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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.""
Near as I can figure out, he's claiming "the web is broken, don't bother."
The book looks broken. Don't bother.
John
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
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.
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.
If you had written to the standards instead of just hacking something together until it worked in IE/NS $CURRENTVERSION, odds are pretty good that you wouldn't have this problem now.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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.
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
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?
I think the complaint with the web is that things don't gracefully degrade in downlevel browsers, they just die.
The original intent of the web and html was to distribute content with tags that describe the "purpose" of that content and leave the rendering up to the browser. This meant that I could write a page and my message would get across to anyone even though it might look different to every person.
Then enter the marketing folk and the desire that a webpage look the same to everyone. That sucked.
CSS allows better control of the look but still works on the premise that the html (or xhtml) describes the purpose of the content and CSS is around to give hints on how the page should look. It still gives the end browser ultimate control of the rendering and the page could look different to different people.
If people would design thier webpages realizing that whats important is the purpose of the information and not the look of the information we wouldn't have so many of these problems. The web was designed for information, not for art.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
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.
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.
Who on earth is running a browser earlier than 4.x?
I'm using Konqueror 3.0 which came with Suse 8.0. Googlebot is version 2.1 according to my logs. The point is that it shouldn't matter what browser you are using, and we shouldn't be fudging markup into tag-soup in an effort to keep certain browsers happy. Rather markup a document cleanly, and use CSS to present the markup -- that way less capable browsers can strip away the CSS and have a default view of the content - which they can markup or manipulate themselves.
Do you expect stuff to be rendered right if you use an older version of IE/Netscape/Opera?
No, I don't care about the rendering, but a page would be much more interesting to my little scripts if the markup described the structure of the content appropriately.
Don't you have to try real hard to even find an older version of any of these browsers?
Not too hard at all: http://browsers.evolt.org/
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.
...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.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
are the least of your problems... seven? You gotta be kidding me. Anyone actually design like this, even in the dark ages?
Uhh, ever view the source of this slashdot page you are currently reading? Try it some time. Each block of comments at a given indent level is a nested table. It's called "Nested" for a reason. (I can't belive anyone actually uses that godawful "Threaded" option that's the default, but it too uses nested tables as well.) And the the entire block of comments themselves are nested in a table, which itself is nested. Notice the page layout, the menus on the left, the 5% black borders on the margins, etc, those are all from tables.
Deeply nested tables are more common than you would think, because webmasters use tables for specifying page layout.