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

Gasp!

[Tsali]

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.

correction .. company website

[RembrandtX]

Correction .. I mean to say my employer's website, which uses asp/javascript/VB

{and technically .. my personal website uses PHP .which is just getting parsed into html for your browser}

however .. if you would read the article .. even basic HTML can be corrupted ..

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 .. previous incarnations of browsers tolerated (and corrected) sloppy html.

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 .. 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.

5 years of bad habits become 2nd nature.

sorry for the confusion.

Re:Back in Reality...

[jilles]

XHTML strict by itself renders quite nicely in older browsers. It's CSS that causes the problems. If you adhere to the standards and do some positioning, etc. You are likely to encounter problems in almost all browsers other than Mozilla. It is really frustrating to tweak your CSS to do what you want it to do and have it work on all major browsers.

For my own sites I simply don't care about older browsers. I provide alternative CSS files (with basically all layout stripped) that should work in netscape 4 (haven't actually tested this). Aside from that there's only IE6 and mozilla for me. I develop for Mozilla and remove everything that doesn't work as specified in IE6. I refuse to do browser detection or to use CSS hacks to get stuff working. Some people advocate such hacks to trick IE into the right behavior but I refuse to sacrifice elegance and simplicity. That is also the reason I use XHTML strict. XHTML strict is much easier to maintain than HTML dialects that are polluted with formatting and other bullshit.

Giving netscape 4 users a bad experience may actually stimulate them to install something else. If enough sites ignore netscape 4, maybe it will be abandoned by users. On most platforms there are now good alternatives (e.g. opera performs better than netscape 4.x on win32).

Obsolete is an obsolete word

[stratjakt]

it's lost its meaning. It's been degraded by marketing drones and morons to mean 'anything thats not the cutting edge'.

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 :P

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'.