is nice to see that changes are made for the good after indicating a problem on the site.
Unfortunately, cathegories 1 and 2 are growing faster than cathegory 3 and when faced with "we got the server and bandwith to provide the streams for free" argumentation, there is, still, little one can do other than trying to get the people understand the value an need for standards
And the fact that government sites seem to be especially susceptible to these effects makes it worse: these sites should be accessible to _anyone_ (even when "best viewed with telnet 80") and, if the government practices something, it is to some an indication of "standardisation"
Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis. You can't simply say, "Today I will be brilliant."
Apart from the problem of not being able to being able to bookmark a page on the site ( since it is all flash ) and waiting ages for the site to load, web designers literaly shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to indexing. There was an article that I read recently that indicated that more people will make use of a search engine before surfing to the site of interest, so if your site is flash only your site is not going to get indexed, so nobody will know that there is stuff of interest, unless someone explicity says so.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
(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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"I think coding for ALL browsers would be rather hard."
It's easy. Write standards-compliant pages, validate, and you're done.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Your problems with sites supporting IE only depend a lot on what sites you frequent. I hit sites dealing with Unix, Linux and some odd news sites.
_ _
I have not had a major problem with site content itself. Sure, I do not have the Crossweaver's plugin for viewing QuickTime but if I did I would pretty much be in the clear for all sites I view in terms of seeing the content available.
I worried a bit when my wife started using the KDE desktop I set for her but Opera has done her right.
The biggest issue I have has been with IE and more precisely windows based web apps on my company's intranet. In fact, this has been the biggest problem for most people using a *Nix desktop in the corporate environment.
Out there in the wild of the WWW world I have not hit this problem.
Am I just sheltered in my web viewing?
_______________________________________________
ACK
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
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 do business online with my websites. Some arbitrary "standards" are irrelevant. What *is* relevant is making the best possible experience for the most possible users.
What are you talking about? Your website is butt ugly (btw, 'free pics' link is http500 - internal server error. Great customer experience there).
No, there aren't that many people using mozilla, but it doesn't take any more work to make a site that works in moz if you follow the standards. Unless you just needed to have that stupid cascading menu thing that covers the text on your page. Of course, no one with Javascript disabled will even be able to use it, and a lot of people do turn it of when surfing for porn, to avoid all the popups.
By the way, what are you talking about moz having rendering bugs? Every time I've had a rendering glitch moving from IE to moz it turned out to be because of Mozilla's more strict parsing rules (in other words, I had made a mistake and IE worked around it)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Strangely, Konqueror works fine with their website if you tell Konq to identify itself as IE on windows. Their was nothing I could do to mozilla to get it to work.
Check out AbiWord.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I did a small research in the Netherlands for uselab.com. We tested 22 municipal websites for accessibility using Mozilla 1.0 on Win2k and IE 5.1 on MacOSX.
The result: over 30 % of the websites had serious accessibility problems on Mozilla and on IE on the Mac. Problems where mainly caused by improper use of dynamic HTML and erroneous handling of the useragent-string (ie. trying to deliver a non-existant Mozilla webpage).
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.
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
(did I just say that?)
This article on Webmonkey explains how IE6 is going to make it easier for designers to create web pages viewable by all browsers, by becoming more standards-compliant. It is over a year old, but explains IE6's use of the DOCTYPE declaration, which allows designers to write standards compliant code for almost any browser (and throw microsoft's old propriatary standards out the window if they choose).
I understand your concerns using FrontPage to build web sites.
Now, how about finding a decent standards-compliant WYSIWYG web page builder that will create web pages that look good in both IE 6.0 and Mozilla 1.0? What brands do you recommend?
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?
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
You are not even capable of aligning your bold tags properly...
Got that? Less well. If you follow what the W3C wants to the letter, people with "legacy" browsers will be screwed - people on NS 3/4 especially will see nothing but crap.
Personaly, I think people using netscape 4 should be shot. Baring that, showing them a fugly-ass page is good enough.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I like this quote from Shutterfly about the issue, blaming browsers:
What we want to do is write once and have it work with everything," said Russ Sanon, senior manager for quality-assurance engineering at Shutterfly. "But it falls onto the lap of the individual browser manufacturer. There's nothing that we do that's proprietary. Everything that we write should work with W3C-complaint specs.
Funny. According to an html validator, I would put their site in the not even close department. I wonder how the QA manager could claim his page is standards compliant, when the front page is so obviously not (although it would be a lot closer if it at least had the right DTD...). Could be because he doesn't understand what we are even talking about? Sigh.
From the article (I made the link a bit more obvious):
The referenced study actually reported 95.3% use of MSIE, down from 96.6% as reported the month before. I don't care if it's true, the audience of users to whom I serve web documents is far more diverse. I believe it would be foolish to permit numbers of overwhelming IE dominance sway you into the IE-centric camp of Web design.
Here are my overall use percentages. In cases such as those which feed the numbers below, I don't really have much choice but to be agnostic about the browser in use. Percentage of documents (HTML only) viewed by various browsers, top ten:
I really won't go into reasons why I've split AOL or Mac IE from Win IE ... I could rejoin them or
group all the Gecko-based browsers together, but
the above provides me with a pretty clear indication of why I shouldn't care whether 95% of
those not visiting my sites are using IE exclusively. Would I really want to forfeit over
1/3 of my visitors' experiences? Would you?
Numbers are great. Context is better.
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.
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!
Oops, here's the link.
"Ever wonder why most open-source project websites look completely unprofessional?"
I like the look of most open-source Web sites.
"Maybe we'd make better inroads to businesses if the marketing materials we used looked halfway decent."
Most commercial Web sites are cluttered and ugly.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The organization that is devoted to evangelizing Web standards is the Web Standards Project, aka The WaSP. They have been promoting web standards for years now.
Originally The WaSP targeted the browser makers to support standards in their browsers. They also targeted WYSIWYG Web development applications like Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe Golive.
Now that modern browsers are (mostly) standards compliant and WYSIWYG developers have released programs that generate standards compliant code, The WaSP has changed focus to the Web developers.
The WaSP agrees that the last bastion of old school, standards flaunting Web junk lies with Web developers. Now that we've got good browsers and good tools, there is no excuse why we don't have standards compliant sites.
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.
/.).
Now tell this to jamie to fix the page-widening-bugs that plague slashdot. And change 5% to the real number of IE users (I'd really like to see real stats on who uses what browser to view
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I think someone just took a year or two year old artical, punched it up a bit, and sold it to news.com.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Your Flash peeve will be redundant, as the latest version of flash (MX) now supports the back button and will work with content inside the flash file, it's only a matter of time before most web sites are upgraded.
Take a look at the 5K contest this year. The rules were relaxed a bit this time around, and in my totally random browsing of the entries I found that at least half of them do not work in my trusty Mozilla sans java, flash, etc. Disgusting, what used to be a contest to showcase novel design has become a wasteland of cheesy javascript and flash.
Sadly, the 256b contest seems to be going the same route. Check the first 5 entries, they are all IE only or require javascript.
Web designers are sucking more and more latley. Learn proper CSS and stop designing broken pages.
i stuck with designing stuff with clean (by the book, w3) code, even though i knew that NS couldn't/wouldn't display properly...
i was safe in the knowledge that as soon as mozilla was available mainstream all my designs would suddenly look fine.
and they do.
they still look good in ie too.
webstandards.org/upgrade
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***
I'm a website designer.. and I know that sometimes when I'm designing a website I will notice that IE displays the page as it "thinks" I want it to be displayed.. rather then how I WANT it to be displayed.. where as netscape displays it as I CODED it.
.. well you didn't code correctly.
An example. If you leave the closing off of a website.. IE will usually display fine.. on the other hand Netscape will display a blank page because
The problem, as far as I can see is that Netscape follows code.. IE just haphazardly tries to decide what YOU want to do and "fixes" the code.
... 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.
What Bugzilla bugs? Keep in mind that if you reported bugs that basically demanded a return to the rendering model of yesteryear then they're likely to remain languishing for quite some time. Switching to standards-compliance requiures a little more than just slapping on a 4.01 Transitional doctype and praying.
You might try looking here: http://www.hut.fi/~hsivonen/standards.html
And as a small aside point, yes, you *can* choose to keep coding for MSIE; it's just that doing such is a very unwise course of action.
--
viqsi - See "vixen"
If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed.
I think one has to take into consideration that a great deal of these statistics are compiled on the basis of free and paid-for webcounters.
The news.com article refers to stats made public by OneStat (http://www.onestat.com/). OneStat provides "free" counters to end-users much like Netstat, webcounter and others. I've had a Netstat counter for yonks and keep it there mostly because many of my collaborators on the site like the pointy-clicky graphics it produces; however, I have noticed a huge discrepancy between the stats that netstat compiles and those I derive from running analysis programmes on the server logs.
OneStat, for example, installs an invisible image on the page:
How many of us have browsers and/or software that blocks this kind of monitoring? How many of us have browsers that lie about what they are?
While there's no doubt that the large majority of users continue to use IE, I do not for a moment believe it's anything like the 95 or 96% that's being reported.
You've just hit upon a recent pet peeve of mine. Why is it that people think they can apply their graphic design skills (in designing layout for newspapers, yearbooks, etc.) to the Web unchanged?
If I had a job playing a standup bass, I certainly wouldn't practice for it with a fretted electric bass. I guess what's needed is a good bash over the head with "Designing Web Usability." Unfortunately, that's not always an option.
This situation really isn't very much different from the software development world, though. Bad software is produced largely because of people (bosses, designers, and even the coders) wanting some flashy feature without really having a need for it, and bad Web pages often come about in the same way.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
This page on news.com wouldn't validate on w3c's validator (it doesn't even have a DOCTYPE declaration). Oh, the irony.
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
How much will %30 of the effort cost? How much revenue will be gained if you lure 5% more costomers? Will the investment payoff?
If you design the website using the proper standards no dual maintenance would be needed. What you design would work on all browsers.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
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
From the article:
"What we want to do is write once and have it work with everything," said Russ Sanon, senior manager for quality-assurance engineering at Shutterfly. "But it falls onto the lap of the individual browser manufacturer. There's nothing that we do that's proprietary. Everything that we write should work with W3C-complaint specs."
A quick trip to the old trusty w3c validator and you'll find that the front page isn't even compliant!
Bad Russ. Anyone have Russ's email address? He needs to learn how to use the resources of this thing called the "web".
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
This is a totally disproportional estimate. Any good web developer digging into JavaScript e.d. alread knows the ins and outs of most browsers, and if not, can find them relatively easy (just install NS and type javascript: in the white thingy).
Estimates of 3x the development cost is just plain stupid, that means you're actually spending twice the time to set up the same site for the remaining 10% of all browsers. That is completely rubbish. It doesn't take a NS site much longer to be set up than a IE site.
In fact, only minor parts of code usually needs to be changed or dubbed for IE or -the-other-browser-, and this usually works with all the other browsers immediately.
A *real* estimate would look like this:
$X to create a 90% browser cover
(1.1 to 1.3) x $X for 98% cover
(1.5 or up) x $X for 99.9% cover
if you manage to get your boss to pay 3 x $X for that, well, go for it!!!
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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You are obviously not a business school graduate. No one calls them customers anymore, they're "suckers". And if they use an alternaative browser, chances are they're not nearly as retarded as your average "sucker". If they aren't idiotic, how do you expect to sell your crap to them? You can't force them to buy... unless you're a telecom or something I suppose. But if you can slam them, why bother building a website?
For the clueless, yes I'm being sarcastic. I'm for the total abolishment of advertising...
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... it is the Java that kills me. I hate sites that simply use java for their menu systems. Java just kills my poor little PII 300, and as such I do not have it installed. The fun thing is that this makes so many sites simply un-navigatable, as the maintainers don't even provide a simple link to an index or something. Why do they bother getting fancy, when the fancy does not even work? (And when it does not work, I take my money else where!)
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.
Good idea. If you're sick of letting a company like microsoft dictate to you how the web should look, let a company like macromedia do it instead. No thanks. I'd rather have an objective third party like W3C dictate the standards, and then have developers actually follow them.
do not read this line twice.
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?
If Mozilla/Netscape 6 had a 5% marketshare it would be a no-brainer. The problem that it doesn't -- the numbers I've seen are under 1%, and the browser just isn't on the radar at all among the 'normal user' community.
I test my stuff on Moz as a sanity check, but nobody's ever written it into the project requirements.
Instead, your 5% is Nutscrape 4.x users, and catering to them could cause you to produce some non-compliant and/or ugly HTML/JS in order to get the thing to render correctly. That makes actually more difficult to support Mozilla in the longrun.
Maybe two thirds of the Intranet/Vertical stuff I've seen that is IE-only is only that way because writing a second javascript path for Netscape 4 isn't worth the trouble. If Mozilla supported document.all, the stuff would run unmodified. The other third uses client-side activex or data-binding or other nasty stuff.
(Also, Baki makes a good point about that using MS extentions is risky because they've been known to change.)
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Do you play top 40 songs on local FM stations or short-wave?
Short-wave has an international standard. Everyone can get a short-wave radio. Everyone could also build a short-wave radio and stick a tower out to pick it up a station. So, why go to trouble to get a scratchy signal that will take twice the time and effort to pick up?
People have FM radios are similar to people who have IE. Fm radios and IE are both easy to get a hold of. They do not want to go to extra effort of switching to another âuniversalâ(TM) standard. What they have no is just fine.
Microsoft has gone outside the standards box and has created a piece of software that can do more, in more respects, then current standards. If any open source company did the same 'build a better mouse trap' thinking and created something better standard then what was already out there this forum would be praising that company to the heavens. Look at Mosiac compared to LINX? How about Linux to Unix? How about USB to RS-232 serial? How about ribbon cable to ATA Serial? How about 3.5' to 8' floppy disks? Eacfh was a good standard but something came along that had features the other did not have and was superceded.
- Do most people have IE? Yes
- Is IE easier to script for? Yes
- Does IE offer more abilities and effects with little to no overhead? Yes
- Does IE offer tighter integration into the OS for application such as CMS and program updates? Yes
- Is there a Basic-based scripting engine out now for Non-IE browsers? No
Why take the extra time to build a universal standard that isnâ(TM)t as flexible as the prevailing standard?Also as an aside, I did a census from Alexia on your two standards following sites. They came up ranked at about 1,100,000:1. That means that only 1 out of every 1 million people are visiting those sites.
Job 34:26 He striketh them as wicked men in the open sight of others;
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
I'm using NS4 myself on a daily basis, since it's the standard browser installed through the company (30,000+ employees), and it's doing just fine.
Occasionnally we come accross a site which doesn't render properly (such as when the </table> tag is missing), but as someone said before, you just move right along and go surf somewhere else.
I work for a company that does a number of web projects for the US government, and the big buzzword here is Section 508 compliance. This is federally mandated support for web users with disabilities that use readers and other assistive tools. It is a requirement for all government websites, although enforcement appears to be highly variable. From what I have gleaned, the rule of thumb is make the site Lynx-compliant and you're not too far off. By time you have true 508-compliance, you're not using very many of the cute IE tags, you're not using Flash (I know it's theoretically possible, but Flash & 508 absolutely do not mix), and you've eliminated a lot of the useless JPEG/GIF/Javascript menu junk. Unfortunately, some of our (government) clients are just thumbing their collective noses at the regulations right now, but 508-compliant sites do render just fine in just about anything.
I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just. --Thomas Jefferson
The only reason people have started manipulating their User Agent string is because fuckwits like you can't do your job properly by making your content fully accessible in the first place.
Look how many pages assume that MSIE and NN4 are the only possible browsers on the planet. 2 browsers out of 1000 -- that's shocking and idiotic.
Overall I have been doing web design for a while and all of our pages are 100% spec and there are a lot of reasons for that.
The first problem is that thinking IE is the only standard is a self fulfilling prophecy. The more you design for IE the less you see other browsers and thus the more you can design for IE since you don't see other browsers. I have seen this a lot of rewriting a customers page that was designed for IE only by another company typically increased the number of customers a fair bit.
When you piss someone off most of the time they will tell 10 other people that x company pissed them off. However if you make something good and cool they typically tell only 2-3 people. So how can it be a good idea to ignore these other browsers that are down in the 5-10% area? That would lower the overall usage of your site by a staggering amount which I have seen that it does.
Finally I have seen sites that only work on IE and block you if you are not using IE. Guess what guys search engines for the most part are not IE. Google is most certainly not IE. Ooh your company page is really good and will really help your company now that it is not on the search engines. Also sites that are 100% spec move up in the various search engines faster. I don't know exactly why but I do know that it happens.
Overall the data is the same between many views of a website so why not just do server side browser detection and change some of your layout code for each of the browser groups you need to make for you site to make it render correctly in all of them? The data is the same between all of them and changing your layout code should be fairly easy in any dyanmic environment. Then you can serve back to the browser whatever version best suits that browser and overall I have found that usage of web pages using that rises dramatically. Also with that we tend to see far more opera, netscape 4.x, konqueror and mozilla users and thus the percentage of IE drops a fair bit.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
There's not a single reason why you can't discover who the Opera users are. A quick google of "opera identify browser script" brings up a great, accurate script that does the trick.
c ri pt.html
http://www.webreference.com/tools/browser/javas
Opera lies, yes; but only to the simple-minded. Smart people can see through the lie quite readily.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
If you can tell what browser the user is using at runtime, via GET headers, why not send them code specific for that browser?
Because you can't tell what browser the user is using. The user-agent string is supplied by the user-agent, which can send whatever it likes. For instance, opera and konqueror can send ie user-agent strings to get into sites designed by morons. I believe opera defaults to identifying itself as ie.
what "features" does M$ IE provide that you must use that aren't able to be written for w3c standards?
from my experience, web devels (myself included) are too lazy to code correctly. we're using IE for testing, and when it looks good, we ship it out. if we were using a w3c browser (mozilla) for testing, we wouldn't have to worry. it would *er rather should* look ok in IE. if it doesn't, it's IE's problem.
That's great that you can validate your page, but there is no motivation to do so. Heck, even /. doesn't validate, but does anyone really care? It shows up fine in IE, Mozilla, Konqueor, Opera, etc...why should they waste time making sure they are compliant? It's good in theory, but there is no real motivation to do so...hence the problem.
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
As a web designer, you really only have to follow the standards. Sure, are you using the latest ones, there will be old browsers out there that can't handle it. There are people still using Netscape 4.7, so you never know...! Personally though I test my homepages in the latest versions of IE, Opera and Mozilla (if it works there it works in Netscape 6 too). I am trying to use the latest versions of HTML and CSS, which sometimes doesn't render alike in every browser... Opera doesn't have 100% support for CSS2, for example. If I use .png graphics, I know that I can never use alpha transparency since IE6 does not have full support for .png. About Flash and javascript, I have to say that both have their place in web design, and actually I like flash sites, even if I have learned that a lot of people seem to hate it...
Will work for bandwidth
> doesn't-that-burn-your-bottom
/. doesn't validate as proper HTML. Slashdot is one of the premier OSS sites; if we don't follow the standards, why should anyone else?
Yeah, especially since
If you stopped writing browser specific code checking the browser would be unnecessary. The only reason the Opera lies is because some sites will only let you in if you return IE for your browser.
Alex DeWolf
"The Brady Bunch is back...working homicide"
First let me say that I'm a big supporter of OpenSource, cross-browser and cross-platform HTML, and of the principle that a web page or web application should be viewable on as many browsers as possible.
Having said that, as a web developer (NOT designer), it's very easy to succumb to temptation and support only IE, especially when there are tight deadlines.
On the last major web development project I worked on, the QA people didn't bother to test on browsers other than IE, and none of the developers on my team (including myself) bothered to test on different browsers. This is curiously despite the fact that my browser of choice is Mozilla. The project manager sort of wanted us to produce cross-browser HTML and JavaScript, but didn't emphasize it all that strongly.
It got to the point where, late one night doing a criticial build, one of my teammates decided to run a few routine tests in Netscape 4.7. It turned out there was a MAJOR impairment of functionality in that browser. We couldn't get a hold of our supervisor, so we debated whether or not to rebuild, seeing as nobody was really concerned about cross-browser performance. We decided to stay even later to fix the bug, which was simple enough, but time-consuming.
The next morning, we told our supervisor what had happened, and he told us we did the right thing. Afterwards, he sent an email to QA and the requirements people, emphasizing the need to test the application on different browsers. It turned out that the HTML templates he requested well beforehand were to be specifially tailored to support ealier versions of Netscape.
Also, we dodged a bullet when there was a rumour that the client didn't even use IE. That rumour turned out to be false. Nonetheless, one of our potential clients apparently doesn't even use IE. The product has since been tailored to be cross-browser (NS 4.7, NS 6.2, IE, etc), right down to the JavaScript.
The moral of the story: Make sure your product works on different browsers, because you never know who your client will be. Furthermore, it's just good practice and the right thing to do. If you're going to do your job (web design/development), you might as well do it right, and not take any foolish shortcuts. Anything else is just the wrong attitude.
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Yes *damn* Microsoft for writing a browser that lets you view improperly formatted pages!
Oh wait there *is* an excuse for rendering badly formatted pages - it makes life easier for the majority of people (~90%+ of web users) when one person fucks up (i.e. the HTML monkey).
So actually there is a reason and it's an excellent one that makes sense.
Maybe you would prefer a browser to utterly refuse to render any pages with invalid HTML As only a tiny minority of pages are fully valid HTML I don't think it would get many users, but if you wanted to it would be pretty trivial to set up a proxy via a Perl script to validate all pages and give you an error of they were improprely formattted, though I don't think it would do much to enhance your browsing experience.
For the record, at this time, Internet Explorer for Macintosh is the *most* compliant browser according to the W3C. Saying that fails to adheare to 'core programming standards' by having additional support for auto-correcting user error is illogical.
Rendering *some* useful content is a lot more useful than not rendering it at all.
Don't blame Microsoft for correcting errors, blame the user who put the error there in the first place!
i work for the second largest portal site in their webhost division as a production engineer. i only use mozilla (since .9.1) to do my work and we have to test all of our pages in:
IE 4.0 +
Netscape 4.7
Netscape 6.0+
Everything, aside from DHTML tricks (of which we use VERY little) has to work in all browsers, including our CSS (simple CSS, no layout).
We even test on WebTV for our flagship project.
All my pages validate to HTML 4.01 Transitional. I sent all the correct headers, etc.
However, if you make it easy (as IE, NN4, and NN6/Gecko have), I will test my site in your page and tweak the stylesheet. You'll get fonts that look good on your system, etc.
If you want to play games, like Opera, then you get ignored. Opera users should have no problem viewing the site, but it won't be customized for them. I won't do Javascript hacks (what happens if you turn off Javascript).
I will probably start tweaking for Omniweb on the Mac in the near future, but Opera users are completely on their own until Opera stops lying to me.
Alex
I don't like being lied too.
It is certainly at the discretion of the browser.
You told me you were IE 5.01, you get the IE Stylesheet. If Opera provided a separate User Agent, they would get their own Stylesheet hacks.
As it stands, NN4 gets the Netscape Stylesheet, NN3 gets no Stylesheet, Gecko gets the Gecko stylesheet, and everyone else gets the default one. I want to add Mac tweaked stylesheets as soon as I can.
Because Opera doesn't want to follow some basic rules of respect, WebTV will get customized support before Opera.
Blocking people on User Agent is rediculous. If you tell me what you want (via an HTTP Get) you get that file. If you want a customized stylesheet, you need to tell me what it should be.
I'm not going to throw Javascript hacks in. My pages are straight HTML/CSS, almost no Javascript. I'm certainly not going to add Javascript because Opera won't follow Net conventions.
Alex
#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
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.
At a world-famous corporation (that shall remain nameless here), the chief technology officer mandated IE as the official company browser. Compatibility with all other browsers was to be ignored for cost reasons, for all intranet sites.
The CTO announced the mandate on an intranet web page.
The page, when rendered in IE, crashed.
Of course it displayed perfectly in Netscape.
Netscape 4 is used by about 1% of the browsing public. It's 6-year-old technology. Yeah, it runs great on a Pentium II, but so does IE5.5. Use that instead. Or use Mozilla and live with the slight slowdown (though, really, on a PII, there's not much of a slowdown, let's be honest.)
Kill Netscape 4, now.
Let it die. Let it be forgotten.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I look at it this way, if the site doesn't show up in my browser(Galeon) - then I don't go there. If the company is trying to make money from that site, they just lost some.
Businesses that are serious about making money on the web are going to make their shit work on as many browsers as possible.
Some businesses may not care about the 5 - 10% of the traffic that can't view their pages. I find that strange. That would be like 711 not allowing some people into the store and basically throwing money away. Some businesses may have such a targeted audience of IE users that utilizing the "extensions" in IE makes sense.
I have been a web developer for over 5 years now and I look at it like this:
1. You are spitting out HTML. Use the standard HTML unless there is some compelling business reason to deviate. Even in that case, you should still cover non-IE browsers.
2. This is off-topic. Don't rely on Javascript to make an online "application". Javascript is a supplement that should be used to make the user's experience more pleasant, but shouldn't break your site if it's not enabled.
3. Just make good clean HTML. If you are a web developer that doesn't understand HTML and can't created good clean HTML, you might want to buy a book.
4. Don't use WYSWYG editors. I don't care how much people complain about typing. No one ever said making a web site was supposed to be easy. Good clean code will serve you well into the future and something you can build onto rather than throw away everytime you want to make a change.
This is a statement that I think most web developers will get pissed off about but here goes: I think designers should design and web developers should make this shit work. Example: A web designer creates PSD's of all the pages and hands them to the web developer who breathes life into them. I think that the web developer should be an expert at HTML and should know how to cut up the PSD and make that shit work. The web developer should own the entire site, not just their little PHP or Perl code. That works best for me anyway. I love having total control of the process. And it frees the designer up to focus on designing, which is what they do best. A nice spec. from the designer helps too. Of course, in larger businesses replace the previous term "web developer" with "web development team".
HTML can be tedious at times, but you would be amazed at how pleasing it is to work on something that you know inside and out. Plus it is fun to break apart sites and simplify and eliminate duplicate html code and really make that site maintainable. Programmers kick ass at making things easy, that's what we do.
Don't be afraid of HTML, it's not that big of a deal. One last thing, lose the attitude toward designers. If it weren't for designers all web sites would like Slashdot. I can sitdown with a good designer for an hour and they can make my crappy site look like it's something I can be proud of. It aint shit if you people can't use it.
Yep. I've noted the trend, too. Ironically, IE5.2 for Mac OS X isn't recognized by many sites that handle its Windows counterpart.
That's when I load up OmniWeb, which has an option in its preferences to proclaim itself as any popular Windows or Mac browser type, and can be customized as well.
This doesn't guarantee that OmniWeb will actually be compatible with the site, but at least it lets you in the door.
This is a nasty issue. Computers of all types need standards to communicate. While the W3C community has a standard, it's the effect of the mostly self-crafted and barely compatible coding of one company, Microsoft, that undoes that, and creates disharmony and incompatibility.
When my wife and I are online shopping and run into an incompatible site, we vote with our browser. If the business doesn't understand or care that the world does not revolve around Windows, fuck 'em. We take our money to a site that does. I may have to fight incompatibility at work, but I don't have to live with it at home.
Still, I now have to fight with getting my online banking to work in any Mac browser. I had to get my PC game box up to make a simple transaction. My PC box is for fragging chix, not for fragging checks!
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
It's more than the boss. I worked on a project recently that was an intranet web app (hospitals). During discussions about web browser compatability, development's "solution" to the problem was to just put a statement in our docs that states the supported browsers. (IE and Netscape) When we (QA) started raising tons of bugs against the code because it didn't work in Netscape, they actually wanted to change it so that we only supported IE. When I objected, I got the line that everyone had IE, there was no reason to support anything else. (?!) Amongst our customers, this was true because we were a Windows-only shop. Even though it would have cut down a lot of the testing we had to do to support only one browser, I fought against it and won. Now we officially support both Netscape and IE.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
A couple of years ago designing web sites was a major pain -- IE and Navigator had different opinions about almost everything -- from HTML to Javascript (especially the Document Object Model) and Cascading Style Sheets (very, very broken Netscape).
Right now IE has over 90% penetration on the "market" and offers almost acceptable support for CSS and stylesheets (Remember, AOL uses various crippled versions of IE, too). Netscape prior to the Mozilla based code is out of the question. Opera has very little penetration.
What was a web designer to do? Write fast and easy code compatible with IE and maybe breaking for 5% of the users (less than 5% for some big, non-geeky sites) OR spending over 200% more time accomodating for alternate templates, scripts, etc.?
The light at the end of the tunnel comes with the now officially finished version of Mozilla which is less than a month old.
Some designers got sick of the agony of coding all workarounds and decided to go for standards (load alistapart.com in Netscape 4.5, load it in Mozilla -- see?) but big sites still go with the shit flow (IE).
The actions I personally am taking is coding with standards, and avoiding using features not supported by IE -- this way the layouts work in IE, Opera and Gecko based browsers, and is readable in Lynx.
g Here are some links:
http://Webstandards.org
http://bluerobot.org
http://alistapart.com
It seems to me that the web designers aren't the ones ignoring standards, but rather the web-browser designers (programmers).
According to this, the browser of choice is decidedly IE. The reasons behind these statistics are not relevant here in the least, so don't even go there. The fact is, most people use IE browsers, so naturally, most designers design with IE foremost in their mind.
If Netscape, Opera, Mozzila, etc. manage to get the majority of the user-base somehow, I'm sure that web designers will naturally sway their designs to those browsers.
You can't logically blame this on the designers. Instead blame it on the browser makers for not complying with standards, and blame it on alternative browser makers for failing to make people want to switch.
On another note, I'm really pissed that the current highway system doesn't better accommodate my motorcycle. It's smaller, lighter, faster, cleaner, and better in every way than those big ugly cars, but the road designers just continue to design roads with cars in mind....get the point?
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
You may have a slow-ass computer, but there's simply no reason to continue using Netscape 4, no matter what you may say.
There are stripped-down versions of mozilla out there. You can use Opera or Internet Explorer 5, if you run Windows. You may even be able to stomach Mozilla or Netscape 6 if you've got a computer built this century.
The world does not owe you a favor for having a slow-ass computer, though. We're not about to sit idly by while your shitty 486 attempts to render our modern websites. Stop using NS4. Times are changing. Get with it, or give up. But, stop whining.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Possible Moz Feature:
;-)
Create a button that will send an "error rendered on http://web.address.here" to mozilla. Also put a space to provide the webmaster's e-mail. (Time spent 5-20 seconds. Someone at Moz will check out the most popular links and find out if it's moz's problems or html problems. Moz will then politely send an e-mail. (X,000 of our users have e-mailed us concerning using our browser on your web page. We have verified that our browser was functioning correctly.) You can verify that your page is not compliant HERE.
Especially in recent nightlies I have seen some render errors. This is expectable, but makes me wary to send in invalid HTML complaints. (And downloading moz 1.0 to check if it works there and then the most recent nightly to see if it works there is a lot of work on my 28.8!) I imagine webmasters also get pissed when they get complaints about build 2002893405209345802853.b, but it seems to be working on 2002893405209345802853.ba.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
I don't see what the big fuss is all about. It is VERY easy to make advanced web sites that look good in Nav4, IE 5+, and Mozilla/Gecko browsers.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
He figured his client base would be using whatever came pre-loaded on the machine (i.e. IE), or AOL. After I explained they are the same. He told me not to waste my time with the other browsers.
Well, I ignored him and made sure my code ran under NS6 and IE5 to W3C specs (CSS and NS4 == TNT).
A few months ago I proudly showed him an article explaining how AOL would be dropping IE and going with NS in the future. He said I should look into supporting NS. I told him the code already does...scored some brownie points.
Point is...don't listen to your boss when you know your right. Especially when they are lawyers with money trying to start a tech co. Always do what you know is the right way of doing things, fuck the bosses shortcut suggestions. I've spent the past year showing my boss how clueless he is concerning computers, and now he listens to me.
Well, you will not be hitting the most users when AOL switches it main browser to Mozzilla source (probably with the release of 1.1 if all the bug fixes get in there).
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
The problem is in all these AOLers and Front Page users who write all these "fancy" pages full of MS-specific javascript and styles. That's when stuff breaks. However, realize that these same people aren't even aware that there are different browsers. To them, they have "their internet" (IE), and that's that. They don't even realize that there are alternatives out there - they just have "the internet" and if it works on "the internet" it's good to go.
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.
Check out the Mozilla Evangelism site. They keep up a list of sites that are not standards-compliant (and therefore don't render well in Moz), including a list of specific bugs and their status for each site.
Flash peeves will never be redundant, since Flash is simply an awful tool for developing websites. As the original poster said, Flash is best used for value-added things like demonstrations, interactive tidbits, etc. Whenever I see an all-Flash website, I groan as it takes longer to load, sucks my machine's resources, doesn't always work, sometimes crashes my browser, is often counter-intuitive, and is tacky, in general. The result: I try to avoid Flash-based websites as much as possible, and I certainly never bookmark them (they aren't worth my time).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
I caught that too. It's great how you can click that link at the bottom (after reading a lot of hooey about the beta-status of Netscape support), and the site works perfectly in nearly any other browser.
I was about to post something about how all ya'll Nutscrape lusers can suck it down, then I discovered that the Javascript for one of the admin pages on my personal site doesn't work in Opera 6.02 (fave browser for work). On the one hand, I now empathize with all ya'll. On the other hand, I now feel like a total idiot.
[o]_O
The site works fine in Mozilla 1.0, but try this.
Visit slashdot, hit ctrl-I and notice the rendering mode. "Quirks mode" instead of "Standards compliant mode".
Slashdot should follow web standards and set a GOOD example for the community, especially considering their prominence, influence, and the appearance of hypocracy if we preach about standards and do not follow them.
Try going to validator.w3.org and entering slashdot.org.
It is quite disheartening to see just how non-compliant the site is.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
However, in Netscape 4, things just kinda all came together on top of each other. The menubar and the content kinda just appeared all on top of each other with nearly-random black boxes around the text. For added fun, the links didn't always become links due to some weird Netscape 4 CSS+hyperlink reaction.
End result: Fuck NS4 users - there aren't any anyway, so what do I care? My page works fine in Lynx, Mozilla, and IE (and Opera as well, I think, although I never really tested it) - any NS4 users can damn well use NS4 to download a real browser that properly supports or properly ignores CSS. So, yeah, fuck the NS4 users - I wanna use real web standards, and not have to bastardize a page to work in NS4 so that it'd be completely unusable to a speach reader but at least place the text properly on the page in the proper size with the proper border. It may not validate as valid HTML or valid CSS, but I can force Netscape 4 to do what it's supposed to do!
Or I can just allow the NS4 users to go somewhere else and allow everyone else to view the page in a useable fashion.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Where I worked we used the 80/20 rule. "You use 80 percent of your time trying to fix what's wrong on 20% of your users."
;-)
That meant we didn't bother coding things to work in Netscape or Opera. I'd still do it on the side for grevious errors, but MS was a client of ours and so there was pressure to make it an IE only site.
My boss didn't care about anything else so I decided to look at user statistics. He didn't really like that I was doing this, but in the end the numbers showed that only 4% of the users were using anything but IE. Since I know that the world uses other browsers in higher proportion I noted that we were forcing some people not to use our site. It didn't matter, because he used the numbers to say we should waste our time on 4% of the market.
Statistics... pretty soon you start to believe them.
My home site .. is viewable in (almost) everything .. since its a hobby site .. some stuff probally doesnt work in opera .. but it all works in NS/mozilla & ie ..
.. well .. thats a whole nother can of worms. I try to make everything web compliant, but we are in bed with microsoft .. much as i don't like that .. its a fact .. and when our marketing team insists on doing something (microsoft) cool .. there isnt alwayas a choice.
work
especially when they insist on outsourcing something to a vendor who brags that their designers 'never had to do any of those certification things - they just loaded up the software and played with it.'
a fact that is evident when you get 'frontpage' generated shit from them at $250 an hour.
*sigh*
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
Besides, if you really want to go with the spirit of HTML 4.x, you'd be using CSS to place your silly widgets, not tables.
experience speaking. The bottom line is and always will be CASH for development. As long as MSIE continues to dominate the market, AND CONTINUES to effectively ignore standards, the smaller standards compliant browsers will suffer. It is a proven M$ merketing tactic.
**** 100% Flash free and proud of it. ****
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
If you're doing real e-commerce, and you're relying on client side functionality for ANYTHING, please tell me who you are so I avoid your totally insecure web site. You don't trust the client. Ever. Especially not when you're trying to twist HTTP into doing something it was never intended for, like "real" applications.
Seriously, check it out for everything from HTML, XML, SQL, CSS etc. They cover a lot.
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
Have you seen Mozilla boot on even an 800Mhz P3? It takes forever
...You just need to have some basic knowledge of NS4 CSS bugs.
I run mozilla just fine on a 600mhz Duron. They also have a tool now that'll load moz when the system boots, so it seems as quick as IE. If you're using windows. And of course, windows users can use IE. On Linux you can use Galion(sp?) Konq, or Opera. Lack of system resources is not an excuse to use ns4. There are faster and better.
And why on earth would I want to do that? it's a complete waste of time. On one site putting CSS attributes on a table caused the table to simply not show up. Since it was the main layout table (this site used scoop, so getting rid of the layout tables would have taken forever) basically none of the site content showed up. I tried putting the table in a div, but that really screwed up the layout in IE and moz. So I basically told NS4 users to disable CSS. Do you know how annoying it was to have a lovely layout in IE/Moz, a nice one in NS1/2/3/mosaic/lynx and everything else but ns4?
On autopr0n, I detect NS4 and send a blank style sheet if they have it.
Using XHTML for simple markup and CSS for visual formatting, it's very easy to design a standards-compliant web page that renders fine in Netscape 4, without the fancy visual formatting you might see in Mozilla.
That's true. But with about 95% less work I can write a page that will display in every browser except Netscape 4 with it's broken CSS. Seriously, why should I spend time testing against a buggy implementation and looking up bugs when I could be spending my time working on the DB layer for my site, or graphics, or playing Gran Tourismo 3? Actually, if NS4 users just killed CSS all would be ok.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Now try it with 128MB of RAM
The diffrence between 128mb and 512mb of ram is $46....
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I can understand why 'designers' don't spend much time worrying about anything other than IE, but I'd like to be able to take my chances. Give me a warning if you must, but then I'm pretty well capable of deciding whether or not a site is usable, thank you. However, I can't forgive the decision to block me entirely if I'm not using IE.
The Benjamin Moore Paints website doesn't allow non-IE browsers to even TRY to render the pages; to me this is far worse than a simple warning. That company lost me as a customer recently because I couldn't view their product information. Pretty stupid.
For the record, the arrogant, stupid people responsible for the Benjamin Moore site are Modem Media and some woman called Ellen Zaroff Brady. Please avoid them like the plague.
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 problem with Lynx. lynx into autopr0n and see for yourself. I used a server side hack to check for Netscape 4 and send a blank stylesheet if you're using it.
The thing is, I don't need to do that for any other browser.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Dunno about general tags but try using some png files with an alpha channel without providing an alternative for IE users that specifies that stupid directx alphaimageloader crap.
The problem here is that users see these problems on a web page. If it simply doesn't look good, they think 'wow, this site is so crappy, what stupid web developers' rather than blame their browser. In the case that the site intentionally looks fubared on IE and there is a prominent, clear statement and explanation, a user thinks 'the web developer is elitist and won't support my browser, and I know full well a site can do this stuff on IE because other sites do!'. The user could care less about standards and anyone else's experience aside from their own. If they see a bad website, they go to a similar, but different website that does look fine. Political agendas don't matter to a user unless the agenda is being pushed to someone who already believes.
For example, when you see a company website that renders poorly in mozilla, and a comparable website renders well, do you fire up IE to cater to the 'bad' site, or do you take your business to the place that caters more to your experience rather than their implied agenda of 'IE is dominant, other stuff is BS'. You go to the mozilla site, and the IE user would do the same to any site with an 'IE is bad' agenda.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I don't know why blind people would want to go looking at porn galleries, but they can if they want to. Autopr0n will work in every browser out there. Actually it will work in ns4, but only because I put in a server side hack to detect NS and send it a blank style sheet.
On another site I did, an entire table disappeared because of the CSS I was using. It worked perfectly in Netscape and Mozilla. And in other browsers it degraded pretty gracefully.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Flash MX has alternate display support (for the blind?) Does it have some sort of mechanism to dopeslap people who make their buttons look exactly like their background? Will it still take forever to load for people on dialup? Heck, will it still force you to effectively download the entire (or at least the majority) of the site when you first visit, instead of loading sections (pages) on demand like HTML? Will developers understand the importance of this when they're previewing their site from the local machine? Heck, I'm on broadband and I still have to wait forever for many flash animations (particuarly those that include lots of useless annoying background music or talking heads).
Flash isn't bad, but it's not the same kind of tool HTML is. Flash should complement HTML, not replace it.
I read the internet for the articles.
There are tons of great modern browsers for Unix out there. Moz, Konq, Opera. It's not that hard.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Has BBEdit ever fixed the backwards search? Last few times I tried it, hitting Command-E got the selected text into the find buffer just fine, and Command-G would search forward as it should. But BBEdit hangs on Command-D to reverse search, which I use all the time. Very annoying.
(This is probably not an issue for old Mac hands, but for an OpenStep junkie it can be crucial)
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.
If Mozilla supported document.all, the stuff would run unmodified.
But both Mozilla and IE 5 and later support document.getElementById, the W3C recommended DOM method. You could create your site with getElementById and then have a site-wide js file that emulates getElementById through document.all for IE 4 users.
Will I retire or break 10K?
And if there's one thing that's true about the web, it's that there's *always* another site offering what your site offers.
What if your power company's web site is IE only? What about your natural gas company, your telephone company, your cable company, your ISP? What about a company that has a patent or copyright on the product you need?
Will I retire or break 10K?
At my last job I was a UNIX consultant. I had one PC (a notebook). I did not have (or want, to be honest) a Solaris license for the notebook. The upshot is that I couldn't use any corporate network services. I ended up using my personal server to grab all my corp mail with fetchmail via IMAP and using that for webmail. I found webmail to be indespesable but the coporate webmail was provided by Exchange (and only worked with IE).
I couldn't read the internal website at all because of bogus use of tables that netscape can't handle, but IE likes just fine.
Bottom line is that the only sane thing to do is to make all web pages adhere to a W3C recommendation and report failures to browser vendors. This whole idea of making crappy pages with frontpage or whatever and then trying to rig them to work with a particular set of web browsers is just nuts. It is more work for inferior results. Crazy.
-Peter
Make a repository of sites which break on non-IE browsers
As illsorted pointed out, you should look into Mozilla Tech Evangelism. If you find a site that discriminates against Mozilla or otherwise doesn't work, search Bugzilla for it, and if it's not already listed, add it using Bugzilla Helper.
(I had to use a workaround to link to Bugzilla because Bugzilla refuses links from OSDN referers. It's not the goat.)
Oh, and how many of you ... are posting via IE on windows anyway?
I use a Mozilla nightly build on my home winbox, but when I'm on a public terminal, I don't have rights to install Mozilla, so I just use whatever's installed (IE 5.x, or NS 4.x with CSS turned off).
Will I retire or break 10K?
Opera could have 20% market-share right now, and nobody would know because 99% of them are probably id'ing themselves as IE to servers. right or wrong, those user-agent stats are the only thing web-designers have to go by when they're determining the percentage of their traffic represented by different browsers. If you're pretending to be IE, you're selling your own position up the river.
But I know something much more important: Netscape users are 3 times more likely to buy goods online!
I tried to find an answer for this:
- Netscape users are often hard-core veterans and more accustomed o use the Net for business
- Some users are online since 1996 or even longer, and at that time Netscape was the only real browser. They didn't *upgrade* to MSIE, but are still loyal to Netscape. Those same users have the money to buy online
- Young, 14-year-old freaks got their PC last Christmas and are surfing a lot. They visit also our mall, they do show up in the browser-stats,
... but they don't buy!
Here's the analysis of the buyer's browsers (as opposed to the visitor's browsers) for the month of June 2002: 86% MSIE and 13% NetscapeAllot 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.
The majority of professional web developers make every attempt at keeping the pages working across multiple platforms and multiple browsers. Any dev shop worth a lick of salt has this built into their QA process.
I personally use what I can on the server-side to adapt pages to the browser viewing them. For most modern browsers, this only requires slight changes to insure consistent look and feel, but for netscape 4.x some major tweaking might be required. For instance, if I have any DHTML that is required, I try to make sure the designers have designed any DHTML elements so that their is a fallback mechanism that works if the browser viewing the page doens't have javascript enabled, or their DHTML implementation is too buggy to bother with.
Being a microsoft shop, we use asp.net for development and it's proven quite easy to develop a set of custom server tags to enable this sort of adaptivity. It's really as simple as:
<ilab:Browser Browser="Netscape" Major="4">{
</ilab:Browser>
<ilab:Browser Browser="Default" >
{
</ilab:Browser>
Additionally with asp.net (as well as jsp) most of your page's UI elements are probably written as "controls" (or widgets) and you write those to degrade to lesser browsers, and give the full feature set to the capable ones.
In the end, it's all about rigorous QA and deciding what works best for what platform and making those changes accordingly.
Conspiracy theories aside, IE was a real boon to the advancement of DHTML for user interface in web pages. While netscape 4.x was choking to death, IE enabled developers to do a lot of new things rather easily. Unfortunately, this all occured during the web boom and a lot of developers were lazy or hurried and didn't take the time to strategize for multiple browser/platforms.
In-house is one thing, but what we are developing is for customers (hospitals). Sure, we can say that they must use IE, and it isn't much of a pain for them to do so - yet. What if parts of the system are opened up to outside traffic? Or some of the employees work from home or remotely and need to access it? All of a sudden, our software sucks because it doesn't work with other browsers. Maybe that will never happen, but if it does we look bad. It is ALWAYS "cheaper" to do something correctly up front instead of trying to fix it after the fact.
But, we are a corporate entity, where MS rules. I would love (hate, really) to see how much we are spending on MS licenses each year.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Your pages are designed incorrectly. Most "compatibility" problems are caused by laziness and/or an inability to come up with more than one way to present information. Yes, I've done a lot of web development. No, I've never come across a problem that can't be solved with standards-compliant code and made to work on multiple browser acceptably.
If people would stop designing for print and start deigning for the web - where no one knows what renderer will be rendering the pages - these issues would go away. If a design relies entirely on minute text/image alignment to communicate information, the design is flawed.
Speaking of standards and supporting multiple browsers... I do some web development on the side. One of the companies I work for doesn't care if we screw over Netscape 4.x users. This makes development real easy (using XHTML, HTML 4.0, CSS, etc). The other companies I work for want me to still support Netscape 4.x. I HATE SUPPORTING NETSCAPE 4.x. Are there any opinions on how long old browsers should be supported? Is it safe to say that anyone using any half-way decent OS can get some flavor of Mozilla or Netscape 6.x? The only OS that I know is screwed is Solaris 2.5 or less. Anything else?
This isn't counting the 1720 Tech Evangelism bugs that have already been resolved. Sites like salomonsmithbarney.com, yahoo.com, cbs.com, citrix.com and many many more have all resolved improper coding issues that screwed up non IE rendering. But the positive news is that in 1720 cases web administrators have changed their websites to make them unbroken.
Here's an example. One of the most highly reported bugs (bug 114812) that has since been fixed was with hotmail. Due to faulty javascript implementation if you would select the "ALL MESSAGES" box in your inbox only one message would actually be selected, so to delete the mountains of spam that accumulate daily you had to click the box beside _each_individual_message_. Clicking 200 checkboxes after not checking your mailbox for a few days does not a fun time make. Anyway after about 6 months of pestering microsoft finally fixed it. The moral: If complaining can make Microsoft make its pages standards compliant well the sky's the limit.
Anyway if you want to do something to help check out Mozilla Evangelism The site is chock full of advice about how to report and deal with non-compliant websites. You can even use the Letter Writing Tool to write and send a nifty letter to website administrators who haven't yet seen the light. Obviously the site is geared to getting things to work properly in Mozilla, but the fact is, things tend to work in Mozilla if they are standards compliant.
Agreed. The way people lay out most web pages now, they'd be better off using Adobe Acrobat or something meant for page layout. A webpage is supposed to look different on any platform, at any resolution/color depth, on any display, GUI or CLI. From the beginning, everyone has used different browsers that rendered pages differently. The only reason it's a problem now is that people expect pages to look the same.
A well-designed page that renders correctly (but differently) on all platforms/browsers and presents the information well should be the goal for a web page.
If you're trying to make it look like a page in a print magazine, use Acrobat.
Just my $0.02.
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 can also use display: block in CSS to turn the links into block elements -- although be aware that IE doesn't quite get that right.
DNA just wants to be free...
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.
IE and Mozilla render tables incrementally -- they can show you part of a table before the entire table is loaded. That is a good thing because it effectively makes pages load more quickly. It would look strange if IE/Moz were to toss an already-displayed table because it reached the end of the document before seeing a tag closing the table. That would be kind of like displaying 90% of a porn image, one row of pixels at a time, and then suddenly replacing it with the text "This image cannot be displayed because it contains errors" rather than leaving it 90% displayed. (Mozilla currently does that, by the way.)
IE has lots of hacks that are only there to "help" webmasters who make coding mistakes and typos. Accepting tables without closing tags is not one of them.
The shareholder is always right.
Web developers need to take a cue from software developent and use HTML validation tools to check the syntax of their work. Such tools can also check for compatibility with different browsers and different versions.
This is all the more important because browsers are lenient in processing HTML with incorrect syntax. This convention has lowered the bar for letting non-programming folks write HTML, but has had the lousy side effect of having inconsistent behavior for rendering HTML in different browsers be the norm and not the exception.
Syntax checking. It's a good thing.
What the fuck is this doing getting modded down as a troll? There is nothing "troll" about this post. IE has better support for W3C standards. Maybe these fuckhead moderators should check their facts.
Which part of it is a lie? Go read any browser comparison. Or, better yet, try viewing any page that is actually standards compliant using XHTML, CSS2, and JavaScript. They look good only on IE (though Mozilla has recently made some huge advances).
Fix the page widening bug in slashdot then get back to us about not creating cross-browser compliant sites.
It's like some of these people don't know what good design is. Total content accessibility via graceful degradation is an art that is totally lost on some of these pretenders that call themselves web designers.
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
[blockquote]#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![/blockquote]
Yeah I love the way that IE exceeds at fixed positioning...
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
Assuming you are correct (I will not debate that since several other posters have done that well enough), your point is a complete non-sequitur.
My point was about support for W3C standards. Supporting broken open/close tags has nothing to do with compliance with those standards since those standards say nothing about what a browser is to do with such tags. The standards simply define what correct is and what the browser should do with correct things. And to that end, the other browsers cannot get things to behave the way they are supposed to when things are correct. Your concern about what IE does when things are wrong is just plain silly.
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.
Well personally I think that the vast majority of Flash "developers" are misusing Flash. There is very little Flash that I've seen that was even neccessary. Try surfing the web without Flash for a week and then ask yourself what you're really missing. I found that I was missing nothing. And man Flash navigation in general is a pet peeve.
Just for the record, I like Flash. As a presentation tool it can be a Godsend. It just has too many limitations (can't resize, recolor, or otherwise modify text, no default settings that I know of - like always disabling sound, can't control navigation - i.e. opening links in new windows, can't search text via the find function, and so forth and so on) for doing any serious data presentation. It's great for audio synching like you said, and it's cool that you can make flash apps as standalone apps too. I just wish that these graphic / multimedia designers would understand that designing for the web requires more than a simple title change.
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
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?
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
Web Designers will be quick to give you an email saying that they will not support this browser blah blah blah. They have been doing it for a long time, they are used to it.
The best way is to complain to the web masters boss. Now most sites don't have webmastersboss@domain.com but most have sales@domain.com if a commerce site. Simply state your case, ie was going to do business with you but it doesn't work with my browser. Let me know when it is fixed and I might consider doing business with you.
You will find things get fixed quick smart. Especially stupid things, like sites that have a flash intro, & a skip intro button that is also don e in flash so if you don't have flash you can't get into the site.
Go out and get sailing!
I use Mozilla for work. Stabler, no backdoor of the day, no asking if I'm sure I rather wouldn't use MSN instead every time I log into webmail.. It's just nicer to use, period.
However, as a HW designer, I have to spend quite a bit of time browsing the net for datasheets etcetera. I don't mind flash sites and I have zero problem using them. If done right. I really do hate fixed size flash windows. It's just *so* hard to understand that if you make a guy making purchasing decisions view your product listing via 600x400 window, he'll probably start thinking about competitors.
There are quite a few sites which will work with IE only but same flash(y) interface would work just as well with mozilla. In any case, high-density I/O connectors may be boring, but a gimmicky site design doesn't help as far as I'm concerned.
Is this published somewhere?
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Well, the corp standard here is IE, but I use Opera.
It's IE here too, but I use Mozilla most of the time. Like you, I switch to IE when I need to. So far it's a non-issue.
but what we are developing is for customers (hospitals)
Then perhaps this thread doesn't really apply to you. I was simply trying to say that there are situations where coding for one particular browser is not bad.
Or some of the employees work from home or remotely and need to access it?
For us, at least, we prohibit even remote access into the corporate network from non-company systems, so that's a non-issue for us also.
It is ALWAYS "cheaper" to do something correctly up front instead of trying to fix it after the fact.
This is completely dependent upon the situation. In my corporate environment, I disagree completely. We have hundreds (if not thousands) of different internal web sites. If 1% of these sites later for some reason becomes more of a public-facing site, it's far cheaper to go in after the fact and shore it up so that it's standards-compliant and functions with other web browsers than it is for us to double (or triple or more) our testing efforts and add development time to ensure all of our sites work with browsers that are not company standards. This just doesn't make good business sense.
I generally use Netscape 4.78 about twice a week for sites that Opera won't render. I'm beginning to run into sites that work on Opera 6 and not Netscape, when I run into them in significant numbers, I'll upgrade my Netscape.
Opera doesn't render in most cases because:
The only site I couldn't get into with either Opera or Netscape was when MSN declared itself offlimits to everyone not running IE.
As someone else pointed out, cross-platform compatibility is one way to tell developers from wannabes.
Also, the browser-specific stuff tends to be bloated bandwidth hogs done by dipshits who forget the rest of the world generally runs dialup.
In the great majority of cases, any site that isn't platform neutral has a direct competitor who is, whether the site is informational or sells products/services. Patronize the competitor and leave the IE-only site to Darwin.
Tech Public Policy stuff
While you may want the web for just information and nothing else, some of us like to occasionally visit a site that's only point is to entertain via graphics, or demonstrate some very nice interactive graphics, sound etc.
Why are you determined to LIMIT the web to be a text only domain?
Sure my main use of the web is for text rich informative sites, but I don't want to be using a browser that can't support the entertaining flash driven sites with some very impressive graphical artistry if I wish to see them.
Just because YOU only want text and static pictures does mean EVERYONE wants that out of the web... remember, when reading and posting on Slashdot you are conversing with a very limited subset of the web community... don't let your view of the web community be overshadowed by that.
W3C does specify which tags REQUIRE close, and which have an optional close.
I suggest you check the standards before you claim to know them.
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.
Since when is HTML programming?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
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"
Me: You're incompetent. Next designer, please.
I design and build sites for a living. I worked on the campaign that got an accessibility law analagous to the U.S.'s Section 508 passed in Germany. For very little additional development time (like less than 5%), you can build a site that will function correctly in damn near any browser you throw at it once you know what you're doing.
You probably won't get fancy DHTML menus in Netscape 3.x, since that browser doesn't support DHTML in any form. It may look pretty bland in a browser with weak CSS support like OmniWeb. But it will function just fine in all of them.
If you really must have the thing look 'the same' (not possible, really; never was; there's always a few pixels here or a differently-styled bullet there) in all browsers, I'll use a valid and accessible table layout (yes, it can be done) and call it a day. If you really want it done fast, I'll do the whole layout in CSS and use @import for the fancy stuff, then do a quickie stylesheet for NN4.x and bring that in via the <link> tag. NN4.x users will get colors, fonts, images, maybe even some of the JS goodies. The layout may be circa 1995 top-down boring, but it'll be perfectly usable. If another browser has issues, I'll just use one of assorted browser hacks to hide that bit of CSS. We're talking a couple of hours of testing and hacking, tops.
Things do get ugly if you try to do a CSS-only multi-column layout that works perfectly in NN4.x. (I've done it, but it was a royal PITA). So what? If NN4.x is that big a deal for you, use tables and have done.
Barring developer incompetence, there is NO reason on God's green earth why a site can't look great in Opera 5+, IE 5+ and Gecko-based browsers and function perfectly well in the rest without spending ungodly amounts of development time on it.
Period.
What I don't understand is, in pre-OS X versions they DID support CVS (in combination with MacCVS). Since OS X, that support is gone.
Of course, MacCVS and the UN*X CVS included with Mac OS X work rather differently -- MacCVS would write the CVS tag info in the resource fork of each file, whereas UN*X CVS has a directory "CVS" to store that same info. But I can't imagine that it would be that hard to change BBEdit's old CVS support to look in a directory named "CVS" rather than in the resource fork.
Ah well...maybe they will have it again soon.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
If you are relying on a browser supporting CSS and DOM, then you are in for a very rough time.
- Netscape purchase price: $4.2 billion
- AOL user online purchases in 2001: $100 billion
- Watching IE-only websites go down the tubes: priceless
Creating an inaccessible website may be cool,(With due respect to Mastercard, naturally)
Every time I go to a new site that works flawlesly with Mozilla/Linux I drop a quick mail of appreciation explaining why I used their site.
People that stick to standards and do the right thing normaly answer back and are very grateful for the encouragement they receive from paying costumers (then they can show evidence that sticking to standards does really pay).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
This is not just a problem for PC users, it is a bigger problem for alternative access devices, for example STB's for Digital TV services which are increasingly Web enabled. A large propotion of web-sites do not work [well] because the web developers make assumtions that the access device is a PC.
l
This plays into Microsoft hands, because most alternative access devices are disruptive technologies that could break the Microsoft monopoly because most IP enabled STB's are Linux based. Some examples: http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS4506518394.htm
Consider Slashdot & Google, these render poorly even on fully standardised DTV & STB's.
The biggest problems are:
1) Hardcoded widths in tables and frames instead of proportional.
2) Colour Saturation levels are too high for TV's.
3) Using proprietary web extensions like Flash, PDF, Real.
4) Poor Standards (www.w3c.org) support.
The most common Browser for on DTV systems is ANT's NC Fresco Browser (a Mozilla derrivative).
So if you find 'NCBrowser' or 'NCFresco' in the User Agent, you now know that it is a DTV/STB.
If you want argue that you get few/no visits from STB's, well you won't if you don't support them, so build it and they will come.
I want information, relevant information, not idiotic flash snipets.
How is people going to use search engines if everything is in Flash...???
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Ever heard of templates? This has been done since the year dot. Quit re-inventing the wheel and start looking at every day solutions to every day problems.
Surely you can comprehend to useful collaboration of templates and databased content. Avoids the duplication immediately.
My whole argument is that these are industry standards but are not supported by many browsers. Therefore, the parent's claim that coding to standards magically gives you support on all browsers is incorrect.
"A good conspiracy is an unprovable one." -Conspiracy Theory
I suggest you go back to elementary school for remedial reading comprehension classes.
I think the phrase "legitimate business reason" was removed from my original post in the drafting process. I needed UNIX more than I needed corporate email, to be honest. I had manager approval, etc.
The point, however, is that if the site 1. complied with some W3C standard and 2. worked with IE, I would have been fine. I'm not demanding testing with my browser. That's, in fact, my core point. Testing with one browser and an SGML parser is no harder than testing with two browsers, but it puts the onus on the browser vendors when stuff breaks. Writing valid code is certainly no harder unless you have developed bad habits. Debuging valid code is easier.
-Peter
Have you never heard of the benefits of separating content from the presentation? Have you never heard of using templates to publish a website? Have you never heard of using automated tools to speed up the donkey-work?
You are supposed to be using a cutting edge medium, we're no longer in the middle ages, we do have tools to reduce problems down to manageable sizes.
Its your lack of understanding of the tools available that fails you as a good web developer. You've been caught out by the oldest trick in the book. Start modernising your design and development practices, all the tools you need are freely available.
<style type="text/css">
@import url(/path/style.css);
</style>
Or is your solution the proverbial triangular wheel, eliminating the extra bump from the square wheel implementation?
There's no specification forcing browsers to implement CSS and DOM, so this "industry standard" you refer to is meaningless. CSS is an optional item that should _never_ be relied on to display content. It is an enhancement of a proper well formed HTML document.
The only thing you should ever rely on is that the user agent can render HTML and nothing else.
The idea that CSS and DOM is an industry standard that all browsers must follow is ludicrous and misinformed. It is merely a nice to have, not an absolute requirement.
So by adhering to a recommended HTML specification does give the author a higher degree of confidence that today's browsers and tommorrow's browsers will support this document.
Heck, Lynx is a standards compliant browser. CSS is not mandatory. Javascript is not mandatory. DOM is not mandatory. Lynx is a Web browser.
Well, the problem I have is that there is no emulator for "all" browsers. I test pages with IE 5 & 6, Netscape 4.7 & 6.x, k-meleon and Lynx. I happen to have an iBook, so I also check IE & Netscape on that machine.
The real problem, at least for me, is that it is fairly inconvenient (no to mention unrealistic) to test sites with every browser that has ever existed.
I don't design out of preference to one browser over another, but the truth, there is not one web browser that interprets HTML 100% correctly. Different brands and different versions have introduced their own particular bugs.
Its true that 90% of my visits are from users with IE running some version of windows. But I do take the time to make sure someone can view it with Mac browsers (mac's IE 5.0, for example had several bugs in it when loading tables, fixed in 5.1).
The best I can do for everyone else is use a browser based on the Mozilla engine (K-Meleon) and lynx, the theory being that if the site works with these 2 browsers, it should at least be viewable for any others.
The results aren't always pretty when you aim for wide interoperability. But at least they work.
I hate flash. IMHO, the only thing more pathetic than a flash intro page, is an HTML page that says "click here to see our Flash presentation".
::.. check out some Cell Phone Reviews
Well, as often is the case, the debate has become one of semantics.
If your "XHTML" isn't valid it isn't XHTML, is it? If you are testing (as opposed to validating) with an out-of-compliance browser you don't even really know if you are writing XHMTL, do you?
And, as I said, I don't expect "you" to make any special allowances for my browser, and I certainly don't expect you to test against it. But if you don't write some form of valid HTML I can't even write a useful bug report for my browser vendor.
That makes you part of the problem. Internal site or no.
-Peter
We seem to be hung up on testing and validation. Think debugging vs. compiler errors and warnings.* Somehow it became okay for "web designers" to pass off code that isn't HTML as HTML. How did that happen? I guess the same way it almost became okay to pass off non-Java that works with J++ as Java . .
So, yes, my opinion is that web sites, even internal ones, should be based on actual, valid (and by implication validated), HTML. Are you trolling me or what? I specifically said that I don't expect you to guess what browser I am using and test against it. My suggestion, in fact, was to do more (some) validation followed by less testing. In fact, I'd wager that the over all testing cycle would be shorter if you started by validating your HTML. You clearly didn't comprehend my previous posts. Allow me to spell it out a little more clearly.
I worked at a company who's internal website was unusable in any browser except IE. (It was the same story for the corp email.) Running UNIX was a job requirement for my position. The company gave me 1 PC. I had neither the time nor the disk space to dual boot. They wouldn't buy me a VMWare license.
You tell me how to reconcile all of the above without buying another PC (or VMWare) out of my own pocket.
Explain to me how it makes business sense to go out of your way to write a web site to a specific browser, to the exclusion of all others, when you have employees who cannot run that browser. I'm not prepared to agree to disagree based on that premise.
The fact is that writing actual HTML is no harder than writing non-HTML (at least for someone who legitimately claims to be able to write HTML), and it is considerably easier to debug. The fact is that anyone who claims to be writing HTML and isn't is a twit at best and a charlatan at worst.
The reality is that people are promoted to their level of incompetence and web designers are generally at that level. Most have no understanding of the technology that is their "area of expertise" and are just GUI monkeys that can drag shapes together to make flash animations and follow "Dummies" books to make barely-working sites that are "cool" because the menus expand when you hover over them (in IE, it crashes NS4.x (which is a separate rant), and causes newer browsers to be unable to render the page due, at lest in part, to undefined use of HTML tags).
The bottom line is that most IT employees suck at their jobs, and most IT services hover around the line of total uselessness due to incompetent design and administration.
-Peter
* God this pisses me off. In my mind this is analogus to saying "Our C program throws a gazillion warnings, but it compiles with the particular sub-version of the compiler we are using at the moment and it seems to work with the test data. Any more testing would be a waste of money. Fuck it; were shipping it."
Beyond this is the fact that so many "web designers" are frustrated wanna-be artists who think that their site is a work of art, and that the media is the message. I've got news; the message is the fucking message**. I don't give a shit that you graduated top of your class in graphics design at Shitheel Technical College, I actually want to know what the number to HR is, or what's for lunch in the cafeteria or how to change my 401k. Get over yourself and give my browser the INFORMATION (That is what the "I" in "IT" stands for!) in a format that my browser, whatever it is, has a fighting chance of parsing and presenting to me however I damn well please. If I want to use FooBrowser2000 on a black & White monitor at 320x240 with a gigantic font that ain't your fucking problem, Monet.
-P
** I think I have a new sig!
If you are in technical management and you keep someone like this in your org for more than a month you need drug out and flogged. Woah! Exploitable bugs are a miniscule portion of the bugs out there (and are unlikely to throw warnings besides). I know they get all the ink, but let's be for real.
I'm just talking about quality, and how disturbing I find it that "our current dot version of IE" is the gold standard of HTML quality in corporate America. Disturbing on several levels. Ah Ha! Now we've hit upon something. The problem, clearly stated is that web sites and web browsers both approximate the specifications to widely varying degrees. This causes a less than ideal coincidence of interoperability.
There are two general approaches to resolving this problem. First, pick two (or maybe more) particular release versions of particular browsers. Write some gross approximation of HTML (or "better yet," let FrontPage do it for you) then make ad hoc changes until it happens to mostly work in both (or all) the selected browsers. Second, write actual HTML, then resolve any issues with your selected browsers by eliminating problematic elements.
The first creates an unmaintainable mess of javascript browser detection routines and hacks that are sure to break in the next few point releases of you pet browser. It also reflects a defeatist attitude about browser standard support, which I believe to be self-fulfilling.
The second attempts to add to the harmony between web sites and browsers. The only actual disadvantage of this approach is that it doesn't give web designers the opportunity to masturbate to DHTML menus.
The real point, however, is that you can only positively influence the situation by 1. writing (and encouraging others to write) valid HTML and 2. reporting failures to properly render valid HTML to browser vendors.
Key to this is the fact that I believe that this can be done not only without additional expense, but at a development savings long term. (Yes, "long term," that magical phrase that sounds like silence to a manager's ears.)
To illustrate. Before the UNIX consultant gig I've been talking about I worked as a phone drone at Dell. Dell took exactly your attitude towards web development. When IE4 was released we were forbidden to install/run it (but were expected to support it, which was fun). They worked and worked on the site, which had been designed around IE3's quirks. It seems that IE4 has a completely separate set of incompatible quirks. Finally, because of Dell's "special" relationship with MS we had to start moving workstations over to Win98 which includes IE4. What a fiasco.
Things really haven't changed that much since then. The fact is that if you use "advanced browser features" you end up locked into a browser brand and version. Who wants to be in that pickle? Or, if you'd like, who wants to go to the CFO to explain that the web devel budget needs to be doubled for the next three quarters so that the crufty IE8 site can be refactored into a crufty IE9 site?
I guess the same guy who in the late seventies wanted to go to the CFO and explain that only IBM peripherals would work with that spiffy new IBM mainframe, and cost 230% of what everybody else's peripherals cost.
-Peter
hat about Omniweb? it does a pretty good job (CSS/JS/etc). It's not IE or Moz, but apparently your javascript doesn't seem cross-platform enough.
OmniWeb's CSS and JavaScript (ECMAScript) support is not complete, and therefore, will have problems in some situations, even if the site is authored to spec.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
A lot of the craziness involving nested tables goes away if you use CSS, like W3C recommends.
It's not perfect, but I can't imagine going back to all those nested tables, single pixel hacks, etc. It's such much easier to maintain.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
I could dig back into the OLD OLD rfc's etc and make a point that would in the end be pointless, I won't.
What this discussion has done is re-enforced an assertation that given the opportunity things tend to sink to the level of the lowest common denominator.
Tables have been a persistant problem for rendering by user-agents (browsers).
The intelligent thing to do, standard, or no standard, is to be sure that your code (pages) are as complete as possible so that they survive transition to new methods (DTD, XML).
An automated XML transcriber that would convert clunky old HTML into data that could be reused in XML and SGML is likely to fail on incomplete BASIC tags.
The proper thing a browser _should_ do is to do it's best to display the information AND report an error to the viewer so that the viewer is aware that the presented display may be inaccurate allowing an informed decision about what has been presented.
subnote: HTML standards say that a browser should IGNORE invalid tags.
-Peter
The first three months of last year (jan - mar 2001) were even more interesting:
- visitors: 71% MSIE, 23% Netscape
- buyers: 49% MSIE, 51% Netscape
So again: Netscape users are 3 times more likely to buy something, than a visitor which uses MSIE.For the same period of 2001 we analyzed also the visitors for different sections of our mall:
- Fashion, T-Shirts: 80% MSIE
- Coffe-related products: 56% MSIE
- Wine: 44% MSIE
- Gourmet products: 40% MSIE
We hardly sold any t-shirts, but the mall is selling lots of wines to lots of returning customers.The numbers have now obviously shifted towards MSIE, but still Netscape is *very* important for anyone doing e-business.
Markus Senoner
I wasn't aware you could do that. Next time I'll do it that way.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Of course it isn't a standards-based technology. I never said it was. The reason I suggest flash as an alternative is that is is supported under popular browsers in Windows, Mac OS and Linux. Also, the swf file format is open, so that you can actually create swf files with other tools, such as PHP.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.