On The Perplexing Prevalence Of Plug-Ins... 49
Element5 asks: "Recently I've noticed more and more Web pages are requiring plug-ins to be viewed at all. Most notable of these such pages are movie sites. Some sites are built entirely with Director or Flash (I only use Flash as an example as it is seemingly the most prevalent plug-in requirement out there). Am I the only one who finds this trend disturbing? It's almost as if Web site developers are skipping the whole process of learning HTML entirely and instead rely on an authoring tool based on a proprietary technology. Don't get me wrong, Macromedia's products are fantastic ones; but I'd much rather see them used in throw-away aspects of a Web site that can be dropped if a user doesn't have the plug-ins, or on a site which also hosts an HTML version with exactly the same features. At any rate, I'm just wondering what other people think about this trend." Read on...
I too understand the frustration behind encountering sites like this. I understand that it's hard work to create and maintain sites with multiple "versions" for browsers of varying capabilities, but I thought the primary purpose of a Web site was to make oneself seen, and wouldn't it make sense to make yourself seen by the lowest-common-denominator before adding all of the glitz and chrome? Would a static version of a site that makes extensive use of Flash be that hard to design, especially since most of the key artwork should have been done for the animation?
Re:most people have the plugins... (Score:2)
Re:most people have the plugins... (Score:1)
I don't return to a site because of any fruity graphics or animation, I return because they have something I want (information, links, news etc). I think site designers would do well to rember that.
'Flash is a Bad Thing?' No, look at evidence. (Score:1)
No, no, I have to disagree with your assessment of the relative uses and merits of Flash. Yes, it's *usually* used obnoxiously, but not necesarily so.
Look at http://www.moma.org, official site for the Museum of Modern Art. Here flash is used simply and elegantly (no ohh ahh effect) for site navigation; it's not trying to be site's the content--the bitmaps of great art and the articles are the content--but it enhances the feel of the site.
It allows you to pack a lot of links into a page without giving it a cluttered look and over-solicitous/click-me-please feel, like say...almost every major site out there--crammed to the brink with links.
I do have to conceed that a site that doesn't offer a Flash alternative, as many professionally designed sites do, is totally stupid.
Re:Use Flash because it's the best solution? (Score:1)
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Cheers
Re:Use Flash because it's the best solution? (Score:1)
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Cheers
Re:Ignoring economics. (Score:1)
Customers do not "accept whatever crap a business peddles." If a site is hard to use, does not provide sufficient content, or otherwise does not meet the consumer's needs they *will* and *do* go elsewhere. Calling the vast majority of users "sheeple" is at best, pompous. I have used more browsers than I can count, and because it is faster, more stable, and complies better with standards than other browsers I choose to use IE -- as does the majority of web users -- am I one of these "sheeple"?
Is someone among these "sheeple" if they don't *care* about the browser? Why *should* they have to care about the browser? It is just a tool. The only important factor is how well it does its job.
The fact which you have refused to address repeatedly is that things like images, CSS and JavaScript are VERY powerful tools to improve usability, readability, and performance of web based applications and information.
Simple features like color can be powerful tools for making information easier to analyze and absorb. Witness SourceForge's bug database which uses the background color of a table row to denote the severity of a bug. A quick glance gives you a pretty good idea of the shape that the project is in: A lot of red indicates that the code is riddled with severe bugs... Layout is even more important.
And of course, branding is imporant to any company that wishes to survive. Customers (and that means companies as well as individuals) wont use a service if they forget it exists. This apparently matters even among techno-savvy users -- witness the success of RedHat versus other distributions.
IME customers go both ways - perhaps yours want whizz-bang graphics that explode off the page at them.
You have repeatedly tried to set up the abuse of capabilities as a straw man to distract from the real argument. I reject this argument. That's like saying "drunk drivers kill lots of people, so cars should not be used!"
The real argument here is about standards and progress. You apparently do not see new and evolving standards as being progress. Therefore your opinion is that web developers should not use them. You might as well complain that you can't access all these web sites using Gopher.
I see new and evolving standards as a means to deliver a better service. If I develop a web based application, things like JavaScript provide me with a way to deliver a user interface to the application that does not go against 20+ years of usability research and information theory. I can provide information in a cleaner, simpler visual layout and put more functionality on the page with a simpler appearance. Not only that, I can make the performance of the application FASTER for my users: Why should search results be sorted on the server? Why not have the client-side sort the results of a search instead of having to open a connection to the server, make a request, have the server sort the results, and then send the entire page back for the browser to re-render.
When I was teaching a course on browsing the web with Netscape, most of the newbie-students I was teaching were overwhelmed by how loud many of the pages were. ("It's so busy" were one's exact words.)
That is an example of poor usability. The abuse of a tool does not invalidate the tool.
As for hardware, running Netscape 4.0 on a P120/16MB is a painful experience.
Buy a better computer. A $400 eMachine has a 500Mhz CPU, 32MB of RAM, and 4.3GB HD. It also comes with Windows, and thus IE which as I pointed out before, is more compliant with standards than Netscape 4.x -- not to mention that IE runs very well on such a computer. You can get an equally good machine used for much less.
Netscape 6 is miserable. Opera is bearable but costs money. None of them are open source, and if it was my decision my Win95 install would be on the losing end of a HD reformat. I am far happier with lynx and w3m.
Since when is Netscape 6 [mozilla.org] not Open Source? And yes, performance sucks right now -- it's in *beta* and has all sorts of debugging code in it. By the time it's released it will not only comply with standards better than any browser out, it will be vastly faster than almost any other browser.
If you are happy with Lynx, then fine. Use it. But don't complain about web developers using *industry accepted* standards that you have consciously chosen to ignore.
-JF
Re:Use Flash because it's the best solution? (Score:2)
Re:Plugins are not indexable (Score:1)
Of course, if the intent is to bring users to a specific point in a Flash movie then that can be problematic, but framed sites have similar issues. It's all about paying attention and doing the right thing at the right time at the right place, etc.
(Sorry for the cross-thread post -- I thought it an important point and this seemed the more appropriate location)
Re:Use Flash because it's the best solution? (Score:1)
you have to deal with arbitrary floorplans
you need to be able to put numbers, names etc on the image underlying the imagemap
the zooming/scrolling has to be fast - if people have to reload a 400KB image each time they zoom or pan then they're not going to be very happy
This isn't a flame - I'd like to know how this is best done. I'd add that I'm by no stretch of the imagination an HTML guru, but I did investigate other sites offering similar facilities ("it's not plagiarism, it's research") and most of them seemed to be using either client-side Java applets or the SmartPictures plugin, rather than HTML, so I concluded that it was probably at the hard-to-impossible end of the market and therefore not something that should be embarked on given our (stupidly tight) timescales.
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Cheers
The /real/ problem with plugins... (Score:3)
- They are too often closed-source trojans to gather personal information for the marketing department (and yes, even once is too often for me)
- There are far too many "multimedia plugins", all incompatable with each other.
- The plugin developers are constantly releasing new versions with kewl new features, which mean that people are creating content to use the kewl new features, which means the plugin you just downloaded to view content using the lame old features is now obsolete. Time to download the latest version (which will be obsolete moments after you finish downloading).
- And once you plow through the junk so you can finally see the "multimedia content", it turns out to be incredibly lame...
:=P
I used to listen to spinner.com, but the last time I started the client and got the sorry, you must upgrade to the latest version message, I finally decided it was in no way worth it and just uninstalled.-y
Ignorance of (some) webmasters (Score:1)
Seriously, what really pisses me off (whether I'm using lynx or arachne or Netscape 6.x) is the sheer ignorance of a significant number of webmasters. Not only do they assume that you have the latest (ie, most bloated) browser and plugins, they also presume that you're running windoze, have plenty of memory for new windows, and lots of screen real estate for gargantuan graphics and zillions of frames. The biggest problem, though, is that they really don't want to be told that they're shutting users out. They don't give a rat's ass. I've e-mailed at least a hundred (with calm, reasonable, and intelligible messages, unlike this post), none of whom made the slightest change to their websites as a result. I've given up. I guess they just want a page that looks good when viewed by the CEO on his T1-connected P-III 700 running Win2000 & Internet Exploiter 6.
Making a page that everyone can use isn't hard, and doesn't have to be bland. Ditch the frames (unless absolutely necessary), make images, scripting, plugins, and all those other multimedia goodies all optional. (And put in ALTs for fsck's sake!)
(sigh)
(PS. If you use lynx, take a look at w3m [yamagata-u.ac.jp]. It's an HTML pager that complements Lynx well in that it renders well the documents that lynx does poorly, and vice versa.)
Re:May'be not the only one... (Score:1)
Whether you use a web authoring tool or write it by hand, it's still HTML, though FrontPage is a bad example as its graphics handling facilities are apalling.
> The majority of people enjoy the experience of plugins such as shockwave...
The majority of people that I know don't have T1 connections and would prefer not to wait for anything, be it shockwave or unnecessary JPEGs. And not all have the relevant plugins installed. Therefore, plugins and animated graphics, etc. should be used sparingly, and should not be essential to the viewing or navigation of the site. Unfortunately, many personal sites do not realise this.
Just Say No (Score:2)
http://www.anybrowser.org [anybrowser.org]
Because...
- Tim Berners-Lee.Nuff said.
Use Flash because it's the best solution? (Score:1)
I'm just finishing off writing an engine which builds .SWF files (Flash movie files, for the Lynx generation out there). This means that text-only browsers, people running graphical browsers which don't support the Flash Player, people on Palms or WAP phones or two-tin-cans-and-a-piece-of-string or whatever the fsck the last 0.1% of the population connect with won't be able to use some of the functionality.
The reason we're using Flash, however, is because it's the best option out there. The requirement was to deliver an interactive floorplan for trade-shows to the browser: it had to be zoomable, moveable, fast and respond to clicks. Given this, Flash seemed like the best option, especially since SVG support is currently nigh-on non-existent (actually, having said that, Adobe have released an SVG ... plugin. Hmm).
Does anyone out there have any better suggestions? We didn't, so we decided to abandon the <5% of the market that weren't running Netscape 4+ or IE4+. Life's tough, I'm afraid (c.f. the move in the UK from 405 line TV signals to 625 line - eventually, you've got to abandon some people).
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Cheers
Re:most people have the plugins... (Score:1)
But in this day and age where a lot of money is put into designing cool sites that will bring people back, designers are going to go with whatever lets them create glitz and flash. Especially when 95+% of their users have or can easily get the necessary plugins.
Interesting that you'd cite "bringing people back" as the justification for these things. I know I, and in fact most people I know, find these ugly things an almost certain indicator that we'll never return to a site using them. When I see some ugly-as-fuck java'd up flashappy site, that's pretty much it for that site. Sorry, gooood-bye.
How important are these plugins? I have a very knowledgeable friend that designs web pages usign flash script. Bright guy, geek, runs linux at home etc. Last month he point blank told me that "Flash 4.0 will bury html"
And what does he have to base this on? Flash sites are annoying. Note that the best commerce sites on the internet such as Amazon and Yahoo have, in general, their total percentage of flash/java/lameerplugin#27 being, you guessed it, absolutely none whatsoever. If you want people to come to your site, you use HTML. Period. Absolute, utter, final end of story. Nothing says "don't come here, I don't want you to look at this page" more than an irritating "you need a plug in for this page which doesn't exist" popup window.
Sure, a few sites have some fun with these things, but you know what? They're typically "look, we have a cool toy" type of sites. Sites showing off their cute little flash animation, or some silly Java applet or whatnot. Not sites that actually want people to visit them. Either that, or (guess what!) they don't get a lot of visitors.
Ignoring economics. (Score:1)
Except for niche sites like Slashdot and other open source/free software community sites the vast majority of users that hit a site will be using IE on Windows (mostly 4.x+), followed by NS on Windows (mostly 4.x+), followed by IE on the Mac (mostly 4.5+), and followed distantly by NS on the Mac. (mostly 4.x+)
My site is usable under Lynx and such -- no JavaScript/Flash/Java/whatever to get in the way of things, and no frames for example.
A quick breakdown of my site reveals 51% using IE, 31% using Netscape, 0.4% using Lynx, and about 0.8% using Opera. 13% is attributable to AvantGo -- but that's almost entirely because I have a personal sub-site which I access from my Pilot. Most of the rest are bots.
A breakdown by OS: 86% use some form of Windows, 9% use Linux, and MacOS is around 0.9%. FreeBSD is just under MacOS.
Broken down by browser version, the number of users accessing my site with IE/NS 4.0 is less than 1% *total*.
The Linux/MacOS numbers are skewed in favor of Linux vs. the "normal" breakdown for big sites because most of the users that come to my site come from Slashdot.
I'll get to the significance shortly.
Companies are rightly concerned with presentation. Presentation does matter to the general public. It is time consuming to make a version of a site that for older browsers when you value detailed control over presentation.
What does poor presentation mean for a company? Poor brand recognition. Poor customer first impression. Lower sales/usage. Lower customer retention.
It is only *economically sensible* to support a browser if the cost of doing so is lower than the increase in sales/banner impressions/whatever gained by doing so.
Supporting Lynx makes no sense for a site that is banner-revenue based: Lynx isn't going to display the banners. So Lynx support only makes sense if you have a pay service. (and, as above, if the income from Lynx users outweighs the cost of making a Lynx-compatible version)
Every major site supports both Netscape and IE. Almost every web application developer grumbles at the difficulty of doing so -- primarily because Netscape (excluding Mozilla) has very poor standards support and a ton of bugs. It is a *major effort* to support a site of any significant complexity on just the two major browsers.
Eventually, if and when Mozilla becomes more widely used then NS 4.x -- and it's still widely used enough that it is statistically significant -- then we'll be at a point where web developers may be able to just make pages to the standards. HTML 4.0, CSS1/2, DOM1, and ECMAscript 1.3...
When I have time to work on my site, I'd rather work on improving the functionality for the 82.8% of my users who use a recent browser than make the existing functionality work better for the 17.2% of my "users" who either refuse to use a decent, up to date, standards compliant browser or are robots. It's just a more effective use of my time and energy.
One more thing: The WAP protocol (which is largely a subset of HTTP, HTML, and other such standards) includes a subset of ECMAscript. That means that text-based cell phones can run some JavaScript code. Why doesn't Lynx even support JavaScript yet?
-JF
Re:Overdoing it all (Score:1)
designers as it is with the clients who buy the
designers services.
Talk do a html monkey sometime and listen to them say
"This new potential client wants a site that looks like
these other ones". Buyers that are clueless about the whole thing want flashy glitz
because they were impressed by foo.com's homepage and have no
idea the whole web thing is supposed to be useful.
Sympathy for the (Flash)Plug-in (Score:1)
Designer Mindset? (Score:1)
The point is for such designers is that it gets the job done and for the artists out there it looks good. Another part of this trend may be sheer ignorance on the those who hire others to design. After all, if bossman says "I want...", and you say "No, thats lame," you might not be around the next day. How many times have you visited a site whose links fail because they use a line of JavaScript instead of <a href...>?
Though I've been doing HTML by hand for years, I do know that as a web designer my days are in a way numbered. Purely because the medium is changing in a way that may not agree with my design goals (low bandwidth, cross platform etc). The direction may take a sharp about face, it may not.
Ending this rambling note, if it takes too long to load a site or it needs special attention, forget them. After all how many web sites can claim truly unique content? While things cannot always work this way, it is an option.
-Greg
Lazy (Score:2)
Re:Use Flash because it's the best solution? (Score:2)
Re:most people have the plugins... (Score:1)
1) ship with these plugins (if they are popluar enough) or
2) will automatically down and install them without the user having to do anything (not even a reboot!)
Unless of course you happen to be using an NT lab, where they download and get three fourths of the way into the installer before they bother to tell you that you need administrator privileges before you can do anything.
By this time I am so pissed off at the website that if there is any way of finding the webmaster's contact e-mail without the plug-in, I send off an angry e-mail. Of course, there usually isn't, so the website maintainers have no idea how many people don't see their lovely, pretty, seven freegin' megabyte websites.
Re:Just Say No (Score:2)
Guilty as charged ;)
That said, the people on the other side of this debate seem to be invoking an opposit sense of holy principles: "why don't you want to spend all your life downloading and installing flaky closed-source plugins and customizing your browser to our marketing department's whims".
I posit that yours is an equally common malady among marketroids.
If your target market is only users who have high-bandwidth connections and who use IE99.9 with all the latest privacy-invading closed-source trojans and plugins, by all means, design for them and tell anyone whose User-Agent doesn't measure up to your standards to go to hell.
But don't be surprised if your server logs start seeing references to pages like "you_lost_a_customer.html" from people who only wanted to buy stuff from you, but whom you deemed unworthy.
Designing for only one browser or requiring a custom plugin is fundamentally no different than telling someone "Looky heah, boah, this heah's a Whites Only wat'rin hole! Y'all gawddamn Nig^H^Hetscape usahs kin jest git to th'back of th'bus!"
While I'd be the last person to argue that browser-discrimination is anywhere near as important as race discrimination, I believe the analogy holds: You "never signed off on any internet principles" - that's fine, I agree you're free to discriminate on any criteria you wish, I'd love to hear your business case for it.
I'm serious here -- what are you doing that's so special that Netscape users shouldn't see it? Or that people on Macintoshes, IRIX boxes, or Suns shouldn't see? With user attention spans measured in seconds, what makes your site so important that I should want to spend 5 minutes (or 20 minutes!) downloading a plug-in, or that I should have to stop what I'm doing to fire up a different web browser, or that I should have to get up and walk over to an officemate's Wintel box to see it? Or even that I should have to lift a finger for the three or four mouse clicks to enable Java/Javascript?
When you design for accessibility, you maximize the size of your potential market. In business, a larger potential market is generally considered a good thing, and it has nothing to do with sound bites from Tim.
Bottom line: If your site won't let me shop or browse at it until I bow to your marketing department's whims, there are plenty of sites who will. They'll get my money and traffic instead.
Re:Use Flash because it's the best solution? (Score:2)
A prototype, that I have hacked together in php is at http://www.illtel.denver.c o.us/~abelits/floor/floor.php3" [denver.co.us] (see source [denver.co.us].
Images are produced from xfig diagram (in this example very primitive one) cut into 200x200 squares, and php script displays them in 3x3 "tiled" maps in "zoomed" mode, or another image produced from the same diagram in the "whole floor" mode. "Whole floor" image could be generatred with less details, however I was too lazy to do that -- in this example it's just all tiles, scaled down.
In both modes clicking on any area on the map leads to tiled 3x3 "zoomed" image with the clicked tile in the center. Images are never re-downloaded if they fit in the cache, and only html is generated dynamically.
Of course, this is a proof-of-concept prototype, and any real design can feature additional scrolling controls, additional areas on the imagemap that lead to objects displayed on them (say, clicking on the room with known detailed description and map shows that map instead). Also 3x3 tiles per "viewport" can be too small, real map probably should be displayed with more tiles. Still, it works, displays well in all browsers (including lynx, if it can call image viewer to view images separately), and can be extended to more zooming levels "recursively".
Re:Ignoring economics. (Score:1)
Not true. Using a significant subset of the HTML, CSS, DOM, and ECMAscript standards one can write a very functional, standards compliant web page that works perfectly under IE, and Opera (4.0) but fails miserably under Netscape.
Supporting Netscape alone requires additional effort due partly to its exceedingly poor standards support, and partly because of bugs. Nonetheless, it at least provides most of the relevent capabilities in one form or another whereas Lynx does not.
Using Javascript for all of your nav functions just seems plain ridiculous when there are these perfectly functional things called *hyperlinks*
Hyperlinks are not the end-all, be-all of navigation. They can be entirely inadequate, or result in a slower, clunkier browsing experience. Using, for example, drop-down menus can save the user one or more page views at several seconds per page view. It also makes finding what you are looking for easier. Yes, like anything, ECMAscript can be abused. I, however, am not going to avoid using it where it will legitimately help make my site more usable just because you hide behind such excuses.
Usability matters. Tech-savvy individuals who ignore standards do not.
Lynx and other browsers that don't use scripting or plugins just ignore them.
So basically, your complaint is "my browser doesn't support accepted industry standards, and I can't use sites that rely on those standards, so nobody should use them!"
If you need to create two totally separate versions, then IMHO, you're doing it wrong.
Spoken like someone who has never had a customer base of normal (non-tech-savvy) individuals. Customers will not conform to your whims. They will go *elsewhere* if they are unhappy. Therefore, if one wishes to be successful, one must conform to *them*.
As for doing things wrong... If you *don't* have to create two seperate versions of a page -- one with and one without JavaScript then your JavaScript code is probably just eye-candy (useful in branding but generally not useful in aiding navigation). Most uses of JavaScript on sites of any significance these days are *not* just eye candy.
One example would be expandable/collapsable tree views, and tabbed sections. Yes, these can be trivially implemented on the server but that creates more load for your server, and involves more page reloads for the end user -- a very frustrating experience. A little ECMAscript and DOM make for a much more usable site. But for those using browsers that choose to not support ECMAscript, the only alternative is to code *both* versions and send the appropriate HTML depending on who is visiting your site.
1. Why lump in old browsers with ones that aren't standards compliant?
Because standards progress. The end result -- whether you use an old browser, or a non-compliant browser -- is that I, as a developer, cannot use those standards.
Historically, Netscape and IE have been the worst for desecrating the HTML standard.
Define "desecrate." If you mean they added stuff to the standard, then sure, they've "desecrated" it. If you mean failing to implement a substantial amount of the relevent defined standards, then Lynx has a far worse record here. Netscape isn't much of a prize in that regard either. Mozilla and IE are the only browsers on the market that correctly implement a very large subset of the most recent DOM, CSS, and ECMAscript standards.
Lynx adheres to the standards strictly enough that it uses special parsing modes to emulate the most common Netscape- and Microsoft-introduced screw ups necessary to make many pages useable.
Yet Lynx chooses to ignore the progress made in standards. XML, CSS, ECMAscript, DOM -- these are all *industry standards* that Lynx chooses not to implement.
2. Some people are stubborn (like me) and refuse to use K00lBrowser6.66, but others don't have a choice. (old hardware, shell account...)
First off, it's not *my* fault that Lynx refuses to implement standards. Nor is it the fault of the majority of users using (nearly) standards-compliant browsers. I refuse to punish the 86% or so of my users that are using standards compliant browsers because of the actions of *your* browser vendor. As part of the development of Opera for Linux, they developed a text based version which had basically all the same support for HTML, CSS, and ECMAscript that the graphical version of Opera does. If you are forced to use a shell account, then you should be demanding that the Lynx crew keep up with standards. (Translation: Complain to the lazy slobs that made your browser.)
As for old hardware -- a $500 eMachines box is *more* than adequate for running a decent browser. That's new. Used computers that are capable of running at least as well can be had for a couple hundred if you shop around.
If you can't afford that, then don't you have more important things to be spending money on than internet access -- such as food perhaps? Or maybe rent?
3. Lynx is up to date - my build here is 2.8.3rel.1 (23 Apr 2000).
You misunderstand me. I did not mean to say it was not being maintained. I said it was not up to date with standards. It has not been updated to support recent standards.
or do us "luddites" not count as real "users"? =)
No, actually, you do not -- from a business standpoint. You are far more technologically savvy than the vast majority of users who visit most web sites. (Slashdot and other niche sites being an exception because of their tech-oriented nature) You are someone who is aware of standards, their significance, the various browsers and such. You choose to ignore progress in standards. From the standpoint of a business you are a poor potential customer choice. You would cost a lot of money to support, and you are less likely to spend money on my product/service than someone who is at least willing to download a *free*, nearly standards compliant web browser.
Not being on the lynx-dev list, I can't say.
It was a rhetorical question. The answer does not matter. The point is that JavaScript (aka ECMAscript) is not supported. This standard, which is important to improving the end-user experience of the web, is not supported. Period.
Maybe because it would add what is perceived as too much bulk to the program
Lynx 2.8.3 in bz2 form is 1.6MB. Opera 4.0 for Linux (tech. preview 4) in bz2 form is 900KB. Remember, Opera supports HTML 4.0, ECMAscript 1.1, CSS 1, and a large subset of CSS 2. To be fair, printing is unimplemented as of yet...
Remember, CPU/memory/ROM constrained devices like cell phones have (limited) ECMAscript support. That's on hardware that's only a step above XT-class machines.
It seems to me that Lynx is already pretty bloated. Perhaps then, this is a valid concern: Perhaps the developers are not capable of producing a standards compliant browser that can run on the limited machines where Lynx is ostensibly preferred?
maybe because no one cares to implement it.
If you choose to use a browser whose developers are too lazy/self-absorbed to care about implementing standards, why should I -- as a developer -- care about you? Why should I care about someone who is going to blame me for someone else's problem (that would be the developers of Lynx, in case it wasn't obvious)?
I know I couldn't be arsed to put full java applet support in
I never said anything about Java. Java is not an industry standard. ECMAscript (aka JavaScript -- no relation WHATSOEVER to Java except that they both have a "C-like" syntax) is an industry standard and is implemented by nearly every browser to a greater or lesser degree.
If you look around, you'll notice that most sites don't use Java for much any more. Why? It's slow, it's unreliable, and it doesn't usually improve the end-user experience substantially more than comparable ECMAscript.
Even WAP-enabled *cell phones* support a subset of ECMAscript.
Say you're putting up a building. Only 0.1% of the users of your building are in wheelchairs, using crutches, or don't fit into the "able-bodied" typecast in some other way. By your argument, it certainly doesn't make economical sense to put in elevators or wheelchair ramps, does it?
The difference here is that there is nothing stopping you from getting a standards compliant browser. A wheelchair-bound individual does not have the option of getting out of the wheelchair.
Are you honestly going to compare you *conscious choice* to use a crippled browser with the hurdles faced by people who *have no choice* about their situation? That is the single most arrogant argument I've heard yet...
Also keep in mind that wheelchair access is required by law. Why? Precisely because it does not make financial sense to provide it so the government intervened. Faced with the expense of providing wheelchair access versus the expense of having your business shut down... Wheelchair access *does* make financial sense.
Your argument about shell accounts misses the point: Browsers do not have to be graphical to support the present standards. Your argument about costly hardware is equally specious: Hardware is cheap enough that you'd almost have to be on food stamps to not be able to afford a computer that can run, say, Opera. Or Internet Explorer (it requires less memory than Netscape). Also, Lynx requires a 386 and several MB of RAM -- if old, cheap hardware is its target, why don't they support DOS on a 286 with 1MB of RAM?
If you don't like it, then either complain to the Lynx developers, or upgrade your browser. Don't whine to me about the situation you have chosen to put yourself in.
-JF
Opinions about Flash (Score:2)
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Re:Use Flash because it's the best solution? (Score:1)
Re:Just Say No (Score:1)
Re:Use Flash because it's the best solution? (Score:2)
The reason we're using Flash, however, is because it's the best option out there. The requirement was to deliver an interactive floorplan for trade-shows to the browser: it had to be zoomable, moveable, fast and respond to clicks. Given this, Flash seemed like the best option, especially since SVG support is currently nigh-on non-existent (actually, having said that, Adobe have released an SVG ... plugin. Hmm).
Client-side image maps implement this functionality perfectly -- and client-side image maps made by literate people will even work in Lynx (user will see all links, and will be able to get images if he cares to look at them). If you don't know this, you have no business maintaining a web site, and now you are just wasting your employer's (and customers') money.
The Solution (Score:1)
No, you're not. My usual solution to this is the rapid application of the [Back] button (unless I really, really, really want to see the content).
Hopefully, if enough people do this, the site authors will get the message and stop this stupid behavior (or at least provide alternate views which don't require the plug-in).
Re:May'be not the only one... (Score:2)
a. Writing HTML is too expensive. Web-authoring tools should use the lowest common denominator, which are the W3C standards for HTML. I don't blame you for using Frontpage, I blame tools for using bad HTML.
b. Plugins such as shockware are common. Maintaining 2 versions of a site is not efficient. Javascript is common too. So what? I can visit most Javascript-sites with Lynx perfectly, as long as the content is HTML. Javascript should be used for page style, not for encoding content. There's a reason that Slashdot headlines aren't animated GIFs..
Will I ever convince you? The majority of Internet users thinks that HTTP == Internet, they log in to visit a playground. Anyway, I will not upgrade in the next 2-3 years. I expect you to have a decent web page. If not, I won't visit your page. It is as simply as that. 5% may not be much, but you might want to take that extra cost once you realize how much 5% of a few million visitors is.
Overdoing it all (Score:3)
Some websites require flash not for decorative content but critical stuff like navigating within the website.
Others have JAVA navigation bars. Generally, I surf with javascript/java disabled so as to avoid the popups and reduce the risk of netscape crashing on me.
There are other plugins that just SUCK. An example is vivo. While vivo movies are small, have you ever tried seeking a specific spot in a vivo movie? Tried rewinding or fast forwarding? I downloaded a couple of anime movies in vivo and whenever I need to re-view a specific portion, I need to see the WHOLE movie over again.
This is a typical case where I would prefer Real content or the plain old mpeg 1 format.
Web designers, remember that not everyone has feature-packed browsers. There are times I need to download something but wait... I want to do that on my shell account with wget. Duh! I need to have java/javascript enabled or some other fancy plugin to even ENTER the site.
Please, if you really really need to design a whole website in flash or director or whatever plugin, consider making a 'normal html' version also. PLEASE.
Some of you might argue that we are no longer in the console days and I am just old-coloured. Thats up to you. I will be just one less visitor to your site, right? Who cares about the small minority of die-hard geeks who love lightweight, console (insert favourite) stuff? We are still users who wish to visit your website. Consider us.
Awaiting nods of approval and/or flames.
Give me speed!!! (Score:1)
That 5% of users probably have slow machines with limited RAM and slow links, because they use obsolete text-based web browsers such as lynx. In the next 2-3 years we expect those users to have upgraded...
No. The point of faster connections/processors is NOT to bog them down with more special effects/bloatware. It is to run things faster. I do have a slow (100 MHz Pentium) machine and a slow (14.4 Kbps) link, but if you dropped an SGI Onyx2 with twin processors, 1 GB RAM, and 100BaseT Ethernet onto my desktop, I would still read /. in vanilla. Out of respect for the rest of the world, I will not eat bandwidth simply because I can.
That said, I generally avoid Flash and/or Java whenever possible, because it indicates that the designer was more intent on presentation than interface design. Atomfilms and JoeCartoon may have looked pretty, but 5 minutes of download time just to see 1 page and a poor navigation system is insane. Don't let me get into the number of people that {don't|mis}use ALT tags... especially ads.
-- LoonXTall
most people have the plugins... (Score:3)
Current versions of netsacpe and IE either:
1) ship with these plugins (if they are popluar enough) or
2) will automatically down and install them without the user having to do anything (not even a reboot!)
Sure html is great. I remember writing up pages back in the day with notepad.
But in this day and age where a lot of money is put into designing cool sites that will bring people back, designers are going to go with whatever lets them create glitz and flash. Especially when 95+% of their users have or can easily get the necessary plugins.
How important are these plugins? I have a very knowledgeable friend that designs web pages usign flash script. Bright guy, geek, runs linux at home etc. Last month he point blank told me that "Flash 4.0 will bury html"
You can complain about it all you want, but it isn't going away. Maybe mozilla will have some kind of easy plugin porting layer so *nix users can get plugins faster.
"You want to kiss the sky? Better learn how to kneel." - U2
Plugins are not indexable (Score:2)
HTML is indexable. Flash and Java are not, PDF could be, I guess.
How will your targets find you in the enormous web if your pages don't appear in search engines?
__
The future will be slower (Score:3)
That's not what I was told. In the coming years, expect people trying to access your pages from mobile phones and TV sets ("What do you mean "my TV Internet box is old"? It's only 5 years old!") and exotic countries with bad connections. Of course, you may not be interested in them.
But for a general-purpose site you should have in mind slow connections and crude interfaces.
Beware of the Boo.com.
__
Re:The web isn't Unix, guys (Score:1)
This was not my point. Go use tables and Javascript, I'm doing fine. The trend we are facing is that Pages are becoming Programs, and that is not the Standard. No, I am not one of those that bounce a RFC when you reply email above a quote.. The web is a library of documents that can be accessed everywhere, anyhow. You can link and index things as freely as you want to. That's not possible anymore, if you encode content as a program.
By the way, if you didn't know that Lynx doesn't support Javascript, I guess you haven't used it either behind a VAX..
Re:The web isn't Unix, guys (Score:1)
(biting the troll really really hard)
I know that "geeks" tend to prefer the old-fashioned, command-line way of doing things...
No, I prefer the best way. I think icons are worthless... what did MS think we have extensions for? Would you prefer a CLI or GUI for mass changing of file attributes? Would you prefer a GUI or a CLI for running a program with a gazillion options?
I've got netscape, real player, and all the latest plugins. And I think it's a lot better than Lynx!
And I don't. End of discussion.
Would you rather have a dynamic multimedia experience, or use a web browser that has trouble rendering tables?
Large discussions are bad enough in vanilla. Why would I want Flashdot?
I hear it can't even do JavaScript
Yup. No Hotmail [rootshell.com] security [rootshell.com]holes [rootshell.com] that way.
Do you not like images or something?
Actually, no. Nobody except the /. icon designers can keep them small enough to load before I've read the rest of the page.
Or are you one of those "lets take the Internet back to 1992" people?
I have no idea what the INet looked like than; but I give it a resounding, "YES!" because there were probably less ads. Also, I should point out that the GIF file format is 87a and 89a; and that Unisys got pissy about them ~1995 (so I've heard.) So you can have images in 1992; just try to make them PNGs this time :)
So /. is bland?
Eagely awaiting Slashdot's new Gopher server
"With the coming of the graphical Web, however, Gopher sites have gone the way of the dinosaurs." (from here [einet.net]) Error: logically inconsistent with the previous three statements.
-- LoonXTall
Re:Plugins are not indexable (Score:1)
Plug-in prisoners (Score:1)
Designer: What do you want?
Surfer: Information.
Designer: You won't get it!
Surfer: By hack or by crack, we will.
------
I can understand it (Score:2)
A nice graphical site can, however, quite easily be obtained using Flash. And since there are Flash players for about any platform one can think of, it works instantly on a complete range of systems. And it's resolution-independent, since it's vector based.
I agree that there are a lot of sites out there with annoying length animations, but when Flash is used for a nice looking site and without lots of animations, well, I don't mind. I used to though, but I changed jobs a few months ago and now I'm convinced by one of my colleagues, a graphical kind of guy.
Example: http://www.show2000antwerp.org [show2000antwerp.org] is a site which, I think, is quite well suited to it's target audience and has nice graphics, without any cross-browser problems.
Re:Overdoing it all (Score:2)
Your chosen browser handles Java(script) badly, ergo designer should forego to suit your choice?
This is inverted logic. *sigh*
Re:most people have the plugins... (Score:1)
Don't give me that. People can bastardise HTML as much or more as they can "bastardise the fundamentals of the web". Chasing the quit button? Lame. Ever heard of the Close Window icon? *sigh*
Re:May'be not the only one... (Score:2)
Bah, if you are so concerned about the guy with the 286, no graphics, and a 1200 baud accoustic coupled modem, put the information on your gopher site.... hahahahahaha...
Re:most people have the plugins... (Score:2)
Design. Development. Not synonymous. And not many people in the industry these days think they are.
Our companies online dept (and it's a big one), has three groups of people - designers, who mock sites up in PhotoShop, developers, who code COM objects, PHP or whatever is required for the site into simple pages, and integrators who marry the two.
Why would a designer want to create a web page from a database using a scripting language without the use of HTML? I'll ignore the fact that this is an impossibility anyway. Mmm, I'd love to see your text/plain websites. (And don't say they use XML or somesuch).
Re:Ignoring economics. (Score:1)
From the standpoint of a business you are a poor potential customer choice.
I agree with you on this point. Sheeple that will accept whatever crap a business peddles make far better customers than those who aren't willing to be fucked around and will demand the quality that they deserve. Just ask Micros~1.
IME customers go both ways - perhaps yours want whizz-bang graphics that explode off the page at them. When I was teaching a course on browsing the web with Netscape, most of the newbie-students I was teaching were overwhelmed by how loud many of the pages were. ("It's so busy" were one's exact words.)
As for hardware, running Netscape 4.0 on a P120/16MB is a painful experience. Netscape 6 is miserable. Opera is bearable but costs money. None of them are open source, and if it was my decision my Win95 install would be on the losing end of a HD reformat. I am far happier with lynx [browser.org] and w3m [yamagata-u.ac.jp].
Lynx requires a 386 and several MB of RAM -- if old, cheap hardware is its target, why don't they support DOS on a 286 with 1MB of RAM?
I would imagine because lynx is 32-bit code. There is a browser called Bobcat, based on Lynx, that has a subset of its functionality and runs on 16-bit machines."
Don't whine to me about the situation you have chosen to put yourself in.
If you think I'm whining, that's your problem. I wouldn't be using lynx if I didn't think that I was further ahead in doing so. When I come across a page that looks a mess and fire up Netscape to view it, I seldom find that I'm rewarded with a page proportionate to the effort required. More often, the site is remarkably content-free.
The right tool for the job. (Score:2)
That's not to say I support creating entire sites in Flash...That's dumb too. But anyone with content worth looking at is probably going to pick the right tool for the job. And if they make a mistake, send them a nice email and they probably will fix it (or at least think twice before doing it again!)
Re:Ignoring economics. (Score:1)
My point was that it doesn't require maintaining two separate versions of a page, unless your entire site is flash or some such crap. Using Javascript for all of your nav functions just seems plain ridiculous when there are these perfectly functional things called *hyperlinks* ... Lynx and other browsers that don't use scripting or plugins just ignore them. If you need to create two totally separate versions, then IMHO, you're doing it wrong.
I'd rather work on improving the functionality for the 82.8% of my users who use a recent browser than "users" who either refuse to use a decent, up to date, standards compliant browser or are robots.
1. Why lump in old browsers with ones that aren't standards compliant? Historically, Netscape and IE have been the worst for desecrating the HTML standard. Lynx adheres to the standards strictly enough that it uses special parsing modes to emulate the most common Netscape- and Microsoft-introduced screw ups necessary to make many pages useable. 2. Some people are stubborn (like me) and refuse to use K00lBrowser6.66, but others don't have a choice. (old hardware, shell account...) 3. Lynx is up to date - my build here is 2.8.3rel.1 (23 Apr 2000). 4. Why the scare quotes around "users"? Setting apart robots, or do us "luddites" not count as real "users"? =)
Why doesn't Lynx even support JavaScript yet?
Not being on the lynx-dev list, I can't say. Maybe because it would add what is perceived as too much bulk to the program, maybe because no one cares to implement it. I know I couldn't be arsed to put full java applet support in - I'll take a pass on wasting bandwidth and CPU cycles just to watch buddy's applet animate his forehead.
Say you're putting up a building. Only 0.1% of the users of your building are in wheelchairs, using crutches, or don't fit into the "able-bodied" typecast in some other way. By your argument, it certainly doesn't make economical sense to put in elevators or wheelchair ramps, does it?
Tyranny of the majority, anyone?
Search engines (Score:2)
So even though the text in that nice Flash page may be cool to look at, it is impossible to find it via your favorite search engine [google.com].