Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Saving Bandwidth Through Standards Compliance, Pt. 2

Posted by timothy on from the sometimes-they-come-back dept.

elijahao writes "In case part one of the interview with Mike Davidson of ESPN was interesting, the second part has been posted today."

5 of 34 comments (clear)

  1. Annoying! *groan* by usotsuki · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Why does everything have to be candycoated and designed in ways to discriminate against us people who would use Mozilla if we had the choice but are hog-tied down (at our public library) into using Netscape 4.7? It's only two years old, guys. It isn't like it's hard to code a page that will look correct in NS4. I'll go further and say that a decent Web page should be 100% viewable in ANY browser, not just the latest cream of the crop. Got Netscape 2.01 on one of those old 603e machines? Logged into some BSD box that uses lynx as its browser? I don't think it's proper to ban people from a site for stuff they can't help. If a page isn't viewable in Lynx, that's the coder's fault. All my pages are viewable with Lynx, *if I can help it*.

    -uso.
    In Soviet Russia, all our base are belong to you *g*

    --
    Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
    1. Re:Annoying! *groan* by h3 · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Netscape 4.7? It's only two years old, guys. It isn't like it's hard to code a page that will look correct in NS4

      Well, while the specific dot version may only be two years old, I believe the NS4 series was released in the '97-'98 timeframe, making the codebase in the area of 5-6 years old! That's half the age of the web!

      And no, it's not hard to code a page that will look correct in NS4. It is hard to code a page that will look correct and good, and do so in the most recent browsers, and use proper and conforming markup, and so on.

      I've given up on NS4 as a developer. I make sure my pages are viewable and functional but I completely strip them of any layout- basically, they don't get styled at all, except for any tweaks required to make them viewable and functional- and provide a little notice of what to expect and urge them to upgrade. They work, but it looks like crap, but I think anyone using NS4 in this day and age probably understands the consequences of that decision (whether it's their own, or not).

      -h3
  2. Re:Bad example by sigwinch · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Indeed. I'm looking at ESPN.com on a 1600x1200 screen under a recent Mozilla, and it is an unreadable, shitty looking pile of dreck:
    • Text hanging across columns
    • Inter-line spacing too small so the characters of one line physically overlap the previous line
    • Ugly line breaks in the scores sidebar
    • Content boxes that stick down too far and chop of the top of the box below
    • Boxes that have their bottom part chopped off by the box below (they screwed it up both ways)
    • Shitty Javascript menus with expander buttons tiled when they should be singlets
    • Their "lite" site has hideous colors

    And none of this is Mozilla's fault. When Part 1 of the interview came out last week, I looked at the side from Internet Explorer while I was at work. It looked more reasonable, as long as you used a magnifying glass: they hardcode all sizes in terms of pixels, and I have a decent monitor/video card. Morons, you're bus is leaving...

    Another thing: the whole site is branded as "ESPN.com", but they forcibly redirect to espn.go.com. Forget the technical idiocy: these folks can't even manage a coherent branding strategy.

    People make fun of the work I do using HTML 4.01, but they render nicely on most browsers, render usably on nearly all browsers, and validate so I have confidence that there aren't any lurking bugs.

    --

    --
    Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end. ;-)

  3. Relax, man by michaelggreer · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well, this guy is clearly not a "fucking idiot." He simply believes in practical solutions, and is not interested in abstract validation. I am a bit more to your side (I find, for instance, the opening of tags in javascript to be a nightmare maintanance idea), but I respect his approach. All of us know the difficulty of turning a Photoshop document from a designer used to print publishing, and turning it into a compliant web page.

    Calm down. He's on your team. Don't be so absolute.

  4. Arrogant and Clueless by ajwade · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The absolute positioning trick destroys the layout in Galeon (I've got the minimum font size set to 22 for the sake of my sanity). The left hand column overlaps the centre column (although gecko should arguably character-wrap to prevent that), and some of the text in the boxes on the right is missing because it doesn't fit. And the only reason the line spacing isn't far to small is because I've overridden it in my user stylesheet to fix similarly brain-damaged sites. The "lite" site isn't much better.

    To be sure, the page would likely look fine if I let Mr. Davidson dictate my choice of font size and browser. Presumably I should set my video mode to 800x600 as well, so as to conform to the desires of espn marketing.

    Espn does have "every right to not consider the non-upgrader person". They also have every right to lock out the non-upgrader until they upgrade. But doing the latter is moronic. I don't visit warnerbrothers.com at all anymore due to similar rudeness despite the fact that my current browser is probably allowed.

    Oh, and the whole point of "alt=''" is to indicate to the browser that the "images ... aren't important unless they are physically seen". It's to prevent the page filling up with [image] or similar notations in browsers that aren't displaying images.