The other day, I sat through four hours of “training” for my employer’s new intranet. It included such exciting topics as How To Use Word! How To Use Outlook! and How To Use Internet Explorer!
I browsed the SDMB for most of it.
The during the segment on IE, though, the trainer from our IT department said something that raised my ire. Our current administratively-mandated browser is Netscape Navigator 4.7. This trainer, whom I otherwise respect immensely, blamed the ever-louder chorus of complaints from staff members about website incompatibilities not on NSN4, but on the web designers.
In other words, she repeated the mantra that a webmaster should in effect create two websites: one for NSN4, and one for everybody else.
Given the fact that NSN4’s CSS support is utter garbage (not really it’s fault, since it was released in, what, 1996?), and CSS/XHTML is the de facto future of the web, does anybody really believe this anymore?
I don’t hold any particular enmity for Netscape. I used Communicator from the beta up until about a year ago, when Opera 6 became a more viable alternative to IE. But I recently decided to deliberately stop supporting NSN4 on my own site… users entering through the index page now get a message to the effect that they need to upgrade, rather than the CSS heavy regular version that NS doesn’t support at all.
In the last (college-level) HTML class I had to take (spring 2000), the instructor dropped all the NN4.7 projects because the book had lots of errors in its examples, and basically, nobody could get NN4.7 assignments to work anywhere near the way the book said they were supposed to. The class was an online course, to make matters worse.
We all gave up, and then she gave up too.
~
Web sites should be accessible by lynx and mosaic.
Oh, and the web should not be used for non-static communication such as transactions, although that’s a war already lost. But seriously, using the web for half the things people use it for makes no sense. It’s practically like transferring files by converting them to ASCII using UUEncode, FAXing the resulting ASCII, and then scanning and using OCR on the other end. i.e, yes it works, but it’s not how you’d design it to work if you were starting from scratch.
So, OK, if you have a real reason to code capabilities that you need, and can’t easily accomodate ancient browsers, do what you have to. But the best pages are still the simplest. I can navigate my own site, including making a post to my guestbook, from lynx. What do you needcascading style shits for, anyway? You writing a front end to a SQL or Oracle database?
I still code for netscape 4.7, although if a non-essential graphic is off by a pixel or two or some css bolding doesn’t show up I no longer worry about it. It’s mostly just a matter of making sure your table code is clean, although javascript is very titchy around Netscape 4.x. However, I admit I am not always so philosopical about it and I’m rather glad Netscape 4’s market share is 5% and dropping.
You need Cascading Style Sheets because that’s what the current standard calls for. CSS is what is demanded by both HTML 4 and especially XHTML and XML.
Moreover, and more importantly, continuing the NN4, pre-(X)HTML 4/1 nightmare of table-based positioning, font tag soup and other nonsense adds needless complication, bloats file sizes and overinflates the man-hours needed on any web project. It utterly ignores standards, and does a frank injustice to the growing number of users who aren’t on Win98/WinME systems with Netscape or IE as their browsers of choice. While that may be a majority of people, it isn’t the entire picture, and there are better ways to accomodate everyone while simultaneously doing things the proper, proactive and progressive way. There is no justification for continuing old, out of date, non-compliant practices.
For the record, I write (X)HTML that follows best practices, doesn’t misuse features by twisting them into something they were never meant for (i.e. tables as a means of alignment of design elements instead of presentation of tabular data) and most importantly, can be verified as being fully compliant with the current W3C guidelines according to their validator. By using a true cascade of style sheets, users who choose to use any deprecated, noncompliant browser (IE 4, Netscape 4, Opera 4) that cannot handle CSS positioning (CSS2) can still be availed of the other elements which can be introduced via CSS1, such as color choices, font choices, display of images, etc.
And by the way, the writing of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and CSS is not coding. There is no code involved. It’s not programming, it’s not nearly complex enough to justify using that word, even in the vernacular.
You need Cascading Style Sheets because that’s what the current standard calls for. CSS is what is demanded by both HTML 4 and especially XHTML and XML.
Moreover, and more importantly, continuing the NN4, pre-(X)HTML 4/1 nightmare of table-based positioning, font tag soup and other nonsense adds needless complication, bloats file sizes and overinflates the man-hours needed on any web project. It utterly ignores standards, and does a frank injustice to the growing number of users who aren’t on Win98/WinME systems with Netscape or IE as their browsers of choice. While that may be a majority of people, it isn’t the entire picture, and there are better ways to accomodate everyone while simultaneously doing things the proper, proactive and progressive way. There is no justification for continuing old, out of date, non-compliant practices.
For the record, I write (X)HTML that follows best practices, doesn’t misuse features by twisting them into something they were never meant for (i.e. tables as a means of alignment of design elements instead of presentation of tabular data) and most importantly, can be verified as being fully compliant with the current W3C guidelines according to their validator. By using a true cascade of style sheets, users who choose to use any deprecated, noncompliant browser (IE 4, Netscape 4, Opera 4) that cannot handle CSS positioning (CSS2) can still be availed of the other elements which can be introduced via CSS1, such as color choices, font choices, display of images, etc.
And by the way, the writing of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and CSS is not coding. There is no code involved. It’s not programming, it’s not nearly complex enough to justify using that word, even in the vernacular.
Really? The only browser that has found to be fully compliant with CSS-1 is Mozilla (0.97 or later IIRC) and Netscape that’s based on that core. Not IE, not Opera.
Not counting W3C’s own Amaya, of course.
So I don’t know what are you talking about CSS-2 (that’s not positoning. Positioning is CSS-P).
Back to the OP, the whole poing of HTML is to separate the structure from the layout, which is a rule that was and still is flagrantly ignored. It was somewhat understandable back in the bad old days before CSS. CSS has been out for how long now?
What you should do with website design is to provide graceful degradation. Any browers that do not understand CSS can still render the pages in a meaningful way. That should include Lynx.