Slashdot Mirror
Are 99.9% of Websites Obsolete?
citizenkeller writes "Zeldman is at it again: " Though their owners and managers may not know it yet, 99.9% of all websites are obsolete. These sites may look and work all right in mainstream, desktop browsers whose names end in the numbers 4 or 5. But outside these fault-tolerant environments, the symptoms of disease and decay have already started to appear.""
Just check out the Awful Link of the Day at www.somethingawful.com and you'll see that those numbers are far lower than 99.9%!
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
I think this percentage of the web sites that Iv'e developed over the years are obsolete. It's nothing to do with bad design - the owners of the site don't bother to use them effectively any longer and content becomes... obsolete.
It seems like someone has finally noticed that if you do not test your site using a wide range of browsers you do not know how your page is going to look... To most of us this problem is obvious.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
I cant even keep OUR damn site up and compliant.
.. pages that work with older browsers - are choking up the newer ones.
It worked in all the current browsers a year ago.
but with IE 6 and the new netscape coming out - you would *THINK* there would be backwards compatability.
However, I get e-mails all the time from things that are now 'suddenly' broke.
And after verifying what browser/etc the user encountered this error with - amazingly enough
*go figure*
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
Near as I can figure out, he's claiming "the web is broken, don't bother."
The book looks broken. Don't bother.
John
By today's standards I guess it comes down to whether you want an attractive site or a compatible site. Guess which one Slashdot chose.
I'm a devout CSS advocate in that it's taking web designer down a simpler route that hopefully won't get as convoluted as mainstream HTML has (So long and thanks for all the iFrames, Microsoft).
s200.org - visit it (me), love it (me).
You can read the Webmaster World article, "XHTML -- is now the time?" if you want to read a debate among professionals. There are many pros, primarily developers of small sites, that are advocating dropping NN 4 for XHTML Strict and CSS, but most developers aren't going that route.
They are developing XHTML 1.0 trans or HTML 4.01, maybe adding CSS to go foward. NN4 will be around for a while, and few people are willing to write them off simply to appease the standards gods.
In the real world, we build sites for human composition. We separate content from display with our databases and content management. HTML may be an inefficient way to get the data to the browser (XML+XSLT would be ideal, XHTML+CSS would be easier on the browser), but it works. The browser parsers are done.
Sure XHTML+CSS is easier on the browser, and that may help rendering issues. However, the reality is that old browsers will be with us for a while. Maybe in 5 years this will matter, but not until then.
Alex
99.9% of websites are offer crap. Roll the presses!
Now that the bubble has burst, fixing "obsolete" sites is not a priority. IT staffs have been cut, resources have been redirected into projects that actually turn a profit, or the "web guys" are gone all together. Nobody is around or has time to fiddle with the brochureware homepage.
And Jeffrey Zeldman will help us fix the errors or our ways! Anyone check Amazon for the price on this baby?
Who on earth is running a browser earlier than 4.x? Do you expect stuff to be rendered right if you use an older version of IE/Netscape/Opera? Do advertisers want to sell to people that refuse to use the latest and greatest thing? Don't you have to try real hard to even find an older version of any of these browsers?
Sounds like a cheap way to sell a book - and a little extra helping of FUD thrown in.
This space for rent.
Could this be because of the huge numbers of layoffs since the dot-bomb explosion? There are less people being paid to maintain and monitor the data, hence rendering it obsolete. Also, I am sure there are people who "maintain" to just keep the site alive and not actually doing anything as far a changing it since in most cases, it was not their site originally.
No!
(Hmm, I was tempted to leave that as is, but I think at least a little explanation is required. Zeldman disagrees with his own thesis in as much as he says that sites like Yahoo! are important because of what they offer not how they look. So QED a site that relies on it's content is not obsolete. Tadaaa!)
A little planning goes a long way...
Talk about sensationalism. The article just points out that many web sites have mark-up errors in them. Big deal. To go from that to saying that 99.9% of sites are obsolete is just dumb.
This is just a sensationist way to promote a book. Shame it got onto the front page of Slashdot. It will encourage more to do the same.
The web could do a lot worse than become a bit more strongly-typed, and a bit more like a programming language than a scripting language.
True, most folks don't need more than the basic mark-up for their websites, especially where personal websites are concerned. But commercial sites could stand for a much better design than they have. . . the author here makes a lot of good points when he calls out the faults of ZDNet and Yahoo for their HTML. The code is crap - thank God HTML doesn't have GOTO statements, or these sites would probably be chock full of those, too.
Let's do what we did with the blink tag. Don't just deprecate it--ignore it. Tell the browser, "Don't listen to the <font> tag, just skip over it."
Not too long ago, I re-wrote my own personal webpages using Cascading Style Sheets. It's tricky, since Netscape/Mozilla oftentimes has different ideas of how to interpret CSS than Internet Explorer. But it's easy enough to accommodate both, without too much effort. And I'm a lot happier now that my HTML code looks less like last night's dinner and more like something that someone else could read and understand.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Backwards compatibility means it works in older browsers. As Zeldman mentions, it always has some cutoff point, such as Netscape 3 or IE 2.
Forwards compatibility means that it works in newer browsers. There is not necessarily any cutoff point, as long as you have constructed the website correctly. Structural problems and other typos in the HTML, proprietary and deprecated tags, and versioning can all limit the forward compatibility of the page.
Read the article and you'll see that Zeldman is arguing that web designers should be developing with forwards compatiblity in mind. Unsurprisingly, yours is one of the 99.9% of all sites that have not.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
It's true. If you've ever spent any time looking at the html for a lot of sites, you'll see it. I'm a bit of an html nazi, so I'm probably pickier than most, but, geez, I've seen comments that were like small novels embedded in html source. Those don't need to be there.
A big source of problems is all the people trying to be backwards compatible with Netscape 4. I was a Netscape 4 user, I'll admit it, but let it die now, please. Mozilla is available and it's spectacular. It's amazing what you can do with CSS when the browsers actually support it right.
Oh, and that reminds me of my newest pet peeve... Web pages that are all div's and span's. Some people have apparently forgotten there's a whole world of html elements available. Headers, lists, list items, etc are all still quite usable... and the funny thing is, on a simple browser like Lynx (which doesn't have CSS support), their use can still result in very usable pages!
Correction .. I mean to say my employer's website, which uses asp/javascript/VB
.. my personal website uses PHP .which is just getting parsed into html for your browser}
.. if you would read the article .. even basic HTML can be corrupted ..
.. previous incarnations of browsers tolerated (and corrected) sloppy html.
.. got my CS degree in 1994 .. i never even learned visual basic in college] they are/were not always *aware* of things that html 'requires' but the browsers let them get away with.
{and technically
however
IE 5.5 will support nested tables up to 7 in depth. Netscape 6 will only support up to 4 in depth.
Netscape 4.7 does not require quotes around 'field' tags like width or height.
Netscape 6.0 can do unusual things if they are not there.
the problem (as stated in the article) is that becuase of the past 'browser wars' fighting for dominance
Now that everyone is trying (or at least saying they are) getting on the w3 bandwagon. These little 'faults' are starting to cause errors.
And since the vast majority of web pusblishers and early adopters out there have not received *formal* training in html [I for example
5 years of bad habits become 2nd nature.
sorry for the confusion.
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
TRANSLATION: Buy my book! Buy my services! Need more money!
Isn't this the same yahoo that claimed to invent the clear pixel spacer? I remember seeing that after I had been using it professionally for quite a long time (as were my peers), we had a good laugh about that one.
It seems so altough w3 offer a validator for free.
Maybe learning html in a weekend or in faster don't help keeping the quality of code at high level ; )
Transition from HTML, the language of the Web's past, to XML, the language of its future.
...And more, as this book will show.
XML is nice for many things, but I'd hardly call it the language of the future. Rather than change the world, let's let XML handle some data-bound pages and leave the simple stuff to HTML still shall we?
Support non-traditional devices, from wireless gadgets and web-enabled cell phones fancied by teens and executives to Braille readers and screen readers used by those with disabilities--again without the hassle and expense of creating separate versions.
Ain't gonna happen. Last time I checked lynx wasn't going to show images anytime soon, and neither would my cellphone. Some things just won't work for everyone. Unless of course, you want to convert your "picture gallery" to ASCII.
neither Mosaic (the first visual browser) nor Netscape 1.0 support HTML table-based layouts
So lets all just use HTML 0.1 with only <br> tags and <a> tags. Whine whine whine...!
And of course... the most important part...
In other words, buy my book so I can fill your brain with a bunch of bitching about current lack of standardization and tell you the way I think things should be done, even though chances are that things will never actually happen according to my ideals...
No browsers were harmed in the creation of this document - phorm
This is so stupid.
Do we start broadcasting TV signals in black and white again because a similar portion of viewers use b&w tv's?
Who ever uses an older browser ussually isn't a power user to start with and isn't looking for the latest fluff anyway.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Our website is not only obsolete (it was designed that way from the ground up), but it's ugly and almost entirely non-functional too! Mainly we use it to harbor and distribute viruses inside the company. It's been very effective.
Now that he's completely met his goal of total obsolescence, our webmaster spends every day looking for new ways to make our website even less useful, uglier, and more of a pain-in-the-ass to use. He's been very effective.
I can assure everybody that well over 95% of sites out there are in fact obsolite.
Lets take a closer look.
Overwhelming majority of websites out there are not HTML 4.0/XHTML 1.0 compliant. Even the sites that belong to members of w3c bend the rules which they help write. Sounds asinine? You bet.
Standards do not mean s**t anymore. Everybody is aiming for IE 5.x/6 compatibility nowdays. Cross platform understanding is dead, now that Netscape has lost the overall war. Vast majority of web designers do not even double check their sites in Opera/Mozilla nowdays, thinking they might have to do some extra compatibility coding/clean-up.
Most sites are NOT cross device/platform. You cannot view them on a PDAs of cellphones. Notice the word _MOST_
There are millions of other reasons, but I have to run to a meeting. I'll expand on this later today in more detail.
Merriam-Websters defines obsolete as:
a : no longer in use or no longer useful b : of a kind or style no longer current
If most users don't have a problem with the websites, because they are using one of the more popular web browsers, then the sites are still useful. If 99.9% percent of the websites employ these techniques, you can hardly say that the style is "no longer current".
He goes on to say that inefficient code causes Yahoo.com to add "add Pentagon-like costs to its overhead." Would anyone care to compare the annual budget of yahoo and the pentagon? I could go on, but I won't.
I COULD HEAR YOU BETTER IF YOU WEREN'T TALKING SO LOUD.
I've always considered Zeldman to be one of those self-proclaimed know-it-alls who has had little real industry experience in high volume, high technology web-sites. Most of his portfolio is brochure-ware that looks like it was done by a team of one. So I've always considered his belly-aching a little simplistic and, frankly, unrealistic in current web development scenarios.
It's easy to lament the fact that these sites aren't standard, but there are clearly reasons why most of these sites don't fit his vision of standards compliance.
For one, most sites don't have the budget to develop to standards. It's much easier to code to specifics and use non-standard work-arounds where possible then to boil everything down to the least common denominator (which standards are supported by whom). When I say easier, I mean that years of experience have instilled intimate knowledge in the seasoned web developer that almost comes as instinct now.
Secondly, all of these "standards" are interpreted differently by the different browsers, so you can't insure consistent look and feel without kludges.
Third, most of the foundations for these sites were layed out before coding to a standard was even possible, and when the mindset was not focused on any sort of standards compliance.
Finally, I've always thought that they made writing to standards compliance sound easier then it actually is, because even though it's called a standard, it rarely exhibits standard and consistent behavior across the various platforms. Most art directors and graphic designers - specifically those that migrated from print or traditional design - tend to be exteremly unyielding in the way their designs are interpreted on the web, leaving developers with few options that are fully supported by these so-called standards.
Personally, I think Zeldman needs to spend some time in the trenches working on a large site with a large development team under real deadlines for real clients. Things are rarely ideal in these circumstances.
What is it they say about armchair coaches?
How many variations of 'standards' should one have to comply with to make a usable, functional, Web-based information node? That I have to test against huge numbers of browser/platform/OS variations is a massive waste of time and energy, when I should instead be able to focus on making the information clear and the functionality flawless.
I'm not saying that we as a collective need to move back to HTML 1.0, but there has got to be a solution to increasing complexity in Web information spaces. Companies that intentionally cripple some browser/OS combinations are doing the greater community a vast disservice.
The majority of Web pages are not necessarily broken, but reflect limits on the time and energy of those who create them to keep up with 'standards' that seem to shift every other week.
It's harder to play one note and have it be perfect than it is to play a thousand and have them be close. Most people choose the latter, and hope that one note hits home.
Websites fell into the decayed, rambling mess that they are today because designers started thinking that they were engineers.
A designer will use whatever tools appear to work to get the job done, because his job is simply to make something "look" right. If a designer needs to pound a nail into a wall, and the wrench is within reach, he'll use the wrench. Hence the use of <table> elements for layout.
And engineer's job is to do it the right way and make sure it functions properly. The engineer will use the appropriate tool. That's why standards -- which define the way things should work -- should be left in the hands of engineers. (design standards should be left in the hands of engineers who are also good designers, of which there are plenty; CSS works!)
The attitude that "it doesn't matter if the page is coded properly, as long as it looks right" is akin to thinking that it doesn't matter if you use "there" or "their" when you're writing -- as long as you get your point across.
btw, Netscape 4 isn't merely old -- it's broken (hence the Mozilla team's desire to start fresh). A properly written browser will ignore elements it doesn't understand, but Netscape doesn't do that. It attempts to interpret code it doesn't get and will often return a page of garbage or crash altogether. Try testing a CSS-driven, non-Netscape4 page in Netscape 3 -- it will usually turn out quite legible!
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
99.9% of all websites are poorly designed or horribly designed not obsolete. If you adhere to the proper W3c standards AND you use a browser that is compliant with those standards then it will render correctly.
The problem lies in the fact that web-designers are either lazy or ill-educated in proper design or the more prevalent problem.. the "GET IT OUT THERE and to hell with making it right" attitude of management. Giving unrealistic deadlines and goals further damages the websites design and stability.
If your website is HTML 3.0 compliant it will render correctly on every browser on the planet or universe for the next 90 quadrillion years IF the HTML 3.0 standard is properly implimented in that browser that is viewing it....
Personally... I believe the article's overstatements and sensationalism fail to miss the point that in a sea of HTML code... almost noone pay's attention to the standards... and it's the fault of the webdesigners, browser programmers, and the users. They are the cause of the sad state the web is in today... if users would not tolerate bad designs and browsers were desinged no voilently forced (Yes, violently.. we need to get a W3C mob together with sacks of doorknobs to beat the crap out of programmers and management) to strictly adhere to the standards... then things would get better.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Here's a condensed version of the article for those who don't have time to slog through it:
1. Standards are good.
2. Bad code that happens to work in current browsers is bad.
3. Buy my book.
It's Slashdot's evil twin... SlashNOT
are slashdotted. Time to read a good book, isn't it?
As long as the website, webpage work, all I need is to see the .jpg of Tanya & Julia.
This paid my last vacation, it mi
Let me get this striaght... he sez:
- people who adopt IE only standards are stupid because the piss away 25% of potential users.
- people should abandon older standards for W3C
What is logically inconsistant about those two statements?
Authors want and write backwards compatibility in order not to piss off the friggin users who use older browsers! Get a clue pill dude.
My resolution to the whole browser incompatibility problem is a combination of CSS1 and CSS2 with valid xHTML markup. All of my layout and formatting is pulled from CSS. My pages work in extremely well in IE 5+, Mozilla, Opera, and any text browser. I do not use browser detection scripts of any sort. I simply load the CSS via the @import method and if the browser understands that (most modern ones do) they get the site as intended. If they do not understand the @import method, they get a functional but very plain text site. The main browser this effects is NS 4.7 and below. Text browsers get pure text, as intended. I test on Linux and Windows extensively, and for the most part it works on the first try. I really need a friend with a Mac to test on as I cannot afford one.
Anyway, you can do a lot with xHTML and CSS now. Your markup will be much cleaner and if you are building sites for clients they will possibly be able to maintain the site themselves. Site wide changes such as layout, colors, and menus become much easier to effect as well, especially if you use something like php requires, SSI, or mod_layout on apache.
Yeah, whatever. 83.7% of all roads are in need of repair. 99.9% of all sewers contain rats and cockroaches. Things in society are messy and are nearly always far from perfect. Someone trying to make a buck doesn't make it anymore interesting or news.
-Sean
The main problems that I see are that
1. Web standards bodies move slow and specifications are obsolete before they are approved. Take SVG. (please) Flash is a superior format with a large installed base, quality authoring tools, platform scalability, and open but expensive architecture. SVG took five years to become a reality, and is still VERY immature.
2. It's about the user stupid! For the most part, users sit at a computer desktop, with a commercial browser (IE), and use the internet. It needs to look right for THEM. The .001% of users on cell phones are doing specific activities with mostly packaged content. These users are novelty users. Portable devices have no standards as to how they display, and without this, nobody can expect a useful cross platorm "standard" that works everywhere. It's a microsoft world whiner. There is no doubt that IE is the only browser that matters. If someone else wants to make a competitive browser, it needs to be IE compliant, not W3C compliant. Microsoft took it upon themselves to create a language that works, no matter how it's written. Who cares about sloppy coding? Bandwidth is hardly an issue, and if a browser renders correctly, it should LOOK right.
in conclusion, the web standards project and w3c have failed due to their manegerial impotance, and can be safely ignored.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
<M$ Shill Mode> "... and that's why everyone needs to move to
"If Yahoo would simply replace its deprecated, bandwidth-gobbling tags with bandwidth-friendly CSS, the cost of serving each page would greatly diminish"
Ok, I use <font>. It's a very old tag, and a very useful tag. It works in all browsers I know of, and unless I was drunk when I was last at the W3C page it is/was part of the HTML standard and before CSS was the only way to change a font or its size or color.
I can't figure out how this tag could "gobble bandwidth". I also can't figure out how to change the color of a font in an old browser or webTV or anything else that doesn't support CSS.
If someone could answer these questions for me I'd be grateful.
Also, if anybody has trouble with thefragfest.com in any device I'd appreciate an email to slashdot@thefragfest.com, with the device and what's not working.
I canned a borrowed javascript news scroller when I discovered it covered up part of the other text in KDE. And if you want to see the Strogg squishing Sonic the Hedgehog, I apologize if you're using Mozilla. I'm still working on that.
-steve
I agree with you, and hope someone mod's this post up.
.. where people are HORRIBLY disillusioned with the internet. I work for a fortune 500 which produces power tools - and it has been kicked around previously the idea of actually SCRAPPING our web-based projects. Hows that for a scarey morning meeting to walk in on :(]
.. my real point is .. standards change, and 'mega-powers' in the browser world ignore them anyways.
.. is maybe 80% now. [good and bad .. means that html is more versatile .. but means that you have to recode that stuff.]
.. geez .. I have been using it at work for about 3 years now .. and for a 'universaly standard' language .. its sure been through the damn wringer.
.. and put it on a unix box and watch it puke. [and vica versa]. The standards on this 'universally adaptable' langage have changed so many times in the past few years my head is still spinning. .. i dont mean the 'Official Top Shelf writtin in stone' standards .. I mean the ones that are in the real world .. MS for example. Its not a surprise they tweek things .. but when a major player in the software dept {yeah yeah} produces something sub-standard .. how long before it BECOMES part of the standards? even if its unwritten?]
.. I think your insights are dead on here.
All the folks out there who are slamming web developers/authors really need to step back a second. [I'm amazed that my first post in this topic already has 3 "You should code better" responses.]
I have been working with 'web' pages professionally since late 97.
And man has stuff changed.
Anyone who works in the real world (not academia) understands that not only is there the pressure of a 'real world' environment - but the need to show value for a company.
Understaffed departments, unreasonable demands, HUGE goals. Those are the factors that REALLY limit the 'good code' out there. Its very hard to make sure your 100% compliant [no matter how hard you tell the board/your boss/your dept/the finance people that you SHOULD be] when at the end of the day - you have more 'new' projects in your inbox than ones you have finished.
[and before folks cry - TELL THEM ! TELL THEM ! We are in an economy now
but I digress
HTML that was 100% w3c 4 years ago
XML
I can write some xml/xsl for IIS
[clarification
So yeah
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
Zeldman asserts that the problem plaguing web developers is a desire for backward compatibility. In fact, that desire seems unfortunately missing in most websites. The real problem making websites suck is the desire to view the web as a graphic design medium.
Designers want to control every pixel of a page's layout, completely ignoring what the web was designed for. If everyone used logical markup to describe their data, later adding CSS to attempt to influence the layout, the web would be a much friendlier place. It may not look exactly the same on every browser (which, come to think of it, may be Zeldman's point), but with proper testing, it should look similar on popular browsers, and at least be LEGIBLE on others.
People need to be convinced that the web is not a graphic design medium. That's what PDF files are for. People don't try to build their sites solely from PDF files, because that just wouldn't fly. Instead they try to use the web to achieve the same goal, completely oblivious to the fact that it's a really poor tool for that purpose. Rather than embracing a new paradigm, they try to contort it to look like what they already know. To me, that's just incompetence.
Upon seeing the article, I went in search of the earliest gecko based broswer. I found Netscape 4.08 (running 32 bit, but there is a 16-bit version). Slashdot loads fine. Which is great!!
On the other hand, AOL gives me a connection reset before it loads the entire page. M$ site gives me a small unreadable font. Interesting things happen when running an old broswer.
Funny, I visited this page just this morning, and despite it being "Best of the Web '94" and written in ancient HTML (without even <html> or <body> tags), I don't think it's completely out-of-date.
The solution is simple: make it render only ok in ineternet explorer(use user agent detection scripts for this). Then report to Management that 99.9% of the user use internet explorer, so there
is no need to update the layout.
even some
websites recomment coding for the main browsers.
Unless the wireless browsers break trough, this will stay this way.
newcomers browsers will fake the User-agent field because they will not be allowed (full)acces any other way.
He made no such mistake. He places the burden of interoperability on the producers of the software, not the designers of the sites. You place the burden on the designers, not the producers. From his perspective, the software companies should make sure that their software does not make unnecessary deviations from standard, thus breaking older sites. You think that the designers should predict change and design their sites to take this into account.
I don't know which philosophy is more unreasonable.
Hello,
the world wide web is about what ever you make it. I could make my own meta language that the uses http servers. coming soon- rEml - randomErr markup language. it won't meet your standards, but it meets mine.
forcing everyone to do things your way is so... microsoft.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Who on earth is running a browser earlier than 4.x? Do you expect stuff to be rendered right if you use an older version of IE/Netscape/Opera? Do advertisers want to sell to people that refuse to use the latest and greatest thing? Don't you have to try real hard to even find an older version of any of these browsers?
This is not the issue. As I understood the article the complaint was that current web pages fail in the newest browsers because they don't accept non-standard markup as much as they used to. I.e. loads of web-pages should be rewritten to make them more standards-compliant.
I have to laugh at the assertion "For a beginner, XHTML is easier to learn than HTML precisely because its rules are consistent"--what wishful thinking! XHTML is harder to learn because there are so many more rules. Newbies, even ones who manage to make some interesting content think HTML already has too many rules...
Can someone tell me, is
<b> go and <a href="somelink">click me</a> now</b>
illegal in XHTML? Does it need to be
<b> go and </b><a href="somelink"><b>click me</b></a><b>now</b>
because A HREF tags aren't part of the valid contents of the bold tags?
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
"Here come da Slashdot!" Now YOUR website is obsolete, jagoff!
All your bandwidth are belong to us!
I know the past. I can look up the past. Since I'm not psychic, I CANNOT know the future.
A page written to W3C guidelines in 1997 should work as well (or better) in a brand new browser as it did in a 1997 browser.
I write for the lowest common denominator possible while staying as W3C compliant as possible.
If I need something not supported in an earlier standard I use a later one.
Backward compatible is easy- just write to old specs. If a browser won't render properly written code, that's the user's fault for choosing internet explorer.
Forward compatibility is impossible, and you would be stupid to even try. If an old tag works, use it. Only use the new tags when you can find no old tag that does what you want it to.
And the level of patching makes a difference. An up-to-date patched version of IE will block image from third party sites on pages that are the results of form submissions. Default versions don't always have this problem. The only way around it: iframes.
You can keep 20 boxes lying around just to test IE (or use VPC on your Mac, like I do or VNC). But any way you look at it, it's a major pain.
I work for a mid sized company but I know the web site is very out of date and has incredibly poor content. In my mind I can pinpoint this to one thing. The inability for the people who write content to get it to the site.
I know for fact there is more than enough good stories and photographs in the organization that can be published but most of the technicians who would write it (or at least the first draft) don't have the time to learn a web design program. The solution I believe is a good content management system. I've been looking into Typo3 and a couple of other content management systems. I believe once we make it easy to update then content will be less likely to be obselete.
Content Management Systems are right now the best place I can start introducing open source software at my work. We've looked at Microsoft's Content Management Server which is highly over priced for our needs and its hard to argue with the documentation and self-help community that open source software provides. I know there are other content management systems out there but the point is that for content to stay current publishing capabilities must be pushed to the people who will author it.
My servers' web stats show 96.4% of all browsers visiting the servers are Internet Explorer and/or Netscape. The only thing surprising in this article--other than the clearly fudged percentage sited--is that the author advocates, with a straight-face, that because 3-4% of a site's visitors use incompatible browsers this translates into a 99.9% obsolence rate.
Still, it's always amusing to see someone suit up, gird their horse, and charge at the windmills while proclaiming the revolution.
Rants against Netscape 4 tread well beyond the scope of CSS, but it's commonly known that any webpage that implements a fair amount of CSS1 will not be supported correctly on NN4. Better yet, if the webpage implements ANYTHING from CSS2, it's very likely that Netscape 4 won't support it. And there's much, MUCH more:
NN4 doesn't support <DIV>. It supports <LAYER> instead.
NN4 doesn't like inline styles.
NN4 doesn't fully support the height attribute (e.g., table cells).
NN4 doesn't allow onclick events on every object, such as <img> and <div> (or, layer, if we want to be technically correct).
NN4 uses its own Document Object Model, which results in very poor DOM Level 1 support, and virtually no support for Level 2.
NN4 supports the onunload event, but it does so quite unconventionally. This results in strange behavior when resizing a window: content unloads and refreshes, which is very undesirable for persistent objects, such as applets.
I guess that's a good stopping place. The list goes on, but I hope you see my point. In fact, the word "unconventional" suits NN4 quite well.
Web developers who are serious about dynamic or heavily stylized content will quickly realize that full NN4 support requires either an insane dedication to little hacks and gimmicks or a text-only version of their website. The way to present cross-platform, stylized content today is to use Shockwa^H^H^H^H^H^H^H a plugin.
The fact that 5th and 6th (and now 7th) generation browsers are 95-99% standards compliant means that bleeding-edge content will target newer browsers, and Netscape 4 will be left to rot. Five years is an insane lifespan for a browser, and if you remember correctly, Netscape 4 was just getting off the ground five years ago. Internet life moves at the speed of normal time ^2, so your five years is really like 25.
Maybe I live in a parallel universe, but in my reality, NN4 is already dead. Or, at least it has a really bad case of leprosy.
I want to do a nice little page, and do it in XHTML because it's The Way Of The Future (or I want to display a little math, which only XHTML+MathML allows without resorting to ugly inline images). The tag soup itself isn't a problem, I just close all my tags and make sure the doctype declaration says XHTML instead of HTML, as prescribed by the standard.
However, is this enough? The document is now XML, and therefore should have a <?xml declaration, if only to specify its encoding. Except that said XHTML standard says it is optional if the encoding is UTF-8 or UTF-16, or has been otherwise determined (think HTTP headers), which contradicts the XML standard, sec. 4.3.3, the last two paragraphs, one which says that no declaration and no other information means mandatory UTF-8, and the next one "It is also a fatal error if an XML entity contains no encoding declaration and its content is not legal UTF-8 or UTF-16."
So I need a declaration no matter what. But according to this page about the different layout modes in current browsers, MSIE will react to an XML declaration by switching to "quirks" mode, which is precisely what I wants to avoid by sticking to the standards... And I wouldn't want to lock out 85% of WWW users, wouldn't I?
But wait, this is only if the page was served with a text/html content-type. The right answer would then be to use the standard content-type for XML/XHTML... which should be application/xhtml+xml! Yes, "application"! Now if I use that content-type, all browsers I have at my disposal except Mozilla (MSIE5, Konqueror, Links, Lynx...) either consider the page an application and offer to save it to disk, or display it as-is! Same with the second-best, text/xml.
Okay, am I the only one experiencing this? Any point in not using good-ol' HTML4 and avoid doing (yet another kind of) horrible bugware?
No matter what the browsers support or don't support, or how many books this guy sells by ranting about how everyone else sucks.
I hate the fact that browsers are incompatible as much as anyone, but the fact that there is lots of sloppy code on the web is inevitable, because writing web pages is something lots of people do, and not all of them are competent. I don't think its something we should be complaining about.
The great thing about writing web pages is that anyone can do it. Because of this we get a lot of crappy web pages, but its also why there are so many good ones.
Everyone who I have ever worked with has generated invalid HTML that has made even current browsers crash or behave erratically in different browsers. When I realized that I was also making these mistakes, I finally learned my lesson and started using the W3C validator to make sure my web pages are valid HTML. Since then, I have not had any problem with my pages not working in any browser. This is exactly what Zeldman is asking web developers to do.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
it's lost its meaning. It's been degraded by marketing drones and morons to mean 'anything thats not the cutting edge'.
:P
Here's what it means: http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=obsolete
Hell, I still use lynx when all I want to do is snag a tarball. My linux boxes dont even have a GUI. If the content there has meaning, who cares if the web page uses the latest 'nifty tricks'. Is an ASCII text file obsolete? No, not if the information it contains is valid. Is EBSDIC (sic) obsolete? Probably. I cant even remember the acronymn
I'm constantly hearing how my P3 600 is obsolete. There's nothing that doesn't run on it. Hell, I have a router box running a P90.
Is my original NES obsolete? Or my Atari 2600, for that matter? Not as long as I enjoy playing them.
Is a 2001 model vehicle obsolete because the 2002 line is introduced? It does have a bigger cupholder, after all.
If people want to push their agendas, sell whatever they're selling, go for it. Just quit trying to redefine perfectly cromulent words in the english language to do so. Make up new ones, like cromulent. I propose 'obsolastweek' to mean everything that wasn't shrinkwrapped within the last 24 hours.
This article should read "99.9% of websites are obsolastweek because they haven't been redesigned because some propellerhead made a new widget"
Propellerheads (I can use that word because I am one), dont realise the cost of doing business. The world doesn't start over at 0 just because they invented something 'slightly better'.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Gecko is Mozilla's rendering engine, and was introduced int Netscape when Netscape started rebranding and "enhancing" Mozilla rather than doing their own. So Netscape browsers prior to version 6 aren't gecko-based, they're Netscape-based.
Oh, and that old browsers display a message correctly doesn't mean the html is correct.For example, IIRC the FONT tag was never offcial html, it for sure isn't valid XHTML (which is the official HTML successor).
they do run on a win2k box, and quite well.. Go do a google search on amiga emulation
How do you make your website temporarily obsolete (or at least unusable)? Get posted on slashdot and let the slashdotting begin.
Hmmm... Look at all those tags which have been depricated. Perhaps he should have spent more time making sure they didn't end up in the article.
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
Do you have any idea how old Netscape 6.0 is?
For goodness's sake, upgrade to Netscape 6.2, 7.0 or Mozilla 1.1! 6.0 is so old and has so many bugs, while 6.2 is almost infinitely more stable/faster/better in rendering.
Digital-Web.com found that 100% of their bandwidth was not enough when another, already obsolete, website Slashdotted them.
Andrew Borntreger
Champion of cinematic disasters
The irony is that no one beside Yahoo's management cares what Yahoo looks like. The site's tremendous success is due to the service it provides, not to the beauty of its visual design (which is non-existent).
So according to him if yahoo was just a single column of words and link, it would have the same use of it currently does. No way, people would complain, find it hard to naviagate to the services and leave. Users do care about the looks, and don't like change.
As for CSS yes yahoo still is tring to support non-CSS enabled browsers, why should they write two versions; one for CSS enabled browsers and a second for thoses that don't?
.... But outside these fault-tolerant environments, the symptoms of disease and decay have already started to appear.
Tell me about it. I just checked my webpage, and all my <br> tags had decayed into <blink> tags....
...who don't understand what HTML is.
You're not supposed to be able to. That's not what HTML does.
HTML is a content language. The whole beauty of it is that the final presentation is NOT THE DESIGNERS RESPONSIBILITY. No web site will look the same on all platforms - that's the point.
The people you are talking about are not 'web designers' - cannot be, because they don't have a clue what the web is. If you cannot accept the fact that your content can be presented different ways (including to blind people) as appropriate to each individual client, you have no business on the web. Make .pdf files or something.
I know someone will interpret this as flamebait, and someone else will probably tell me to 'get with the real world' or the like, but in fact I am just telling you the truth, and I'm quite grounded in the real world. There has been no shortage of people explaining these simple facts about what HTML and the Web are, in simple terms and moderate tones, from the very beginning - and sadly there has been an overabundance of self-styled 'designers' that refuse to understand the medium and insist on trying to make it what they want it to be, instead of what it is. REAL designers work with their medium, they take the time to learn how it works and why, and they produce designs that are appropriate to it, rather than insisting that every media work the way their favourite one does and breaking it every time they touch it. And that is something that every decent art teacher in the world tries to teach his students. Sadly, the students, particularly the ones that go into web design, don't often listen. I'm not trying to pick on you personally, but your clueless post makes an excellent example I must admit.
'Designers' that couldn't be bothered to understand the medium of the web before proceeding to dump their work on it have done great damage to the web, and that's something I happen to care about quite deeply. Your ad-hominen attacks and dismissals of Zeldman aside, he makes a point that is absolutely true, and will have real economic consequences. All that patched up proprietary spaghetti code of mal-formed HTML-abuse IS coming down. While standards compliant pages from the very earliest days of the web still display perfectly in the latest nightly builds of Mozilla, the pages written by people with the philosophy your post shows ARE becoming obsolete, very quickly. In a way, the 'designers' that can't be bothered to learn their medium have won - the new standards will allow them to do what they always wanted to do, and what HTML was never designed to do - to specify layout and 'look and feel' issues. But it will require them to do it in ways that consistent with the underlying philosophy of HTML and the web - something they've never shown any interest in doing before. I expect to hear a lot of whining from that corner in the coming years, but don't look to me for sympathy.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
The web pages are not obsolete. They are either "crufty", "poorly-written", "error-covered", or "non-compliant with standards and browsers". I don't hear anyone saying ASCII is obsolete just because it's old...in fact, it's my favourite form of verbal file. So saying that because a web page is either badly written or does not conform to every browser it is obsolete is incorrect. Bad code/tagging is simply that, and if the browser can't handle pages written to the standards, it is the browser that is broken, not the page.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I think the problem is that they are not writing websites compatible with the current standard (ie, they are only writing to the old v4/5 browser standard). Were current browswers to drop support for older standards, these old websites would not render. That's the argument, "dude".
People tend to knock down geeks who have become popular or well-respected. As for sample chapters, I think they are great! Not only New Riders, but Oreilly does a great job in letting readers sample chapters. What a wonderful thing that anyone can download chapters before a book actually comes out. In book publishing, there is an enormous lag time between assignment of the book and publication date (just look at the review of the blogging book from yesterday). By the time a book comes out, the examples are irrelevant and the standards have changed or improved.
The essay gave a good analysis of tradeoffs that web programmers have to make when planning websites. Some of the code examples here were particularly hilarious (if only because I know my websites have code that is equally ugly). This chapter, as I see it, is not advocating anything radical or controversial; it is merely restating the problem in as dramatic way as possible.
Book Previews reduce the "obsolescence" of technical books. I say, let's have more of them!
rj
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
You're talking about forwards compatibility of the HTML code (being able to render properly on future browsers, where the onus of compatibility is on the HTML author).
:) Either term works for this application as long as you are looking from the correct side of the issue.
... that works, but only if you write your code compliant 100% to standards. That means leaving out all the proprietary cruft (which became especially prevalent in the "4.0s" of Netscape and IE) -as well as- all of the stuff that doesn't work in a cross-browser environment.
:).
The parent was talking about backwards compatibility of the browsers (being able to properly render old HTML code in a new browser, where the onus of compatibility is on the browser author).
It's semantics, but I didn't start the nitpick
As for the parent that wanted browsers to be backwards compliant
This is very hard to do if you want interactive sites, or at least was until recently when most browsers began to pay more attention to standards such as the DOM (document object model).
Again, we're back to a very basic problem. Do you write your page to work in old browsers or do you use the latest standards? I'm less concerned with this (as the author of the book seems to be) than I am with the idea of writing code to today's standards and having it work in future browsers.
I as a user understand that I'm taking my experience in to my own hands if I try to load a modern page into Netscape 1.0 (but it is fun some times
However, words can't express my frustration when I have the most modern browsers available and I can't load a page because it was written for an older browser. This happened to me yesterday when trying to sign up for a service from my phone company. The reps kept saying "I see that option, you should have it to". 30 minutes later I decided to load the same page into a 2 year old browser and it worked fine. It had used some tags that were horribly broken, not in any standard, and later abandoned by all involved.
If the modern browsers had had to be compatible with everything since the dawn of the web, they would be twice as large and 4 times as buggy. I would much rather that web authors stick to published standards and not rely on proprietary tags for public pages.
From what I see, this is what the book's author meant by "obsolete" and I agree. Most websites, if locked down and not changed for 3 years, would no longer render in the browsers that are new in 3 years.
While they will naturally work to fix these issues as the new browsers are released, they would not have to if they wrote to the basics. And the problem with fixing things as they evolve is that some pages (like that damned phone company page) get ignored and by the time they're found no one knows how to fix them.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
Before:
<td width=100%><ont face=verdana,helvetica,arial
size=+1 color=#CCCC66><span class=header><b>Join now!
</b></span></ont></td>
After:
<h2>Join now!</h2>
Combined with an appropriate rule on a linked style sheet, the simpler, more structural markup above will do exactly what the cumbersome, non-standard, invalid markup did, while saving server and visitor bandwidth and easing the transition to a more flexible site based on XML."
I'm from the old school, and I like my pages to be as lean as possible. The more junk on a page, the slower that page will load. I have always been miffed at the amount of extraneous code products like FrontPage put into a page, and thus I don't use them. Heaven forbid I should type one sentence and change the font. I will end up with 2 pages of tags and 6 folders for that.
Most day's I like put apostrophe's in plural form's of word's. Stop being a fun sponge.
The people who don't have the latest and greatest hardware. There are still plenty of people who browse the web on a 486 pc (third world nations?). Ever tried to run the newest Netscape or IE on those?(if you even can)
God, I miss the days of surfing the web for info with simply designed pages. When a 14.4 modem was more than adequate. It's getting to the point that you need broadband just to surf the more popular sites (Google excluded of course) and I'm not referring to multimedia content sites.
Yeah, IIS can contract many forms of disease. Don't get me wrong, apache, being free software, is already considered cancerous.
But the problem is that most designers are NOT following these standards ,they keep using non standard features of the older browsers, thus the software writers now have a dilemma of the own making i grant.
They have two choices, Only render the pages that follow the standards and have 99% of sites non functional in there browser or allow it to work so there browser can be used today.
The only company that could currently force the updating of many sites is our favorite company Microsoft and even then I'm sure there would be resistance to a browser that only followed the standard.
So the burden had to be on the designers of the site to pull them into line with the standard, once the browsers can render strictly to the standard such as mozilla and opra etc.
Jakob Nielsen: 99% Flash is bad
Zeldman: 99.9% websites obsolete
Next web-guru wannabe: 99.99% [insert web-related sh*t here] bad
But seriously, to the average user, does it really matter? Most users don't know how the source code was generated or how it was written as long as the pretty little pictures display on their screen in a timely manner. If it gets you the desired results, people ignore the fact that it is less efficient than other means. If it weren't for half-ass workmanship and duct tape, many things wouldn't get done.
"I bet I'll get blamed for this." --Mayor Quimby
At one point durring the heyday of the .com gold rush, people threw money at companies which claimed the ability to draw increadible proffits at some undetermined point in the future. Some onsider this long term thinking, while others consider it foolishness.
Website designers have learned this lesson well. They strive to serve their business clients by allowing them interact with the largest customer base possible by using clunky non-standard, bandwidth-consuming techniques to get outdated browsers to render their stores in the desied fashion.
You really can't blame website designers for this, nor can you blame site owners. The designers are working to meet their client's requirements, which is to make money, by being accessible to the largest percentage of the available customer base.
The fault, dear brutus, is in ourselves. Website visitors are at fault, for using browsers which promote this non-standard architecture. Certainly no one will use a browser which is strictly standards complient such that any non-standard website would not be visible, because that would diminish the user's internet experience; but this is what's required. We need to force site owners to become standards compliant, which will in turn improve efficiency throughout the net.
If only, bandwidth were more expensive, this problem would already have been fixed, as the bandwidth costs of ineficient non-standard site design would be far mor visible.
It really is a foustian bargain. Reduce revenue by modernizing your website thereby making it inaccessible to older browsers and thus reducing your potential customer base and save money on bandwidth usage, then wait for web users to upgrade their browsers so as to be able to view your site, and build up your custoemr base once again; or, cater to every antiquated browser in existance, so as to maximize your potential customer base, and accept the increased bandwidth costs.
In the long term, with a little short term pain, this problem will be resolved, but in the short term, there really is no good answer.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
"99.9% of all websites are obsolete."
Ergo,
"0.01% of all websites render nicely in Lynx."
Seems to me there's some confusion between "obsolete" and "usable." Those websites that will be obsolete with fubar 6.x are the same ones that cram a lot of visual shit down your throat, making you work very hard to extract the useful information out of the noise.
Fight designed obsolescence, and write text-based web content with a minimum of static content. Otherwise, don't bitch when fubar 6.x fubars your site.
are 0.1% of website authors Jakob Nielsen?
digital-web.com is down. Talk about obsolete...
I use XML output from PHP ran through my XSL stylesheets to produce the final output. The stylesheets get fed the users language and user-agent along with the output and easily produce custom output for all devices without any significant coding. I will be glad when (if?) HTML is finally replaced by good XHTML support but overall keeping up with these things is not difficult if you design your site well. Also since XSL checks the HTML output it produces it eliminates many of the problems commonly found in output code. The biggest problem is trying to deal with user inputted data and that is more of a language problem than a formatting problem.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
So? At least if you specify a DTD you are showing that you understand there are issues and have made a rational choice in selecting one.
If you bother to adhere to a particular DTD, the odds on your site being viewable accross a range of browsers increases dramatically.
Yes, you will never get 100% compatibility, but you will get damn close.
If you insist on features outside current DTDs, then use server side browser detection to serve either the site as you intended, or a heavily stripped down totally cross platform version.
.02
cLive ;-)
cLive ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
...doesn't display properly. I'm using Netscape 4.76 and the Yahoo image overlays some of the text. But I think I get the point anyway.
GIGOwiz
All those who believe in psychokinesis, raise my hand.
Shameless self promotion
Let me get this striaght... he sez:
- people who adopt IE only standards are stupid because the piss away 25% of potential users.
- people should abandon older standards for W3C
What is logically inconsistant about those two statements?
Authors want and write backwards compatibility in order not to piss off the friggin users who use older browsers! Get a clue pill dude.
IE only extensions force people on other platforms to change platforms. Standards compliant HTML forces people to upgrade their browsers. Which would you rather do??
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
Yeah, that's right. It was the fault of all those developers who didn't have the forsight to see the standards that would eventually be approved years later. What were they thinking?
It didn't have anything to do with the standards process being slow, or diverging from the needs/demands of the market (HTML 3.0). And even after the standards were finally approved with buy-in from the browser makers, no blame rests with both Microsoft and Netscape for serious bugs in their 4.x browsers, often causing their browsers to crash on many CSS features.
Yep, those developers were at fault. They learned bad techniques, when those techniques were the only way to accomplish what their customers wanted. They continued to use them when the 4.x browsers would crash on standard-based markup. Even after the really serious problems were cleared up in IE5.x, they still used their old tricks. And now, damn them, that 6.x browsers have been available for only a year or so, they haven't redesigned all the world's websites to be fully standards compliant (and broken on 4.x and some 5.x browsers which are still in heavy use).
Yep, if anyone's to blame, it's those developers.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
I do not think designers should predict change. I think designers should simply use recent standards and ensure that they adhere to these standards by using validators such as the W3C HTML validator. Absolutely no predicition is necessary!
Please re-read the article, as it is very clear on these points.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Well, if you coded to standards the first place (with CSS, try relative positioning, and define the "left" attribute by how many pixels to the left you want it to be) it would look great with Mozilla, IE4-IE6 and Opera 5-6. All other older browsers will still see the image. On the other hand, all future browsers will render the image correctly.
All this "invisible GIF" stuff is deprecated. There's already webstandard solutions to tables, invisible gifs and the like...
If there is not much time to fiddle with the pages, then consider running a utility to fix them for you.
Try HTML Tidy. (www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/)
Or if into Java, try SmallHTMLParser's ConvertFolders utility. ( www.room4me.com/software/SmallHTMLParser.htm)
How about instead of requiring the hundreds of millions of web browsers out there to make their lives more difficult, we instead request that the minority of weirdos who choose to use non-standard browsers simply start using either IE or Netscape?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Zeldman responded to a lot of the points brought up before in this MetaFilter Thread. (This story is about a week old.)
What Mr. Zeldman is promoting is forwards-compatibility. The traffic for 4.x browsers is finally receeding; most people (thanks to AOL or Windows upgrades) are on IE 5.x+. If you write your sites so that they're still readable in 4.x, even if they don't look good, that's good enough. (Explaining to PHB's that it would take three times the time it's already taken you to code for 4.x also helps, even if it's stretching it a bit.) What you need to look at is foward compatibility. It's like programming for APIs - you knew that the API calls for win95 weren't going to go away and break your code in 98. Well, the tag formats for XHTML-1.0Trans and CSS 1.0 won't break in the future. That's why we have standards.
Now if IE would just fix it's damned box model...
--
Vote for your hopes, not for your fears - Vote Third Party
I run a fairly sucessful website.
:
Like many businesses money is tight so guess where I'm goign to spend it when it comes to testing, certainly not on Sparc/Solaris9 combination.
So far from 350,000 hits this month I've had the following Browsers
MS Internet Explorer (Versions) 94.9 %
(MSIE/3.xx 0 % MSIE/4.xx 1.9 % MSIE/5.xx 56.6 % MSIE/6.xx 41.3%)
Netscape (Versions)No 2.7 %
(Mozilla/3.xx 1.1 % Mozilla/4.xx 55 % Mozilla/5.xx 43.7 %)
Unknown 1.9 %
Opera 0.3 %
Konqueror 0 %
ANT Fresco 0 %
iCab 0 %
WebCollage (PDA/Phone browser) 0 %
LibWWW 0 %
Microsoft Mobile Explorer (PDA/Phone browser) 0 %
Lynx 0%
Using the following OSs
Windows 37.4 %
Windows 2000 17.3 %
Windows XP 17.1 %
Windows Me 10.9 %
Windows 9.4 %
Windows 4.9 %
Mac OS 1.2 %
Unknown 1.1 %
Linux 0.2 %
Sun Solaris 0.1 %
HP Unix 0 %
Warp OS/2 0 %
Windows 3.xx 0 %
OSF Unix 0 %
Irix 0%
RISC_OS_4.03 0%
Thats at least 15 browers on 17 OSs.
How am I supposed to test my pages for all those expectations?
My HTML passes 4.01 Validation but I can't be sure it displays on those browsers.
I know it displays in Lynx okay so that's about the best I can offer.
I've had one email in the past year saying 'your site doesn't display properly' and that was IE on NT4. A product I can't buy and test with even if I wanted to. (except through warez of course). HP Unix presents a better challenge.
What would you suggest is my *obvious* solution?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
But actually Mozilla is still quite forgiving as long as you don't specify a doctype you haven't actually written to. IE isn't really so bad, either.
HTML should return to its original strength of simplicity. HTML code should have a minimum of noise, and maximize content. Good design is not the same thing as gimmicky fluff. Plan words with a few pictures can tell almost any story worth telling among human beings. Good design gets out of the way and lets the words and pictures speak. It's only the gimmicks which go obsolete, never good design.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
definition from m-w.com:
obsolete
Function: adjective
1 a : no longer in use or no longer useful b : of a kind or style no longer current : OLD-FASHIONED
These old browsers and the people that stick by them are obsolete. Get out of the old and stop reading crap like this.
Must-not-watch TV!
I do agree with you (and a number of the other people that have kind enough to reply to my post)... the upgrade path is rediculously short any more. I remember when you could count on upgrading an OS (Windows anyone) every two years and now I'm patching twice a week if I want to run it? All I'm saying is that I don't expect a corporation to cater to older or "substandard" versions of browsers. It would be nice if the new ones did what they were supposed to, but they don't. Will XML and CSS and SOAP and other acronmyms save the day? Probably not. What I do expect, however, is if I do have the latest version of a browser, that it formats reasonably well. I run Opera 6.* myself, and I am amazed at how much nonstandard stuff is out there that I wouldn't picked up on through our corporate IE browser set up. On my Linux Box, I also run Opera (paid) after I was a little unsatisified with Konqueror's performance. And since I design pages on the side, I've been doing my small part to make everything look reasonably good on 4.x+ browsers....
This space for rent.
people who adopt IE only standards are stupid because the piss away 25% of potential users.
e r.php
this is not true: http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2002/August/brows
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
We spent considerable effort in converting our site to follow the W3C standards and validating our pages, but still had to keep SOME (maybe 0.1%) hacks in place to make sure that our site was at least usable by older browsers.
You can't be 100% compliant without alienating some of your customers. I guess the take-home from the article would really be that you should try to follow standards everywhere you can.
Patrick Carroll
Iocomp Software
http://www.iocomp.com
The rule of parsimony, Occam's razor holds in this thread. Content rules the net. The internet is a network and as a network the principle of KISS applies. What is wanted, what is preeminent is unadorned information. I celebrated the dot com crash and revel in the return of sites primarily textual. The push on the part of developers to bells and whistles brings to mind the Pentax advert for their great 6x4 camera... 'bells and whistles are for clowns'. My research is interfered with on a daily basis where site developers want to cloak info in bells and whistles. Those who need to impart info with a flourish, letting the bells ring out and the banners fly, are akin to some mad scientist intent on tatooing his neurons and tie dying his neural clusters to better celebrate his intelligence. On the internet the most pernicious and ubiquitous bug is humbug .
Wow, rereading this I'm well on my way to curmudgeondom
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
When I first started learning HTML, web design, CGI scripting, etc. I remember that the simplicity of HTML tags and the fault tolerance of browsers were the most amazing things I had ever seen. Never mind that you could put text, images, and hyperlinks on a worldwide public network -- the fact that most of your stuff displayed right, even if some tags weren't exactly to spec was incredible. No computer scripting or compiled language was ever like that before -- they freaked if a single character was improperly placed! This was a whole new world of smart programs that made it easy for every-day people to do important (or not so important) stuff. This was a mini-revolution in it's own right.
If fault tolerance goes away (mostly because it's hard for the programmers to implement), we'll be losing one of the greatest benefits of the Web: it's ease of publishing for the common person.
Give serendipity a chance.
99.9% of new web browsers are obese. What this guy essentially wants is for me to upgrade my browser so he can use his fancy tricks. But he doesn't want to help put pressure on browser makers to get their browser under 8MB.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
That would STILL shut out a different 25% of the population from browsing. If those people haven't let anyone pry Lynx 1.0 from the fists by now what the hell makes you thing they will?
Try looking at the bigger picture. He's advocating screwing a different set of the population, period. Doesn't fucking matter what the reason is. Except that to him it'll be screwing the "right" people or something.
Fuck that.
The problems this article discusses were created by browser implementation problems and limits of the earlier HTML versions. Netscape in particlar, was terrible to write HTML for. While Microsoft actively rev'ed IE, Netscape did little, and the problems of building Web sites to support the current users increased. When NS6 arrived, it was actually worse than NS4!
There is much redundant code because NS and to a lesser degree, IE, didn't do things like inheritance of formats correctly. Developers were forced to try various hacks until they found something that worked. Having gone through the pain, and with new stuff to do, the developers were not willing to remove what worked. Browser developers made certain that the old pages worked, even if they were incorrect, because to fail to do so was to lose users and gain a terrific amount of ridicule in various publications and online sites (including Slashdot).
The issue is if you run a public Web site, you have to support what the public has, not what is convenient for the developer. And the public takes time to update their browsers. The pace of update has quickened over the last 12 months, but before that you had to code for NS4.0x or some real per centage of users couldn't visit your site. IN particular, the South American and other foreign markets were very slow to upgrade their browsers. Sites like Yahoo, who are truly global, must support just about all of the terrible, broken browsers that exist.
With the cutbacks in IT spending, little money exists to make changes to Web sites that are not absolutely required. Changes are made to fix terrible problems and do things to bring in new revenue. That is it. I also think this author really underestimates the effort to build a great site that supports all the required browsers and is cmpleeing to users. Anyone can make a home page, making a great site is hard and expensive. Look how few great sites there are.
Has everybody forgotten Xanadu?
I'd love to obsolete (anything)TML for a xanadu structure. The internet would be more useful, in that all sites would be pay sites. It would be against your decision only to leach, but if you give also, then it costs nothing. The cool thing is that you pay for your demand for content. Not more or less.
Er... 99.9% ? Whenever I see a number like this, I can't help but strongly suspect that it was pulled out of someone's ass.
Is this an estimate ? How was it arrived to ? What is the error of margin ? Could we see the numbers please ? Did I miss them ? Sorry if that's the case.
lone, dfx.
10% is still a sizable number and websites that adopt IE only standards are in fact hurting them self's more then any one else. Its in the websites best interest to be available to as many people as possible and in such a completive forum 10% can really make a difference between success and failure.Also IMO this 10% will only get larger.
I dunno... a few years back I worked for a (now declining) .com e-commerce site, and we had a team of people for QA who specifically tested all the new pages for the site on IE5, Netscape 4.x (including both on a Mac as well)... and if we received a call or email from a customer that anything didn't display correctly on whatever browser they were using, we would immediately investigate it and fix it.
There *are* limits... we certainly were'nt going to be jumping through hoops to try and support a user accessing our site with Lynx in text-only, but if a user had called up about it not working in Opera under Linux, it certainly would have been investigated.
I *still*, personally, prefer Netscape. In fact, I have Netscape 4.7 installed on my machine. I think IE's interface *sucks*, but sadly there are way too many people out there that code their sites for IE only. Sad, when I'm on an engineers sun workstation trying to access the vendors site to download a patch for their software, and I have to go to a PC and then FTP it over, because their site does not support the Sun's Netscape brower properly. Especially when we are paying them like $40K/year on their expensive yearly-licensed engineering software (for the Sun/Solaris Sparc OS).
I always thought that the idea of the world-wide-web was that it should be accessable from anywhere, any platform. Instead, people code their sites for PC's with IE... admittedly 90% of the market... and screw the people with other systems.
The HTML code for a web page should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.
I wouldn't win any prizes for my HTML coding, but I know that when the code looks convoluted and evil I'm probably not doing the job right.
Insert witty sig about inserting witty sig here, here.
Now we get to the web where in many cases the presentation is creative and graphical. Zeldman gives an example a site's "Join Now" text being inside font tags which are inside a table. He suggests replacing this with <h2>Join Now</h2> and add CSS stuff for h2. This is wrong! The text is not a heading, and <h2> should not be used. It is simply some text. The correct markup way to do this is to define a class p.joinnow in the CSS, and in the body use <P CLASS="joinnow">Join Now</P>.
This is utter insanity. You could end up with a separate class for almost every element. A markup language just doesn't make sense for complex graphical presentation where most elements are one-of-a-kind. It is just wrong. Most of the web doesn't fall into this category, and html-css is the right way to describe the content, but some of it does, and trying to squish it into a markup language causes many of the problems we see now.
And most of the time, it's not doing anything useful. Who needs that "abstraction"? Programs that do something with web pages other than render them (and I've written a few) don't find this stuff helpful, because you can't rely on it.
What we needed was a standardized way to download fonts, not all this CSS crap.
That's what HTML is supposed to be, not what it is. I agree that it would be sort of nice if everyone could use the standards (not so easy, since browser support is poor) and use it as a content-markup langauge, but really we want to just make pages that look nice and display correctly. Standards don't help with that until they're implemented and working. HTML right now is a loosely collected set of folklore about what you can do to get a consistent look across browsers.
He lost credibility with me when he said the following:
They mean using non-standard, proprietary (or deprecated) markup and code to ensure that every visitor has the same experience, whether they're sporting Netscape Navigator 1.0 or IE6.
Usually, using proprietary code will not let you have the same experience in every browser. It more then likely has the opposite effect.
Of course, if people used the tools available to them, sites would know that they aren't to spec. Just try running this page through the w3c validator. (Note this page claims it's HTML 3.2) (Ctrl-Alt-V for those using Opera for Linux with PC keyboards, else put the url in validator.w3c.org, I think it is.)
The last time I checked, HTML is still an SGML application.
HTML 4.01 is an SGML application. However, the newer versions of HTML are XML applications. They go by the name XHTML.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Art isn't about pretention, or about ego. Real art eschews both.
By not trying to be pretentious, you've at least come closer to producing some than most people that try ever do.
I won't say if it's art or not, that's a judgement best deferred to the next generation, but I do like it. Nice clean code, the 'art' meaning the screenshots is well presented, flanked by the explanatory text just right, and if I were blind and came across that in my browser, obviously I wouldn't see the images, but I'd have no trouble understanding what the page was about.
Keep up the good work.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Can you say "Old Machines" and "Default Install"?
.... I finally got semantic layout/CSS when I saw it, and the upside was that it degrades perfectly.
On some computers, you'd be insane to even try running a 5.x browser. Browsers are some of the most memory and processor hungry applications your average user can come across. On one of my machines (and old Performa 6116), even running a 4.x browser is foolish. I'm using Netscape 3.x when I run anything on that thing. Or Lynx. Same with a Win 95 PC.
The real point shouldn't be to abandon older browsers: it should be to fight layout complexity. XHTML + CSS is a wonderful tool in this game. I love Blue Robot
Wisely designing to standards doesn't abandon the older browser... rather, it means you can use Netscape 1.0 or Mosaic or Lynx to use a page, and when you use Mozilla 1.0, you get all the purty layout and bells and whistles.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
to grow old, become disused; no longer in use or no longer useful.
He is saying 99.9% of all sites are no longer in use, no longer used? Thats not true at all..
In the article he was spouting off about css and xml and the future of the web. What does this have to do with obsolescence ?
Silly. The reason that you don't see other browsers on the list is because they have tried once and cannot get what they want so never tried again. Also, Cell and PCS users don't go there because they are not on the list of supported sites that they can click on, and 99 percent of those users do not know how to key in the web address directly. Also, it is VERY foolish to accept webstats as real numbers. Please go back a couple years when IE still reported itself as "MOzilla" and then consider that MANY non Microsoft browsers will claim to be IE in order to fool the site into giving it content, since stupid developers are doing IE only sites. Think, man, think! The article is spot on!
In different words, browsers will just have to deal with it. New information becomes old information, and new media become old media. Unless there is a really good reason, tools for accessing the old information better be able to cope with it. Sorry, guys, but "bad HTML" is here to stay. Maybe the badness can be isolated by making it a separate program that gets invoked by browsers when needed and translates bad, old HTML to shiny, new HTML.
(* [so you can't insure consistent look and feel without kludges.] You're not supposed to be able to. That's not what HTML does. *)
I have told the boss(es) multiple times what the tradeoffs were. They didn't care. They were focused on the here and now and target what the CEO will see, and NOT what the consumer will see because the CEO has more pull than comsumers WRT career advancement.
What PHB's *really* want is a coordinate-based brochure-building language/protocol. The problem is that it is really really tough to design a brochure that will look okay on multiple monitor sizes unless you make a seperate design for each size, which is expensive. Plus, most browsers don't tell their screen/window size because it would be a privacy violation (small == poor in some e-store's minds).
If you do it right, it would be very expensive, and they don't want to fork over the bucks. The choices are:
1. Do it right.
2. Hack it up so it looks pretty in majority of browsers, screwing the rest.
3. Keep it simple (lowest common denominator)
To PHB's, #1 is too expensive. #3 does not please the CEO (who only checks it in his/her own browser). So, they usually go with #2.
I don't know if *any* technology can be sufficient. It is a people problem, as the parent attests.
Whenever the tradeoffs are sufficiently complex, PHB's screw it up badly. That is a fundimental rule of business that we must learn to live with.
Table-ized A.I.
This is so radically inaccurate... Cite a better source than "thecounter.com" next time, like a poll of MAJOR websites: Google.com, Yahoo.com, Cnet.com, Fedex.com, etc. The fact is, most hits go to a very small percentage of websites.
<Amanda`> I just went out to the parking lot in my bathrobe to exchange warez CDs.
Silly boy. The point is that the W3C standard is *specifically designed* to work across platforms. It may shut out some people using Netscape 2... but who uses that? Very nearly nobody.
It won't shut out people using something like Lynx. The standard is *specifically designed* to mandate text-only support as an accessibility issue. Any decent webdesigner knows how to be compatible with Lynx-style browsers without doing an entire "text-only" version.
And that's the second main point. Let's review:
1. Standards *increase* access.
2. Standards make it *easier* to write pages.
What's the problem?
postscript: I've yet to see an IE-only "extension" which does anything useful. Not many even do anything non-harmful.
Who on earth is running a browser earlier than 4.x?
Me. Lynx anyone? Not anyone around here who uses a shell is there? Also, old Macs - SE, SE30, etc - can dialup, and there are ethernet adapters for them. They make good, cheap, space-saving machines for simple access. Use Nifty Telnet for shell access, older versions of Fetch and Netscape 2.0.
But the important messge here is that:
The web is about content, not format.
Remember this. The whole point to html is that it's a *markup* language, not a *forced formatting* language. The browser takes the content and displays it in the manner of the user's choosing.
This seems to have been lost in the corporatization and control of the 'net.
Remember the good old days? When the web was about content and not about spam and marketing? That's where I live. I don't want to see blinking and flashing and animated ads and popups. If I can't see your content on lynx or with a 4.x or pre 4.x browser, you have lost my eyeballs and any potential to recieve my money. No popups on lynx.
The same goes for html formatted mail (there is a special place in hell reserved for people who send html formatted mail.) If I can't read it in pine, I don't even care what it says. Send me text if you want me to read it. (No web bugs and stuff that way too.)
In short, the goal is to get your content to other people, stop being such control freaks about how it is displayed. Write to the lowest common denominator, be creative with what is available there and you save much time, aggravation and money. -- And I'll be able to see your content.
NEVER FORGET --
The web is about content, not format.
Join the Any Browser Campaign and make your pages 'content enhanced'.
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. - George Orwell or George Bush?
Yes the various browsers and versions render HTML differently, making us developers do bad things, but how can you expect the web to be 100% standards compliant? And by whose standards? the W3C? Microsoft? AOL? the United States government? IBM?
How do you create a medium of information that is accessible to people of all languages, disabilities, cultures through any sort of digital device? Who decides how to implement it?
It's a world wide web dumbass (Zeldman), and it's a wonder it works at all. Like any sort of large scale human project, sacrifices must be made to get the thing in action. I would venture to say that the state of the web is pretty good today, but as always, is under construction.
Hecubas
I find it amusing that the author chooses to berate the website owners who choose to support only IE, "thus excluding 25% of their potential customers", while at the same time he says it's a waste of money to have backward compatability. If web sites were not backward compatable, they would be "excluding X% of their customers" who didn't run the latest version of the browser, or couldn't due to legacy hardware restrictions, etc.
th0th
"BadTimes will make you fall in love with a penguin" - Laika
The clients of my HTML application(s) are primarily school systems. Big rich ones with the latest greatest mostest wonderfullest hardware that money can buy (or that corporations can donate) down to dirt-poor schools with 3 Mac 030's in the back running the Oldest Browsers Known To Man. My job is to insure they they ALL can properly access the system. It is not my job to tell my clients "you have to upgrade or you can't play". I'm not being paid for that. I'm being paid to develop a system they can all use as-is.
I guess my argument with Zeldman's "conform to the standards or die" approach boils down to the fact that the browsers used by my clients often do not conform to the standards. Hey, it would be nice to be able to use CSS or XHTML. I'd love to. Make my life a WHOLE lot easier. But then I'm not meeting the requirements of my clients, which is the whole reason I'm doing this in the first place.
--matt
HTML originated as a description of a hyper-text document in SGML, and browsers emerged as client-specific platforms for displaying those documents. I think it's time to admit that this particular comination isn't up to the task of delivering lightweight client interfaces for our applications, as much as we'd like to force them into that role.
I think it's time to look at other cross-platform methods of delivering interfaces.
They're the two who started the trend of making their own 'standards'.
When I make a page, I make sure the information is availible in Lynx. If you can't read it in Internet Explodagator 17, too bad - use Lynx then.
I think this guy is forgetting something.
The web == information != blink tags and pretty pictures.
"And I'm a lot happier now that my HTML code looks less like last night's dinner and more like something that someone else could read and understand." ...and who the fuck cares?
Designers are castigated for their attempts to achieve websites with a consistent appearance... yet in the realm of foolish obsessions, that pales next to the sort of code-fetish you're describing.
Code is for browsers, not people. Last I checked, not a lot of people got information off the web by downloading html files, opening them in a text editor, and parsing the html in their head. So exactly how have you improved your website by making the underlying code "more like something that someone else could read and understand?"
Maybe they could read it an understand it... if they ever felt the need to. But did you ever stop to think that the html is only a means to an end, rather than an end itself?
If it makes you happier, that's just super. But let's not start reducing functionality and breaking old sites just so everyone else can get the chance to experience your little clean-code warm fuzzy feeling.
The websites I design contain links to the W3C HTML and CSS validators. The links might look something like this
XHTML 1.0 CSS
and I put them in the site template, so they appear on every page. These are referer links, which mean that they check the page you are linking from. When I finish making changes to a page, I click those links in sequence, and if my page doesn't pass, I fix the XHTML or CSS that's causing the problem.
Depending on the type of page, I might make them bold and obvious, with the checkmark graphics that W3C offers, or I might hook them to a bullet or a period so they're obscure and don't become a design element.
I use absolute positioning to do layout that people often do with tables, and my sites look fine in anything from IE to lynx to Mozilla.
Ellen
mods metamodded as "Unfair"
In my view, if you aren't using .Net your site is obsolete and experiencing decay. I encourage all those who are still using legacy technologies, like php, java, and perl, to re-assess their enterprise e-strategy. What companies need to do to combat this code rot is to implement .Net and gain 1 degree of separation between MS and their e-infrastructure.
.Net or .Obsolete its your choice.
My web site is designed for reading
I don't design web pages for employment. I do it for fun.
Oh yes it is, it just happened to be based on version 0.6 of Gecko/Mozilla.
Netscape 5 wasn't based on Gecko, but it was never released.
This infuriates me with its ignorance. I've never seen such a piece of sensationalism posing as technical information. Well, outside of Redmond of course.
The author defines the very nature of the Web and then asks us to be concerned. It's like writing a book about an airplane and saying "When you get in an airplane you're actually traveling hundreds of miles an hour thousands of feet in the air strapped to tons of explosive. This is horribly dangerous!"
Held up as a Holy Grail of professional development practice, "backward compatibility" sounds good in theory. But the cost is too high and the practice has always been based on a lie.
Backward compatibility does not mean supporting every single browser that was ever created since the dawn of the Web. How compatible to be is defined differently by each project. My decision on a small project may be to only support IE 5+ for Windows, but that decision would make no sense at all for Yahoo!.
And the cost is too high? How is too high defined, and for whom? If I can spend $10,000 in development costs to make my site available to another 5% of my target audience and I can predict that this will increase revenues by $100,000, then it makes sense to do so.
As a Web developer, allow me to generalize when I say that we do code to standards, standards being defined as what most people are using, whether those standards are open or closed, blessed by a standards organization or just de facto. I could code my sites to exactly follow the formal standards instead of the practical standards. In fact I have. Then I've watched the site not work across multiple browsers, even if I'm concerned with nothing other than IE 5 or higher and the latest Mozilla/Netscape on Mac and Windows. That's 97% of my traffic right there. If I don't implement a non-standard workaround, I lose my audience.
Whether the interests of a particular site are commercial or not, the goal of that site almost without exception is to be available to as many people who want to view it as possible. I'm going to code in whatever way maximizes my audience. If 83% of the people coming to my site use IE (current stats for my site, YMMVIANALFIIK) and IE doesn't follow the standards, I can't decide to alienate those people if it means I lose money, or fail to get my message out, or Mom and Dad can't read my blog.
So what am I supposed to do? Call Microsoft and complain that they better straighten up and fly right, because my 2400 page views a day say so? Or as an end-user maybe I should stop buying IE and send them a financial message. Oh wait...
Thanks, I had a big laugh.
NN4, IE5, IE4, WebTV, etc. my customers use them. I hate jumping through hoops, but at this point we can write an HTML 4.01 transition + CSS 1 page that renders perfectly on IE and Mozilla browsers, really well on Netscape 4, and should degrade nicely on WebTV.
The more people using a modern browser, the better an experience the users will have. My site isn't big enough to warrant separate NN4 pages, just separate stylesheets.
However, people like you help me out. I won't pass on their business, it isn't my place to tell them what to use. Webmasters like yourself make the web more painful for NN4 users. HOPEFULLY that will cause them to upgrade (although it is more likely that they'll stop webbrowsing, which would suck), but who knows.
I'll leave the upgrade war to others.
Alex
Hello, world!
Alot of books about programming and administrating are produced by New Riders. Their books are cheap also so I buy them instead of Oreilly books. Its good to see them get some Slashdotting. =)
http://www.newriders.com
Pixels keep you awake!
I heard Zeldman speak at a conference, and he was quite aware that in many situations it wasn't possible to code to standards (if you had to worry about layout in older browsers, etc.) He knows that the job ultimately dictates what choices you have to make.
I think he feels his role is to try to push folks towards something better than what we're used to working with. When you're leading the charge like that, you don't emphasize everything you *can't* do yet.
Personally, while I'm not going to ditch stuff like table-based layout for quite a while, smaller changes like moving to CSS for fonts can offer a substantial benefit in the short term.
Obsolete would imply that they had a function at one point in time.
Maybe "usless" would be a better term.
sine puella vita suget
"99.9%" is still being discussed at whatdoiknow and 37signals and a new discussion has popped up at Metafilter. While the diversity of informed opinion is wonderfully thought provoking, there's also a fair amount of misinterpretation, as always occurs when the topic of web standards is raised, and especially when it's raised by us.
Some think standards are anti-democratic (see above). Others proffer the bizarre notion that using web standards means your site won't work correctly in IE6. Still others think content management systems make front end design irrelevant, which is like saying you don't need tomatoes when you have cucumbers.
Some comments have more to do with perceptions about WaSP or opinions about your humble narrator than with anything stated in "99.9% of Websites are Obsolete." Notice the number of people who complain about pure CSS layout, even though the article says nothing on that subject.
When you begin to break through with a message, some people form an opinion and stick to it. It becomes part of them, like a jacket they wore in college that no longer fits. Eventually a new girlfriend persuades them to update their wardrobe.</q>
http://www.zeldman.com/
Most people think that browsers who support standards are not here yet. Jeffrey Zeldman believes that he personally should work his ass off to bring these browsers to us as fast as possible. Some people like to lay on their asses and wait, others like Zeldman are trying to do something about it.
Google says the same. 25% is *for sure* not the percentage of people on the internet not using ie. it's much less.
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
And these warnings:
That said, I can tell you from several years experience in high end web development that it just isn't that difficult to write a web server piece in any number of back end languages (CGI, Perl, PHP, Python, JSP, Server Side Java Script, ASP, to name the main ones...) that first checks the incoming http request and then responds with content tuned to match the rendering abilities of 90-95% of the user agent variations out there. It's even easier and bandwidth saving than using "graceful degradation techniques", because it relies on template programming to "pick" the right page to be returned. For example, if the "user agent sniffer" detects a Browser supports CSS? the back end program should use page X built from the CSS template... Alternatively, if the user agent only supports , use the font only template... Etc. Etc. Etc. and this can be taken to ridiculous extremes.
However, most variations of this technique which I have seen essentially require the page author to make numerous versions of the same page, which is also a waste of time and data space. Fortunately, there is a middle road, which is to design a site so that the content is author driven, but the formatting is programmatically driven. [If this sounds like I am describing something alot like the /. code then you're catching on...]
So I have no mercy in my analysis for large companies who don't do this on their content driven sites, nor patience for authors who seem to think that the latest greatest US-centric browsers are what we should all be writing to.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
XHTML 1 is HTML 4.01 with minor syntax changes to make it well-formed XML. But it still renders quite fine under older browsers. It may be missing some extra formatting defined through CSS, but the meaning of the content and the page's usability is maintained.
User agents have usually been programmed with the command to ignore what it doesn't really know about. This is why XHTML 1 works in as far back as Netscape 1.
Non-CSS related bugs are usually due to bad HTML, not bad browsers. The majority of which comes from missing end tags. Create well-formed XHTML and the non-CSS browser bugs disappear.
As for CSS hacks, purists say they don't want to bend-over-backwards to support buggy, legacy browsers. As web developers, I say that's our damn job.
But no real "hacks" need be employed. Framing DIV tags with another DIV tag quickly defeats the long-standing long list of IE box model bugs. The outer DIV supplies width/height dimensions, the inner DIV supplies the padding.
As for Netscape 4, which will crash when treated to certain HTML attributes, I like to move all the CSS properties that NS4 doesn't recognize to a separate stylesheet which is then imported via the @import CSS command. Netscape 4 doesn't know what to do with @import so, like a good user agent, it simply ignores it.
The only time I have run into problems creating pages that are both backwards AND forwards compatible is in complex layouts which replace TABLE tags with DIV tags for framing a page. This gets into absolute and relative positioning as well as lots of floating elements. IE especially enjoys inserting gutter space around boxes that are next to floating elements, something it should not do.
Point of all this is that it is quite easy to be both backwards and forwards compatible, even with Netscape 0.9!!. It takes a small amount of extra effort but is well worth it.
So you have your site working on 4.x browsers, using hacks and proprietary markup. Good for you. You captured the 5% of the market that is years behind current technology, and probably really doesn't really use the Internet for anything useful other than E-mail.
On the other hand you've locked out people that don't have a choice in their browser, like people who are blind and use aural browsers, because all those tables and crazy tags make the browser read the content in the wrong order. You've also locked out alpha consumers who do or in the next couple years will use wireless PDA's/Internet Appliances/Pad computers to surf on, because those tables render like crap on the small screens.
Meanwhile the CSS sites that are coded to standards and actually had some thought put behind the content, gracefully degrade on these old browsers and the cutting edge wireless devices so that everyone has access to the content while the majority of people have access to the design as you intended it.
I know it's not possible to do this on every site, but designers and developers should at least have css in mind when they start the design process. If it's not feasable then you can start to work backwards. Maybe XHTML won't work on this project because of client requirements, but HTML 4.01 Strict will, maybe you have to go to HTML 4.01 Transitional, but at least you thought about the best solution for the client. Not just for now, but for the future as well.
I believe even evolt.org, which heavily promotes the standards, uses a design that has some tables for layout, in the header. But the main content is layed out using css. This design degrades nicely to 4.x browsers, works
As for the argument that a client won't pay for or the designer doesn't have the time to create a standards site, these people should take a serious look at their business practices. Do you expect your clients to pay for your learning time on CSS? I highly doubt anyone would hire a developer that had no experience with HTML, put him on a client project, and then make the client pay for all the learning time as he tried to complete the site. It's no different when learning CSS and standards, you should be learning it on your own time, not trying to get clients to flip the bill. Once you get the hang of things, it shouldn't take any longer then how you usually do things.
Basically when you're thinking about a site, think big. Think about all the ways people are accessing your site and then decide your coding methods.
Critisism and Flames Welcome.
Just remember I browse at +4
Also, the bandwidth issue was just a mod_gzip problem. It quadrupled our bandwidth usage basically.
Why did the sysadmin turn off mod_gzip? Is the sysadmin affiliated with the organization that charges you for bandwidth?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I couldn't give a fvck if people can read my site or not in its intended form.
However, PHBs and marketing types can be fascist in their insistence on branding and the corporate style sheet. If it doesn't display the same on all browsers down to the pixel, PHBs assume it to be the web developers' fault.
Will I retire or break 10K?
There will always be future applications, protocols, and conventions which make certain existing technologies--including current conventions/standards--obsolete.
I don't expect my website to be accessible to someone via Morse code (a generally obsolete technology for mass worldwide communication), and conversely, I also don't expect that my website will be compatible with some hypothetical future communications technology (holodecks, anyone?)
Of course web standards are important--forget about future compatibility, what about the present? Many sites don't even want to deal with a browser if it's not detected as "IE-something". And this is no recent development--the precedent for "this site works best with " has been around for as long as there's been more than one web browser to choose from.
In fact, until the recent economic downturn in the "high tech" sector, it seemed that most people purchasing websites could care less about their site's forwards, backwards, or even current compatibility with various browsers (let alone W3C standards). They often seemed to plan on completely re-doing their site within 12-18 months anyways...after their company had "magically" grown from 20 to 2000 employees, and their stock likewise.
It's only now, with the Internet bubble imploded, that people are starting to realize that their $300,000 website investment doesn't even have the half-life of a Twinkie. All of the sudden, standards sound like a really good way to protect a website investment--and to (hopefully) ensure some level of forwards compatibility.
But no amount of standards compliance is going to save your website when the holodecks come out. That's life. Zeldman is apparently trying to compete with Katz for the "Master Of All Things Obvious" title.
The report (book?) is about the future of the web,
not status quo. Today the web is a mess, and nothing
will probably change that.
What he does get right, is the future of the web
isn't exclusivly IE (or netscape or mozilla), but
portable devices. Wireless web and PDA's will be
used more and more.
Or not, if the web builders of the world decide
there is no future for devices that don't
support Word and Flash and PDF, then the wireless
web will be a wish, and nothing more.
I have suggested over and over that a PDA is a
perfect device for mechanics and warehouse people
to do parts order and fulfilment, and using a
wireless web is the easiest way to hook these
together. Web people say I gotta have flash
to support the "future".
Talk to a CFO, and he will say you cannot chase
away 2 or 8 or 25% of your customers for any
reason. Stupid marketing people, who don't get
the web, do it all the time. Arrogant web
designers do even more, not just flash, but
poor HTML does it.
Go after the future, be ready for it, but don't
break my speedy old browser.
- extend the user experience
- improve control of content
- make various browser imitations more alike.
User experience can be made alot richer via use of xml and content can be maintained alot easier. Although browsers are becoming increasingly in consistant in interpreting any form of mark up adding operating systems furthur complicates matters. Peskey-ness prevails, fuey!! Fru2ty, oddness persists - Y O Y?How does he qualify obsolete? How did he obtain his data? Where is his study?
On some platforms, much of the browser specific HTML fix-up goes on server side, so it isn't a bandwidth issue.
I agree with the basic ides, but this book is fluff.
Now that I'm a teacher, I do tell my students all about standards and forwards compatibility and separation of content from presentation. I'm going to have them read this article -- the first 3/4 of it, anyway.
He's right that versioning is dirty dirty voodoo. For a good discussion of how it can be much cleaner and more forward compatible, see http://www.xs4all.nl/~ppk/js/support.html .
However, when the HTML is standard, it's a bug in the browser, which needs to be addressed.
Your logic is flawless, but notice where you're left now.
The browser is branded buggy and non-compliant.
Say the browser is IE 4 or Netscape 4.
Great - the browser creators come out with a new version of the browser that fixes those bugs.
IE 6 and Netscape 6 are in greater compliance with standardized HTML 4.01, CSS, DOM, etc.
Now you come to the end of the road:
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Your figures are interesting; IE is always going to make up the vast majority of hits, but isn't it possible that the users of other browsers/OSes got hacked off and stopped using your site?
Just an observation. I don't know the economics of the situation, so I can't say how much testing is worth your while.
BTW, one *obvious* solution is to buy computers running those OSes, and test it on them. Sensible solution requires a bit more thought, I'm afraid.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Did it ever occur to this guy that perhaps it's 5 percent of browsers that are obsolete, rather than 99.9 percent of web sites?
Book's coming out when? 2003? By then, it will be obsolete.
You show me one browser that is 100% standards compliant, and I will show you one reason for web developers to write compliant pages.
Zeldman, why don't you drive on down to friendly South Carolina, and help me upgrade all the teachers, principals and parents from Netscape 4.02 or somewhere around there to a browser that doesn't rely on the font and table tag to get decent layout.
I spent the better part of a day learning about XUL (ooohhh, aaaahh) only to find out you can't embed it in HTML. So how are you going to get your APP even seen (as in (you need Moz to view this widget) by those without Moz?
Percentages, Perschmenatages, my user base is clean down the middle NN 4.X and IE 5.X, so step-off george.
Oh, I have a book coming out next year too, it's called "Pundit 100% Idiot," and I am taking preorders.
I had a sig, but
Hum? What do you mean? How is XSLT in any way a replacement for CSS? You might use XSLT to get from XML to XHTML, but it's not for adding style.
If you meant XML:FO, well, that's horrible for the web. Most XML documents have no real meaning to a UA; they're just an arbitary collection of nodes, so unless your FO's cover every possible media type, the web becomes conciderably less accessable.
This is so true. Please someone, mod up. In addition to what was already said, I would add that making web sites accessible to Lynx and sending e-mail as plain text enables disabled, handicapped, blind, etc. people to still enjoy your content.
I'd hate to hear HTML e-mail read aloud.
It's ironic that you post a link to your stats, and then go on to say that "40 megs is a very small difference for possibly breaking browsers that don't support CSS!"
Read the stats page that you posted again. Your top 14 user agents are all either IE5+ or Mozilla 1.0, which make up almost 60% of your users. Assuming your site is like most others, almost all of that other 40% is either other IE user agents, other Mozilla user agents, or Netscape 4.x.
Therefore, you have no reason NOT to use CSS instead of font tags. Even the lowly Netscape 4 supports basic CSS. What browsers are you trying to support, anyway? How far do you go? Netscape 3? IE2?
Seriously. Use common sense. Design to standards and use CSS where possible. You have an edge becuase your page is geared to web designers and open-source advocates. These people are likely more aware of browser technologies and thus less likely to use outdated browsers.
(The final thing I would recommend is to get a better stats package that would actually show you what percentage of your users use a certain browser. Webalizer is not a good choice for this.)
--SlashChick
Lets all go back to developing our sites using hyperlinks and text! Then we'll not have any compatibilty problems.
troll my ass, the AC has a point! friggin moderators!
Will be a web page that consists of 100% working advertising banners, bars and inserts together with animated navigation links, bars and menus taking up 40% of the available real-estate with the actual content of the page an error message saying "Not enough bandwidth left to serve this page". This guy is just saying the same thing, but pointing out the fact that the page source will be bloated, unreadable and highly redundant.
Take a look at the "NakedWireless" site from a couple of days ago: They use a completely useless Flash intro page, and they included the link to the actual body in the Flash. I happened to access the page in Opera without Flash, and there was no way at all to proceed without being able to view the extraneous Flash animation.
Yahoo, eBay, Amazon are fucking huge websites with millions of lines of code. It would take a monumental effort on the part of these companies to write 100% compliant HTML, etc. They would spend more in engineers salaries then they would be saving in bandwidth. His ideas might work on small sites, but not the garguantuan ones he talks about in his article.
If it ain't broke don't fix it. This guy needs to get out of fantasyland and into reality.
Sarcastic? Moi?
Browser stats on my site from August 2002:
1 1706657 47.41% MSIE 6.0
2 965967 26.83% MSIE 5.5
3 290285 8.06% MSIE 5.0
4 273973 7.61% MSIE 5.01
5 83440 2.32% Mozilla/5.0
6 52818 1.47% Mozilla/3.01 (compatible;)
7 30307 0.84% MSIE 4.01
8 17733 0.49% Mozilla/4.79
9 17116 0.48% MSIE 5.14
10 15511 0.43% Mozilla/4.7
11 11938 0.33% Mozilla/4.76
12 10194 0.28% Mozilla/4.78
13 9723 0.27% Mozilla/4.75
14 8568 0.24% Mozilla/4.73
15 7930 0.22% MSIE 5.21
16 7512 0.21% MSIE 5.13
17 6622 0.18% Mozilla/4.5
18 6390 0.18% Mozilla/4.77
19 6139 0.17% Mozilla/4.72
20 4959 0.14% Mozilla/4.61
21 4318 0.12% Mozilla/4.08
22 4230 0.12% MSIE 5.12
23 3852 0.11% MSIE 5.15
24 3837 0.11% MSIE 6.0b
25 3534 0.10% Dual Proxy
26 3491 0.10% MSIE 4.5
27 3390 0.09% Mozilla/4.75C-CCK-MCD
28 2501 0.07% MSIE 5.2
29 2299 0.06% Moozilla
30 1969 0.05% Mozilla/4.51
31 1881 0.05% Mozilla/4.77C-CCK-MCD
32 1755 0.05% Mozilla/4.73C-CCK-MCD
33 1707 0.05% Mozilla/4.74
34 1657 0.05% BorderManager 3.0)"
35 1531 0.04% Mozilla/4.7C-CCK-MCD
36 1523 0.04% Mozilla/4.04
37 1425 0.04% Mozilla/4.06
38 1266 0.04% Googlebot
39 1150 0.03% Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)
40 1073 0.03% MSProxy/2.0
That Mozilla/5.0 is me using Moz 1.x, so that number is probably abnormally high. Basically IE dominates the browser market by an insane margin.
This works in most cases, but not all. Netscape 4.* treatement of CSS is so awful, and degrades so poorly, that I simply had to make a choice knowing that my stuff would be ugly for NS4 users. But for the most part, Conservative and Standard works.
I guess that this makes my site (shameless plug) one of the 0.1% of sites with old content that isn't "obsolete" (well, the content may be).
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
Look at the code Frontpage spews. Many people have snickered at me for using text editors to edit HTML. Then they fire up Frontpage. Later, I check out a file they have editted and find all sorts of goofy tags in it. So, it ain't just the browsers. Some of the authoring tools intended to dumb down the process of designing and maintaining web pages share the blame for the garbage code. Yessir.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
No difference here between requiring a HTML 4 browser and requiring a version of the OS.
This is the equivilant of whining about Everquest not working in Windows 3.1.
GET OVER IT.
Really crap contents from someone who never enjoyed the real era and wants to showoff some p(r)etty HTML/CSS skills.
As we didn't know.
99.9% of this very site, contents, is obsolote so why do we read and use it?
I know of at least one place that uses Lynx on terminals for multiple clerks to enter orders over the net! Last I heard, they provided about eighteen percent of the supplier's revenue. The supplier has tried many times to get the client to move away from Lynx, even to the point of giving them a computer and program to try out. No dice. Now go tell the CIO of the supplier about Zeldman and watch him sputter and fume about having to include 1.0 standards for one client!
I'm not sure what it is, but most ./ers can't read.
You're all bunching your panties about "backwards compatibility," blah blah blah blah blah.
Meanwhile, you've completely missed the point. Knock knock!
The article doesn't say you should mindlessly employ the bleeding edge of XML or CSS instead or . It simply doesn't say that.
Let me paraphrase. Code/markup critical content based on *established* standards which work cross-platform MUCH MORE EASILY AND EFFICIENTLY than the crufty work-arounds.
Somebody running Netscape 3 on a Performa or a P200 doesn't *want* to see anything fancy, because it will fark their machine no matter how you cruft it. Using CSS, while not perfect by any means, for your fancy stuff means that older browsers will safely ignore it rather than CHOKING on it.
A quote from the article.
...
Early in a computer programmer's education, he or she learns the phrase: "Garbage In, Garbage Out." Put simply, in the world of programming, if you write your code correctly, it works. If you write it incorrectly, it fails.
I too learned this quote early in my education, but always assumed that the phrase "garbage in, garbage out" had a very different meaning.
My interpretation was that no matter how good the code was, the quality of program's output was dependant on the quality of the input data.
ie. even with a "perfect" program (if such a thing exists), the output is meaningless if the input data is not accurate/correct/complete etc.
Same quote, two different philosophies
just about sums you up, CSS man - HTML is for content, and the browser does the presentation. If the browser presents wrong, that's their fault, not yours.
Like the original post says - if you really want consistent presentation, just put a big image there instead of a page.
CSS is a big barrel of shit just waiting for poncy designer/marketing types to dive in.
Yeah, if the W3C standard ment a damn. Microsoft co-writes the standard, and then writes a non-compliant browser. Unforunately, since they have 99.9% of the market, then 99.9% of the websites will be "obsolete". I render my web site with the W3C standard, yet I have to deal with IE's EXTREMELY annoying lack of support for CSS and proper JavaScript. (I've had to deal with plenty of "Works in Netscape, but not IE" bugs.) Nevermind that this property isn't supported in CSS or that command in JavaScript reports something much different in IE than the web standard.
Give Netscape all the grief you want, but at least they stuck to standards. Propeirtary tags be damned because all of the real tags were there and did when they needed to do.
(Not to mention that the W3C validator is extremely anal about "obsolete" tags. Maybe I want a FONT tag in one piece of text that I'm never going to change. Why do I need a CSS name for EVERYTHING?)
Zodiac Survey
Caught with your knickers down, eh ... not fault-tolerant?? What's your problemo? Outside of good fault-tolerance there is only ... hobbyist crap!
(Not to mention that the W3C validator is extremely anal about "obsolete" tags. Maybe I want a FONT tag in one piece of text that I'm never going to change. Why do I need a CSS name for EVERYTHING?)
Use a SPAN tag with a STYLE attribute, e.g. <SPAN STYLE="font-size: 125%">
I pine for the days when we just had bullet lists of black text against gray backgrounds.
No images, no tables (which are just abused as layout devices), no background colors, no fonts, no frames, no Javascript, no popups.
Just bare-bones INFORMATION, boring to look at but useful and efficient. Hardly a byte that wasn't relevant, and easily rendered on any browser you can imagine.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
Lite browsers do make up less then %10 of your visitors. However if you owned a small bussiness, would you tell 1 out of every 10 or 1 out of every 15 customers to leave or go to hell?
Sure bandwith and development costs money but turning away potiental customers also costs money and probably alot more of it. I heard the same argument for years on why major software companies should support the mac platform. Microsoft in return would make their own tools more proprietary to make software more expensive to port. However most of the big major players in software have mac versions of their products for this reason. I do not mean games but MS-Office, quicken, turbo tax, photoshop, corel photopaint, word perfect, etc. Why turn away potential customers?
Also if yahoo wastes gigs of data a day but pays for itself in just minutes then its worth it.
I do agree on convulted html. Yes html can be ugly if not coded properly. If I were the owner of yahoo, I would plan to redesign the whole website with easy to read css after the majority browsers that support it are %97 or %98. I do not know if the palm's browser supports css(i assume not) but that may be the future of internet browsing as consumers buy more appliances with computers inside them.
http://saveie6.com/
I think mainly this comes down to enforceability.
Sure the w3c sets standards, but how many browsers claiming compliance to any particular standard actually implement it without extensions in a standard way?
Personally in the future I'm going to avoid as much browser side technology as possible including Ecma/Java/whatever script, force as low an HTML/Wap/whatever version as possible and make all the magic server side where I can control it.
I plan on using database abstracted data in any case and generating from templates to whatever client is connecting and doing my versioning based on the client ID sent.
I sure as hell don't plan on implementing CSS or DHTML or any of these bass ackwards technologies that although have the promise to revolutionise the web userinterface are not compliantly implemented.
Perhaps if the W3C had a program whereby they could refuse compliance to anyone not implementing correctly (netscape 6 anyone? )I would. Or maybe I'll just do my interfaces in SWF where the standard and implementation are controlled.
Anonymous coward away! Hoooooooo.....
The remaining .1% of websites which are not "obsolete" and "convoluted code" includes the following sites:
;-)
www.zeldman.com
That is it. All other sites are bad. End of story. Well, probably the author believes this at least
And let it go in that. Oh, yes, don't forget Netscape 3.04, still in use on library computers in poor neighborhoods. Yes, you'll go crazy trying to make all of your pages do in all browsers. Oh, don't forget the text browsers! I try and try to make at least some of my pages work in something. Now, I have Grey Cat Linux 3.0, (perhaps 20 installations World-Wide) running Netscape 3.04. Had to spend some wee-hours time getting something that would work in that, and in MSIE 6.0, Mozilla 1.1 too! Whew! It is fun, however, to reboot into another OS, and bring up a page in a different browser, and have it work OK!
Rapidweather's Linux Screenshots.
There is an interesting website called css/edge which attempts to explore all the possibilities of doing "neat stuff" using only standards-compliant HTML and CSS. There are some really stunning demonstrations, such as the complexspiral demo. This demo shows a page that has a two column menu/content layout, complete with alpha-blended translucent background that seamlessly glides over a fixed background image as you scroll, with the translucency changing for mouse-over events on the buttons. The text size can be gracefully sized, and the layout works for any window size. This is done only with pure HTML, a stylesheet, and four JPGs -- no javascript, alpha-channel PNGs, half-screen GIFs, etc.
Thing is, if you visit this site with Internet Explorer on Windows, the above demo and most of the other demos look like crap. This really opened my eyes to IE's lack of CSS conformance. But visit the page in Mozilla, Konquerer 3, or IE5/mac, and it's beautiful.
...is so much crap. They're just trying to sell their book ("We discuss this matter further in our book" blah blah blah).
As for the whole CSS/DHTML/XHTML/SuperHTML/HTML2000, get over it. While I agree that some designers go overboard when a simple <h2> tag would do, using CSS or whatever does not automagically guarantee correct code. For every site that uses CSS properly, there are 2 that use it incorrectly.
But that is the thing about this article: on the one hand it argues that people should strive for compliance, then on the other argues that people should only write webpages for the latest whiz-bang browser.
In my oppinion, the best way to eliminate nonstandard HTML: if you see it, e-mail the site's webmaster, preferrably with the "correct" HTML to fix it.
But that leads my rant to another point: what is so wrong with using plain-old vanilla HTML? If all browsers being standards-compliant is so important, why does the article argue that we should use CSS and "correct" JavaScript to detect for individual browsers?
I'm in midst of directing the coding of HTML templates and css for a fortune 500 company with 1+ registered users (sure you don't believe me).
You have to support Netscape 4 & the Gecko based browsers as well as IE. If you don't you end up compromising your customers trust and ultimately they see it as a sign of disrespect.
Sure, all the Gecko browsers maybe add up to 2% of our traffic and Netscape 4 another 3%. When you consider that you have 1-2 million users, those number translate to 50 to 100K of people who won't be able to use some function of your site, which translates to 50 to 100K people who might abandon your company or service, or pick up the phone to complain. Servicing a customer over the phone is a lot more expensive than self service on the web. Spend the extra money to make your sites cross browser compatible and you'll save a lot in the long run.
Again, we're back to a very basic problem. Do you write your page to work in old browsers or do you use the latest standards?
This is a false choice. Writing your page using the latest HTML and CSS standards does not break older browsers. Everything will still work fine, although browsers that do not support CSS will get a plainer looking page.
The only exception is when NS4 users have not disabled CSS in their browsers. This is not because NS4 is an outdated browser. It's because NS4's CSS implementation was broken when it was released, and users should always switch it off, which is relatively easy to do.
You can do both those things if you want! Just use the correct DOCTYPE ferchrissakes... FONT is only obsolete if you stick in a DOCTYPE that states it is obsolete! The W3C aint that stupid!
Very well put. The popularity of Google's interface further backs your claim. However, I pay the bills and keep a roof over my head with my design and development skills. Most of the people who are signing my checks live in the corporate "ooooh... look... shiny things" world. They like cute, million dollar Superbowl commercials and they want to hang their name on a website that dazzles them. You have to remember, marketing is about packaging, not content. Call me (and the legions like me) a sellout, but man... Ramen noodles every night for dinner ain't the life I want.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
The Helpdesk at Portland State University only officially supports and installs Netscape 4.7 for faculty/staff that want to use Netscape instead of IE6.
I'm sure that this post won't be seen by very many people (it's already had 447 comments at this viewing), but here's a subject that I'm actually very knowledgeable, so I had to say something.
I developed web sites for several years. I love style sheets, and the article is quite correct when it says that they can save bandwidth and make your page look better.
But when you're trying to sell stuff to people on the web, you don't want to use the latest and greatest technology.
We ran a very large e-commerce site for the purpose of selling college textbooks. You would think that college kids buying books would be hip with the latest tech. But a look at the web logs during IE 5 days revealed IE 4, Netscape 4, even IE 3 among the most used browsers. IE 5 was by far in the minority.
What you care about when you want to sell stuff is selling stuff, not using the latest tech. The article contradicts itself... on the one hand it says that 99.9% of websites are obselete, and on the other hand, it says people don't care what they look like.
People do care if it works or not, and if they can't read your page, they will sprain their fingers clicking on the mouse to get to the site that does work. Furthermore, if you make use of javascript or cookies, you will lose all of the folks who read PC magazine and various other publications who tell you that javascript is evil and dangerous and should be turned off immediately.
So if you want to use javascript, you have to do it both ways, server side validation as well as client side validation. If you're gonna do both, why not just do what works for everyone instead?
We would have LOVED to say, you can't use IE4, you must use IE5, Netscape 6, or above. It just would have made lousy business sense. This is a result of measuring the actual statistics of our actual customers.
Sounds to me like they're complaining about the same things we developers complained about... lack of adherence to standards in old browsers, forcing us to change perfectly VALID html to make it work across the board (ahem. netscape). But instead of placing the blame where it belongs, they blame it on us.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
These work in almost all (99%+) browsers.
These older HTML standards require more verbosity but provide most necessary functionality. We make up for the lack of dynamic behavior by employing pleasant graphics (lots of natural scenes). That also keeps our graphics designers happy and busy.
for taking the time
so much for "I *know* my css is alright" 8)
as for the hardcoded pixels. yeah I know it's not perfect but it enables me to arrange the divs in the page so that for text only the important text of the page appears first and then the menus underneath.
I'm hoping to add a choice of stylesheets at some point. I only make the site part time, we're hoping to turn it in to a full time post before christmas.
I've not optimised it for cacheing yet either.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Back in 1996, I built a very early dynamic websites with a database back end. This was so long ago that IIS (yes, it was on NT) hadn't been released when we started; we had to use Purveyor's server. The site ran an ISAPI DLL written in C that ate HTML templates and inserted database data... just like your ColdFusion or whatever today, but all handcrafted.
Bandwidth was very costly, so I made the engine strip out EVERYTHING in the HTML that wasn't needed. That way, the templates (all written by hand, in vi) could be human-readable and commented to heck and the end result was as compressed as HTML could be.
We also made up some custom attributes that we put in comments... the engine translated these into more complex HTML on the fly, letting us do things like put in odd bits of JavaScript once and have them propagate onto every page. The engine also knew what version of browser was accessing it and could adjust pages for that target.
The chief techie of the company took real exception to this and insisted that the HTML the end user "saw" met a set of "HTML written guidelines". I overruled him (by threatening to resign) and it stayed compressed until a while after I left, when someone disabled the compression. Their bandwidth costs... rocketed!
But ever since then, I've always hand-written HTML if it's anything minor. I have a bandwidth cap on the few tiny personal websites I run and I manage to get hit rates far beyond those that friends of mine who use Frontpage or Dreamweaver achieve. Because they're so damn complex to do by hand, I ignore the CSS, FONT and other stuff and stick to H, H1, H2 and P tags for most everything.
A useful side effect is that most of my pages display fine on any browser back to Netscape 2.
Anna B
Languages like C++ and Java don't merely encourage proper coding practices, they demand them.
They do ? - Could've fooled me - there's some hideous code out there !
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
What's really obscene are the pages that wrap 50K or 100K of crap ... to be gentle ... around the content you're really interested in.
... that makes sense. Yahoo sends *every* e-mail embedded in a load of crap. Guess what folks? I'm on a dial-up connection, and you are severely wasting my time.
... they can't even protect themselves against *scripts*?
For example: Do I really need to be sent 50K of crap every time I want to read an e-mail with one or two sentences in it?
Google Groups uses frames to present archived Usenet materials
And then there's all the 'helpful' stuff embedded in those pages. They insist on sending you cookies that you just wind up deleteing. Okay, since these are so important to *them*, where are the preferences to turn off the 'helpful' stuff?
And on and on. The insanity is endless. Pages that crash 5.x browsers
All of this is another argument for open source and community involvement. And a way for end-users to *instantly* register their unhappiness with outrageous volume and insanely mediocre coding.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
-how about us folks who due to $$$ constraints are stuck with older machines? I'm on a 166 with 64 megs ram, it's maxed out. I CAN'T use new mozilla or new netscape. I have the newest version iCab, but slashdot site itself freezes up on that browser, so my alternative is ole reliable knucklescrapper 4.xxwhatever. At least I can read the page here. I have a linux machine temporarily down for re arranging/moving purposes, but even that is only a 200 PP. Is new moz or new netscape gonna work on it? According to the download sites that's a big fat no, at least it ain't recommended. I don't know, will the next versions of those browsers work? Most likely not. I've tried opera and honestly just plain do not like it. I can use lynx but geez loweez I want to see what a page is, not view it like it's secret code transmitted on a crystal radio set in stalag 17.
Here's a thought, how about webmasters stop making pages all the way to the bleeding edge that only work on brand new machines with a broadband connection? How about a little compromise here and there? I understand newer/better, time to get with the program, but I see no reason a computer that is still functional and in the triple digits of mghz speed is considered so old as to be unusable and be thrown away, that's just nuts and wasteful. I understand that ten years+ old is ridiculous, but 5? Is it going to get to the point everyone is forced to drop a grand a year on a new machine so they can just surf web pages? I've got a lot of elederly neighbors, they got like old machines, they go on the net it's a dismal experience for them now. Should they A-buy a new machine, or B- pay for their heat this winter? How about young kids, or families with a lot of kids? Are all these older but not that old machines out there now to be just ignored with this browser war in geekdom? Is it really that hard to make webpages that are simple but functional and get the data across? Can't tell ya how many times I've canceled a page after waiting like 5 minutes for it to download and render, hundreds if not thousands of times past few years. I'll get a newer machine in a year or two, by scrimping and saving, but back to the same problem, it will most likely be used and 5 years old then, something affordable, will the $#%&(ing browsers out then work with it? I live rural, who's bringing me my broadband that doesn't cost 80 a month with a 3-500$ install? That ain't happening neither, so it's probably dialup for a long time, computer land gives a rats ass about rural people in this nation.
Can't wait for the economic collapse more, all the urban geek elitisits gonna pay more for their FOOD. Screw US will ya? Revenge! And don't forget, we whizz on the veggies before we ship them off to the cities! It's our version of "streaming content". MUAHAHAHAHA!
Even when one is trying to do the right thing, like here, there are many traps, the following are a few points to evaluate. If you are trying to do the right thing by seperating content into structured markup (HTML) and display markup (CSS), always transform HTML into XHTML because CSS requires all tags to be closed to render correctly (or as bug free as possible). The HTML 4 spec does not require tags to be closed. If you use attributes in TABLES etc in TRANSITIONAL DTDs and mix sizes and positions using both absolute and relative positioning you will get into trouble. It's good to try as much as possible to try to develop according to STRICT DTDs and move all positioning into CSS. I know some browsers do not cope with it, but the V6 browsers out there, IE6, Mozilla 1.x & Opera 6, etc. Even if you can't do what you want under STRICT and have to go back to TRANSITIONAL, the learning process helps. Validate your CSS, and also run it by Bobby (http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/html/en/index.js p) and WAVE (http://www.temple.edu/inst_disabilities/piat/wave /), which will give you some good feedback.
W3C validator is extremely anal about "obsolete" tags. Maybe I want a FONT tag in one piece of text that I'm never going to change. Why do I need a CSS name for EVERYTHING?
Because all the current browsers now support rendering the DOCTYPE to one of the current DTDs, and the FONT tags is deprecated, so, sooner or later these tags will not be recognised.
The other point is if you are working in any situation where someone else has to come along and maintain your work, if you have not designed to a standard, how on earth do they know what type of HTML soup you have implemented?
This approach will add to the cost of site development/maintainance.
Crazy Browser uses the IE installed engine, but it's shell seems lighter, and it is smaller on this install, yet it does have features to block popups etc.
TopStyle CSS Editor uses the IE engine too.
There are many volunteer organisations out there that are installing Linux on 486s, but Mozilla is just too big. The one I know uses Opera with the banner ads, cause there isn't anything else. It would be great to see lightweight browsers that had good current fast rendering engines, support for standards, and easy to use.
The problem is that it's not backwards-compatible. Sure, everybody should be using HTML/4.0, but it was only recently (correctly) implemented with today's browsers, so a FONT tag (and other "obsolete" tags) is still useful for the 4.0 browsers and such.
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