Bill H., for a while I thought it was only me who thought you were arrogant, clueless, and rather full of your opinion that professional must needs equal Microsoft.
I think this thread conclusively proves me wrong. Everyone thinks you’re arrogant, clueless, and rather full of your opinion that professional must needs equal Microsoft.
I’d say that Microsoft is fucking itself faster than a horny teen in boot camp, that its former customers are wondering why JPEGs are now unsafe on Windows XP, and that people are moving to Firefox in droves. But, of course, `professionals’ don’t really care about minor crap like that. If it works on MSIE, it will work for everyone who matters, no matter how few of them remain.
Bill H.: either you are missing the point, or willfully ignoring it. Either way, allow me to restate (for the umpteenth time) the crux of the matter.
Nobody is recommending designing a website that conforms specifically to Firefox, or specifically to Macintoshes, or specifically to anything. The entire point here is that a well-designed web page should conform to everything. Standard HTML exists. All browsers recognize it and handle it the same way. It’s the .pdf of the web. A company that wants a decent web page will insist that this HTML set, and this set alone, is used to implement the page. That way, all of its consumers will be able to access and use the page with equal ease.
Your rambling on about “the majority of their consumers” would be relevant if, and only if, the designers were forced to conform to one particular browser at the exclusion of all others. That is most decidedly not the case; see above for explanation.
The point: if a professionally-created page is designed such that it will only function on [insert browser here], it shows a lack of professionalism and an apathy toward consumer needs. One might even conclude that it shows a needless (repeat: needless) discrimination against those who favor a particular browser or operating system.
I am far from the first to say this in this thread. I only repeat it because I have yet to see you respond to it.
Yes, your site is not a commercial site. your site is not a commerical site. It’s a labour of love and you can afford to go to the ends of the earth to find esoteric browsers to test under. When you have 3 weeks and an unsympathetic boss to deal with, then see how many browsers you manage to test under?
Ah, good point. We certainly can’t expect you to put in extra work and effort just to allow for weird, unpopular browsers. No doubt you barely have enough time to spend getting the blink tag to work properly in IE.
Gosh, you know what would be really helpful for both of us? If somebody were to design a set of guidelines that people could carefully follow so that their code would always work properly on every browser. Then you’d know that your site would work, because it would be standard, and all the browsers would follow the standard, and we’d know that your site would work, because it would be standard, and all the web pages would follow the standard.
What a beautiful dream. Maybe somebody should actually do that.
Not really; he implied that at least some of the list was esoteric. Which you must surely admit that it is. iCab 2.9.8 for 68K Mac? C’mon. Shalmanese is perfectly right to point out that it’s simply uneconomic for firms to fund a relatively expensive web-monkey to verify and ensure that the positively minute community using iCab is catered to. I’d say it’s getting to the point where it’s worth ensuring your sites work in Firefox, but I wouldn’t really say the same of Opera, and that’s the browser I use every day. There comes a point where you have to be realistic about what commercial firms’ priorities are.
Ignoring your sarcasm, you are quite right. It is not in a company’s interests to cater for every browser under the sun. Depending on their intended market, it may be sufficient to support IE, and simply verify that the other browsers work “well enough”. This is up to the company, and depends on their business considerations, not your sense of outrage that Shiira doesn’t render the bottom-lefthand navigation graphic in perfect alignment.
Your point about standards would be bang on if all browsers catered to all standards, but they don’t. IE is non-conformant in many ways, as is Opera, and even Firefox, I suspect. None of them are perfect, and I believe even the biggest standards advocate will end up tearing his hair out trying to design a major fully-compliant site that still worked on every browser. Sneering at the people who have to deal with this unfortunate intrusion of reality into your imaginary perfect world is pretty harsh.
I am one of the people who has to deal with it, and I am one of the big standards advocates. I didn’t spend time tearing my hair out over getting standard HTML to work with multiple browsers on a fairly major site.
If you stay away from non-standard, browser specific stuff, it’s not that difficult.
Here’s the answer, kids: it takes the same amount of time to create a standards-compliant site as it does to create a non-standards-compliant one. Given that, there’s no good reason not to follow standards.
People who say that coding in standard compliant, cross-browser compatible HTML takes exactly no more time that coding for a specific browser are living in a dream world. Even if you DID code in 100% W3C HTML 4.01, you would then have to go through each and every page and add all manner of ugly hacks to the code just to make it look the way it should in IE. I’m certainly not advocating the MS approach of deliberately breaking support for certain elements but it’s a situation that exists and when your running a business, then you don’t have the option of sticking it to the man and telling all IE users to use another browser to browse your site.
While, to the experienced web-programmer with years of intimate experience with each and every browser could maybe bang out a cross browser site in very little more time than an IE only one but most people are not experienced web-programmers. It is far, FAR easier to code to one browser first and then add cross-browser support if and when the main site is finished and there are no further pressing priorities. And there sites are never done and there are nearly always more pressing priorities.
Sure the W3C school might have 18% mozilla users but I would say thats a far higher percentage than the average site. I would expect slashdot to have much more and Jan’s knitting and crochet website to have much, much less. In fact, I would say the number of people with disabilities visiting your site is going to exceed the number of people using the more esoteric browsers yet I doubt very much that all the “professional” webmasters are providing disabled friendly webpages as they are making them comply to spec.
Very true. Coding “standards compliant” doesn’t equal coding “cross-browser-compatible”, especially when you start getting down to the pixel-level details that are sometimes required to make a website look right. Not all browsers are equally standards-compliant. There’s a real-world largely-undocumented HTML standard out there that experienced web developers know – the one that actually looks good on most browsers.
Building an all-browser-compatible website may not be free, but when you get down to brass tacks it’s really pretty cheap. It’s nothing like the expense of porting a piece of desktop software between platforms. You can run multiple browser versions and models on a single PC, and it only costs a couple of grand to buy a Mac to once-over your work against. The additional time it takes to have wide compatibility is in the scale of days – not months or years.
So for a large company, this means you can extend your reach to another 2% to 20% of potential customers, for a price so low that it’s essentially free. Especially at large scales, that’s just money lying around waiting to be picked up. The cost-benefit of broad browser compatibility is very very compelling.
Go to the top ten largest websites you can think of. The Googles, the Yahoos, the eBays, the Amazons. Notice how they work on all browsers. It’s not a coincidence.
Oh goodness! The next IE will only work under the next Windows! And it will have OOODLES of features I’m sure EVERYBODY will just rush out to use in their websites so they crash in not only every browser for “odd” operating systems, but also in XP and 2000 and ME and … But no problem! We all saw how fast XP ended up on EVERY desktop! :rolleyes:
Is it me or has MS entered a death spiral? Is it genuinely self-destructive? Have Gates and Ballmer gotten so rich that their hearts just aren’t in it anymore?
I’ll echo the sentiment that building a cross-browser website that does anything more than plain HTML and very simple DHTML is not as trivial a task as some folks are making it out to be. Browsers have quirks, and your application needs to be tested on all of them in order to ensure that it works right. If you don’t have the time or inclination to put the effort into testing all browsers, one reasonable approach is to simply not support certain browsers, because then you control the end-user’s experience, rather than having him run across unpredictable problems.
Just because a company puts something on a web page doesn’t mean their goal was to get it to every browser on the planet. It might simply be a web app because “DHTML on IE” was a quicker way to develop and deliver an app than “C++ compiled to Win32 x86.” Sure, “DHTML on IE” is sometimes frustratingly close to “DHTML on everything”, but the difference between the two is not necessarily incompetence.
No doubt. But you can do so much with plain HTML and simple DHTML. Heck, look at the page you’re looking at right now.
Web users have a pretty good intuitive sense of what kinds of features are fancy-schmancy and which ones ought to just work on their browsers. I have sympathy for the amount of work and cleverness it takes to make the fancy stuff work cross-browser, but really, 99% of useful websites fall into the latter category. When a customer can’t click on a link or submit a basic form on your website because you did something tricksy with Javascript that doesn’t work for Safari, well then you end up in the Pit. And rightly so.
Going back to the OP, I’m not talking about design, and yesteryear concepts of pixel perfect alignment which can only be found by using tables for layout (argh!) or other kludges meant to compensate for the fact that graphic designers seem to think that they can replicate print and television branding ideas on the web when, in fact, that’s not always possible. My gripe always turns to the places where websites become interactive and therefore broken: overly complicated forms. Forms that have broken indextabs. Forms that have invalid, garbage javascript widgets built in that don’t add to the basic functionality (paying bills or ordering merchandise) but do “revenue enhancement” like analyzing what you’ve just ordered and pointing you toward “You might also like…” items or automagically updating as the form is filled out, because it’s so important that we see running tallies of things, because we can’t click “Continue” or “Confirm” to see what the totals are, and make changes from there.
Writing a form that works across browsers and platforms ain’t tough. (Broken indextabs notwithstanding, that’s just sloppy.) Writing one that’s jampacked with widgets that work everywhere is harder. But that’s where webmonkeys need to stop and think and come to a conclusion that if they can’t make their widgets work for everyone, or if including a broken widget makes it impossible for some users to use the form at all, then it’s not the users that need to be excluded, especially when money is on the line.
As Joools mentioned, Amazon wants my money and they make sure that their site works no matter what browser I use. Verizon Wireless needs my money. They ought to follow suit. Or, at the very least, they could tell me that I have to use a specific browser – for three months I tried to pay my bill online only to be told “This feature is temporarily unavailable at this time. Please try again later.” (Yes, that’s verbatim, I know because I just tried to use the bill pay function through Safari again not five seconds ago.) Not “Your browser is not compatible with this function.” Not “Please use Internet Explorer to access Online Bill Pay.” Nothing which indicates that the problem is a lack of harmony between my browser and the meaningless widgets in their poorly written form.
Mobile phone number portability is a beautiful thing. I can’t wrest my landline service away from Verizon, but T-Mobile looks more and more attractive every day. (And I know I an pay their bills online without hassle, because my husband is a T-Mobile person. I should’ve listened to him when I got my mobile. Lesson learned.)
Anyone who thinks HTML is a page-layout specification language – or tries to use it as such – deserves to be bitch-slapped in the kisser with a printed hardcopy of the W3C HTML standards.
Get a cheap eMac for $700, or go on eBay or buy a refurb unit for even less. Hell, if you’re doing web design professionally, you can write it off as a business expense.
It’s not the cost of buying an emac or downloading firefox, its the expense of iterating through many hundreds of pages, checking each permutation of inputs to figure out if everything that needs to be done can be done on a specific browser and, sometimes, this can easily take up just as much time as the actual site design.
If your a google or an amzon, then that elusive 2% of the market is something that’s well worth your time to pick up because the number of viewers/developers is so high. If your some piddling company or a small subsidary of a large firm, then that 2% may only amount to some 100 users or so wheras the increase in cost might be 20% and the cost/benifit analysis is much less compelling.
Yes, it WOULD be lovely if every single company could hire top rate web-designers who are all well-versed in their field and regularly keep abreast of developments and devote every waking hour of their existance to the perfection of their craft. Unfortunately, buisness reality has to step in and 2nd rate programmers are hired on far too short a timeframe and inevitably, requirements are dropped and work is kludged. Most businesses would much rather have an IE compliant website working NOW than a fully compatible, beautifully documented, easily maintainable, completely standard compliant, well design, orthogonally structured and well organized website in 2 months time.
Really? I write standard code, and it doesn’t take me more time than the shitsucking assholes who code only for IE. Perhaps those that get their sites done so quickly are using FrontPage as their coding tool?
Haven’t experienced this either, despite having done numerous contract websites. Then again, I don’t sit around overusing Flash, Java and frames as if they’ll go extinct.
Must be those people using FrontPage you’re talking about.
That percentage is growing daily as people run screaming and jump ship from Internet Explorer. How long are you going to cling to the Titanic of web browsers?
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