I Pit the Craptacular Web Geeks of Major Companies

The BBQ Pit
1

Okay, so it’s only three major companies with which I have a serious gripe, but it’s a fair gripe.

Dear Craptacular Web Geeks:

I know that you think that you’ve got it made. You work for big time companies like Verizon, Avon and That Crappy Cable Company That Doesn’t Deserve Mentioning (And Which We’re Ditching As Soon As We Possibly Can). You probably have a nice compensation package and good benefits. Plus, you didn’t have to move to the Bay Area with all of the overinflated real estate costs.

But one of the things about doing your job is that the sites you build and maintain are supposed to actually work for everyone who visits.

That means even all of us weirdos who use Macs instead of PCs. And worse yet, all of us weirdo Mac users who aren’t using that buggy, inferior piece of crap which is Internet Explorer for Mac, and instead are using Safari or Firefox. You know, browsers which are actually still being developed, browsers which actually give a good damn about web standards, browsers that are actually secure and don’t act as a vector for all manner of crap.

I shouldn’t have to start up a different application just to pay my bill with you. And certainly not because you can’t write a decent java applet in your bill-paying mechanism that doesn’t break when I click “submit.” I shouldn’t have to start a different application to place an order because your invalid, poorly written form has a broken tabindex.

I find it interesting that you can remain employed and paid to do your job when you haven’t done it properly.

I also pit you for failing to provide a means for people to contact you easily to tell you that your websites are broken.

Clean up your acts, chumps. IE is not the monster it once was. It continues to lose market share, significantly for PC users and even more sharply for Mac users. You cannot continue to do your job if you’re marking up and scripting for just one browser. This is not 1999. If you’re not in Microsoft’s pocket, there is no excuse. (Not that there’d be an excuse for being in Microsoft’s pocket to begin with, but then at least the problem could be anticipated.)

I don’t have many choices for home phone service, and I deal with Avon because of my mom, and I like the company. But my cable and mobile phone business will be going elsewhere as soon as is practicable. I’m sick to death of supporting companies that don’t care enough about my dollar to hire professionals in their web departments.

2

I hear you.

My local cable company won’t allow me to create an online account so I can get the damn bill paid. Instead, I have to call them every month to pay them by phone. It’s a pain in the ass.

Robin

3

My internet banking disables right-click? WHY? Is it insecure without that? Then it’s insecure to anyone with a custom browser. Is it not? Then why make things difficult.

4

Ooh, I was sooo pissed about this last tax season, when I had to use IE (not even Netscape!) on my Mac at hrblock.com. Except I was doing my taxes for free and didn’t have a lot of room to complain. Also why the hell must everything be in a popup?

5

One time I tried to send an e-card with a gift certificate attached from Amazon.

I was using IE6.

It didn’t work.

Had to fire up Mozilla to make my purchase.

Ain’t that weird?

But yeah I agree that Web Geeks need to test all their shit in a variety of browsers. I’m a Web geek myself and I spend hours on each project making sure it works on NETSCAPE 4 (and everything else). Sadly, I cannot afford a Mac on which to test things too :frowning:

But if any of you Mac-heads wants to sell me a very cheap Mac on which I can test my sites and make the Web a better place for you, I’d be into it :smiley:

6

Sorry, but here’s reality: A company has limited development resources which they must apply in such a way to best satisfy the majority of their customers. The majority of their customers don’t use Macs.

It’s simple math: the company is much better off from a customer-satisfaction standpoint to devote precious programming hours towards adding new features for 99% of the market place, rather than adding basic ones for 1%.

Sorry. This is what people meant when they told you “Macs are great but they don’t have as many applications.”

7

This isn’t about applications, nor is it about adding features for percentages of the marketplace. This is about HTML that isn’t valid, is poorly written, kludgey and stupid – made 10x more complicated than it needs to be because it’s being written specifically for IE, instead of being written to the standard. This is about Java applets that don’t actually support the application, but make peripheral widget work, and are, again, poorly written and not up to spec, and therefore only work on IE.

The web is a wild, weird thing. It can be accessed from a variety of devices, many of which are not PCs running some piece of crap operating system from Richmond. It is not meant to be OS-dependent, device-dependent or browser dependent, and as more and more people flee from IE (which suffered a 1% loss of browser share in the first six months of this year alone, which accounts for millions of users) that becomes all the more imperative. But the fact remains – there is no reason why any web application should not work – I’m not talking about visual appearance, but function – when it is accessed via a current browser. (Which IE for Mac isn’t; not only hasn’t it been updated in more than 3.5 years, it’s no longer being developed or supported at all.) If want to use a website, I should be able to do that from the crappy little browser built into my cell phone or my Palm Pilot or a Mac using Safari or a Unix box running Mozilla.

It can obviously be done, I can easily pay all of my other utility bills and my credit card bills using Safari. I can use my (very small community) bank’s website to perform transactions and pay other bills via their web-banking application. I can buy merchandise from Amazon or Wal-Mart or a hundred different retailers. I use eBay and Paypal. I can even search the catalog of my woefully underfunded public library system, renew books I have checked out and request books to be sent and held for me on interlibrary loan.

If a company with $22.5 billion in annual revenues (like Verizon) has not, by the end of 2004, built a secure system that functions across platforms and browsers, and has hired and retained people who are apparently incapable of rectifying this situation (not surprising, since these jackasses don’t even know how to set a friggin background color), I can only presume that it’s a matter of willful disregard. There’s simply no excuse. It’s an indication of a stunning level of corporate sloth and inertia which deserves to be rewarded with a loss of business.

8

And I’m talking about allowing about 50,000 people to pay their cable bills online, rather than by phone. It’s more secure, and I want a confirmation that my bill is paid.

Robin

9

Bill H., you lose. That’s the simple version: You took the wrong end of the argument, and you lose.

What these people want is for web developers to do their jobs. They want websites that actually follow the rules laid out in complete and exacting detail by the relevant standards bodies. They want web pages that they can use with the software they run, as opposed to being forced to use software they know to be badly broken and insecure.

Quite frankly, they want basic competence out of the people they are paying. That is not an unreasonable goal.

10

This argument would be more valid if those precious programming hours were spent adding useful features rather than a fancier Flash interface than the one they did three months ago. The man-years wasted on “flash” (that’s a pun, son), both in the programming and in the viewing, could be used to much better effect if the web people were better guided by people who understand the customers’ needs. The website cannot be separate from the rest of the company.

11

TeaElle wrote

Derleth wrote

I honestly feel your pain. But here’s how the system works:

Somewhere inside the company is a guy with a list. On that list is a bunch of features to add to their software. They prioritize that list, based on input they get from customers, and what they feel will please customers the most. I know it’s disappointing to you to hear that “Mac Support” is number 25 on the list, since your perspective is that the entire system is broken and fixing it should be their highest priority. But the fact is that it’s broken for a very small percentage of their customers. And their goal is to satisfy as many customers as possible. I’m sorry to turn it around, Derleth, but you made your choice and you lose. It’s not like I want you to lose or something, that’s the nature of picking a product with small market share.

I drive a 1963 Corvair. It’s not what you’d call a market leader, and guess what? it’s hard to get parts. Well, I picked the car, and that means I get the good and the bad with it.

If this problem is really so severe for you, then join the rest of the world in your computer choice. Me, I like my Corvair and I’m happy to pay extra for parts.

12

But see, there are two options programmers have available (to vastly oversimplify it):

1 - Code, program and design your websites etc. to conform to the standards set out specifically for this purpose, and have the websites work on all platforms.

2 - Code, program and design your websites etc. to conform to the main browser, which has idiosyncratic demands and coding standards, thereby locking out millions of other users.

The people TeaElle are complaining about are following #2.

The entire point of web standards (and really, web programming in general) is to be able to be platform and software independent. It’s not like if following #1 would mean that folks using IE wouldn’t be able to use the websites. It’s laziness, pure and simple.

13

Bill, to be dead frank, you don’t know jack about how the “system” works.

What you know is the same tired, half-assed rationalizations that have allowed situations like the very broken verizon.com to exist, and to allow Verizon’s craptacular web jockeys to keep their jobs even though they clearly don’t actually know how to do them.

This isn’t, for the second time (or is it third?) about “Mac Support” it’s about web standards. It’s about writing code that is meaningful and valid – and if it is, it works across the board. If it only works in one browser, it isn’t meaningful or valid, no matter how pretty it looks or how many lines it takes up or how many hours and 2-liters of Mountain Dew it took to write it.

That’s not a reasonable comparison. There is no independent body which sets a standard for car radiators. There is an independent body which sets easily accessible standards for the languages and protocols which are used to create websites and the applications therein. The fact that Verizon and Avon and that cable company from hell ignore what they have to say is not a legitimate reason for me to have to use some insecure, buggy piece of crap browsers or to trade my very secure, very reliable, very stylish, computer which is capable to do everything I need my computer to do for some piece of crap running that garbage OS from that stupid company in Washington.

14

Your analogy would work if you were talking about roads, for which standards exist such that they will be driveable in any car, being designed so that they only work for the single most popular car on the market.

The whole idea of the ‘web’ and all the standards that govern it were set up to be completely platform independent in the way that the road is car independent.

You obviously have no idea what’s written in those RFCs or what the IEEE, ISOC, IETF, W3C, and others do with regards to setting internet standards. The entire point of such standards is that they are non-proprietary and browser independent. What works with one should work with all, or the web designer isn’t following the standards which means he (or she) didn’t do his (or her) job properly.

Maybe you don’t get it in web terms, but I’m pretty sure you’d be bitching to raise hell if you were required to have a Ford Taurus or else not be able to drive on an Interstate Highway.

15

Yet another analogy, in case we’re running short…

So you take your Corvair for, oh I don’t know, an emissions test. And the guy says “I don’t know anything about these cars, so you’ve failed. You’re not driving home.”

Fair? Good service? Or did you deserve it because you picked an unusual car?

16

I hate to break it to Bill H., but on the commercial web sites I’ve developed, I made sure to follow standards-compliant techniques that worked for all (current) browsers for all platforms. And I managed to do it (a) even when the customer merely requested IE compatability, and (b) without going over budget or losing requested functionality.

Making stuff standards-compliant is easy for a good developer. Making excuses about limited resources and marketshare is the hallmark of a bad one.

17

I know this is the Pit and all, but rjung, I kiss you! :stuck_out_tongue:

18

Be careful what you wish for, some Mac head may set you up for a little geekage :slight_smile:
OK, for the older Mac world, there’s SheepShaver, if you can boot into Linux or another Unix to launch it.

http://www.uni-mainz.de/~bauec002/SheepShaver.html

You’ll need a Mac ROM to use it. More info on that backchannel, check your email.

SheepShaver lets you run MacOS 8.6, in other words the “Classic” MacOS environment. (MacOS 9 isn’t different enough to matter). Some of your Mac users will be running browsers that are compatible with this OS/architecture, including Netscape, iCab, Mozilla, and Internet Explorer. You can legally download and install older operating systems such as 7.5.3 which will run in SheepShaver, but for 8.6 (the latest that SheepShaver can run) you’ll need to shell out for an installation CD. They should be pretty cheap on eBay.

Now, to run the more modern MacOS X (right up to the most recent Apple release), you need to run PearPC:

http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/wiki/

Helpful and busy forum of PC users running MacOS X in emulation can be found here:

http://www.emaculation.com/phpBB/index.php

(They also have a SheepShaver section, for that matter).

With PearPC you can test out sites using Safari, OmniWeb, Firefox, Shiira, and other OS X browsers.

19

Oh, and BTW, my girlfriend has XP and uses the Windows version of Internet Explorer. Standard as you can possibly get. And I’ve watched her hit dozens of very badly designed commercial sites that just plain don’t work. It isn’t just that they don’t always make them Mac-compatible or compatible with Mozilla for X11 or Safari or whatever; it’s that they don’t, as a group, seem to be able to design a ^$@! website that works! Buttons to “review” something your ordered before proceeding, which, if clicked, erases 9 pages’ worth of stuff you entered so you have to start over. Blanks to input shipping address if different from billing address where, when you hit “continue”, lands you on a page declaring that you chose to ship and bill to the same address anyhow. Buttons that when you click on them take you to the page you’re already on instead of to the function identified on the button. Links to pages that don’t exist on their server. Links that, when clicked, open up a page of misformatted .asp code, a page full of gunk.

Not to mention making you search only by arcane product SKU#. Not to mention sometimes not finding it anyway when you’re holding the catalog with the SKU# in your hand. Not to mention clicking “order this item” and ending up with something totally different in your shopping cart.

I swear, they don’t take the web seriously except as an advertising medium.

And yeah, I’m another Mac user and it’s all just a bit worse for us. Don’t be sticking hardwired local execution paths in your code, dumbfuck! Don’t be putting in Active-X controls either!

20

TeaElle wrote

Oh really. and how does your knowledge of “the system” exceed mine? I’ve built and run several large development teams. I’ve been that guy with the list where “Mac support” is on it, but far from the top.

See, the thing is it isn’t all about you. Yes, I know: in your perspective where the world revolves around your problems, it’s all about fixing your problem where your Mac doesn’t work. But the world doesn’t revolve around you. And so companies fix problems that are faced by the majority fo their users. Sorry, that’s just how things work.

catsix wrote

Oh really. How close have you been to an RFC? I’ve been an active member in a number of working groups that wrote them. I’ve put features into standards you use every day (and I’ve pushed for features that were declined).

And by the way, not that it’s really relevent to this discussion: there are very few “standards” which aren’t open to interpretation here and there. They’re designed by committee and they often show it.

GorillaMan wrote

It’s fair and I deserve it. Hell, my car caught fire a while back and left me on the side of the road, covered with soot from putting it out and late for work. Of course it was an enormous pain. But guess who picked the car? I did. It’s my problem.

Oh, fwiw, one of the joys of the car is that since it’s old, it’s exempt from emissions controls.

rjung wrote

Well, duh. Of course you went out of your way to support Macs. You’re a Mac guy!!