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.""

Comments

Back in Reality...

[alexhmit01]

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%???

[pubjames]

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.

Re:Gasp!

[Isofarro]

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/

The problem is people...

[Arker]

...who don't understand what HTML is.

Secondly, all of these "standards" are interpreted differently by the different browsers, 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.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Backwards vs. Forwards Compatibility

[Jahf]

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).

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 :) Either term works for this application as long as you are looking from the correct side of the issue.

As for the parent that wanted browsers to be backwards compliant ... 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.

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.

Shame on all those developers.....

[pjrc]

From the article:

all of us temporarily lost something more important: the chance to create a usable, accessible Web built on common industry standards. We lost it when designers and developers, scrambling to keep up with production demands during the short-lived Internet boom, learned non-standard, browser-specific ways of creating sites, thus bringing us to our current pass whose name is obsolescence.

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.