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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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
(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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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)
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
"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.
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!
Boy, imagine if your code monkeys were saying that. Gee sir, I can code this up faster if I ignore all of the design standards and just stick GOTOs everywhere and skip the documentation. Or how about: we're not bothering to stick to the TCP/IP standard on our stack, we figure that it'll work OK with Win98, and it would cost more to actually make it standards compliant. What do we need standards for anyway, most of our users are still using Win98. Nobody in the software design field would last long with that attitude, but yet we allow it in our web designers. How odd.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
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
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.
Hands down, Dreamweaver - 4 was real good, MX in some respects is better. It beats the pants off of Golive, which is really meant as the "designer's" web development tool (when the designer doesn't have access to a professional developer, for some reason or another).
DW MX will produce code using CSS and the like (even XHTML if you so desire) that will validate to the W3C validator, for the most part.
Cheers!
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!
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***
... 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.
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
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, $50,000 to the company? Which makes more sense?
When comparing percentages, it's always important to pay attention to what you're comparing to.
-Alison
Almost every site I've seen done in Flash could have been done in plain old HTML just as well. If a page has "Skip Intro" it has been badly designed, and whole-site Flash animations are almost always horrendous.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Of course, the real problem is the choice of lowball labor for the task of website development. If you hire a high school webmaster wannabe or a disposable HB1 and pay them minimum wage to produce your website, this is what happens.
We hired a supposedly reputable company to make a simple but graphically pleasant corporate website. Browser compatiblity was an afterthought for them too. They did all kinds of funny things with tables that just happened to work in IE but not with anything else. I knew we were in trouble when I saw the first prototype and it included (for no apparent reason) a Flash intro that was really more like an infomercial. Our marketing manager insisted we needed more bandwidth to support the website, which led to an interesting discussion about page bloat and it's effect on load time for dialup users.
The people who develop websites for a living need to realize that browser compatibility is one of the things that distinguishes the professionals from the wannabes.
I totally disagree with the Coward and his attitude (that's nice, calling someone a moron because you don't agree with him). Many clients say "I want these features and I don't give a #@$% 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?
There's no such thing as a WYSIWYG web page builder. HTML specifically leaves most rendering decisions up to the browser. Different browsers should render a page differently. One of the problems with WYSIWYG editors (for anything, not just web pages) is that people will do really bad formatting that just happens to "look right". Centering a line by using leading spaces or spacer GIFs, for example, instead of the "align=center" property. Looks great on their screen, but looks like hell if someone has their screen width or font set differently.
I'd also mention using physical <i> and <b> tags instead of logical <em> and <strong> tags, but that battle was lost years ago. It is an example of using the wrong markup just because it happens to "look right" on their screen, though!
If someone really wants WYSIWYG, maybe they should publish as a PDF document instead.
I'd really like to see a GUI HTML editor that does a good job using the proper tags, instead of acting like a paint program and producing crappy HTML to try to force the end user into seeing a pixel-by-pixel copy of the author's screen. I suspect this is what you meant by "standards compliant", and I'm sorry I can't help you there.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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 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.
Allot of slashdotters here spend hours just surfing the net. One easy way to help out is to surf the net with Mozilla, and everytime you encounter a site that doesn't work correctly with Mozilla... report it to the web admin! Not only that, but web servers can see and log what browsers its users are connecting with. Surfing with IE may seem harmless, but in fact, you are continuously voting for Microsoft each time you use it to surf.
Honestly, how many of you guys posting to slashdot are using Internet Explorer right now? For shame, for shame. Even if you are at work, you could still install Mozilla, as it doesn't take up much space at all and you can still use IE alongside it if necessitated by work.
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.
I guess that's what happens when you hire someone who just finished reading "Teach Yourself JavaScript in 3 Easy Lessons Using Self-Hypnosis While Sleeping". It's an easy enough language to learn, the trick is knowing when not to use it.
You claim that your site isnt targetted towards the Linux / Mozilla user, so you dont care anyway. The fallacy in your assumption is that your target audience could be Linux / Mozilla users too - and then imagine their estimate of your company when they find your website doesnt work with their browser. When I use a non-IE browser to visit websites (100% of the time when I'm not at work - which is also the time when I have purchasing power), my expectations arent too high. Basically, I need a site thats usable. The bells and whistles might be nice, but I can live without that. Sadly, I find that there are people like you out there who dont even provide that.
A case in point : Ikea - the furniture store. Just last week, I was ready to spend good chunk of money on buying a really good quality bookshelf. The site was unusable with Netscape on Linux. I spent my money at Walmart. Later, at work, I went to the Ikea site and looked at their catalog. There was a bookcase priced at $500 that I would have bought if only their site had worked with my browser. To bad for them.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
Fix the page widening bug in slashdot then get back to us about not creating cross-browser compliant sites.
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.
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?
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.
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Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/