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Are 99.9% of Websites Obsolete?
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Sep 11, 2002 10:08 AM
from the nah-its-just-us dept.
from the nah-its-just-us dept.
citizenkeller writes "Zeldman is at it again: " Though their owners and managers may not know it yet, 99.9% of all websites are obsolete. These sites may look and work all right in mainstream, desktop browsers whose names end in the numbers 4 or 5. But outside these fault-tolerant environments, the symptoms of disease and decay have already started to appear.""
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Are 99.9% of Websites Obsolete?
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Re:Um, no? (Score:4, Funny)
Particularly Microsoft. I applaud their attempts to encourage individuality by setting their own standards. This proves that Bill Gates loves us all (I think).
The Internet didn't become what it was today through standardization- thank God that pesky TCP/IP plan never took off.
YEAH I agree (Score:3, Interesting)
It worked in all the current browsers a year ago.
but with IE 6 and the new netscape coming out - you would *THINK* there would be backwards compatability.
However, I get e-mails all the time from things that are now 'suddenly' broke.
And after verifying what browser/etc the user encountered this error with - amazingly enough
*go figure*
correction .. company website (Score:5, Interesting)
{and technically
however
IE 5.5 will support nested tables up to 7 in depth. Netscape 6 will only support up to 4 in depth.
Netscape 4.7 does not require quotes around 'field' tags like width or height.
Netscape 6.0 can do unusual things if they are not there.
the problem (as stated in the article) is that becuase of the past 'browser wars' fighting for dominance
Now that everyone is trying (or at least saying they are) getting on the w3 bandwagon. These little 'faults' are starting to cause errors.
And since the vast majority of web pusblishers and early adopters out there have not received *formal* training in html [I for example
5 years of bad habits become 2nd nature.
sorry for the confusion.
Re:correction .. company website (Score:4, Informative)
Well, no, they're not called standards, and for a reason. From the w3c home page:
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential.
No mention of standards.
Take a look at the HTML specification page [w3.org]:
W3C produces what are known as "Recommendations". These are specifications, developed by W3C working groups, and then reviewed by Members of the Consortium. A W3C Recommendation indicates that consensus has been reached among the Consortium Members that a specification is appropriate for widespread use.
Again, no mention of standards.
The W3C is a vendor consortium, primarily a group of big players who are trying to reduce their cost of busness by hammering out some common formats. The W3C is not a standards body, and they do not produce standards. While there are smart, possibly altuistic people on W3C working groups, by and large the W3C as a whole is intersted in promoting the welfare of its member companies, not that of the general developer community. Typically, though, these interests overlap, but that doesn;t change the purpose of the W3C.
Re:correction .. company website (Score:4, Informative)
HTML4.01 recommended using quotes as a best practice. XHTML (being a reimplementation of HTML using XML rules) by inheritance from XML requires attributes to be quoted.
Re: Backwards vs. Forwards Compatibility (Score:4, Informative)
Backwards compatibility means it works in older browsers. As Zeldman mentions, it always has some cutoff point, such as Netscape 3 or IE 2.
Forwards compatibility means that it works in newer browsers. There is not necessarily any cutoff point, as long as you have constructed the website correctly. Structural problems and other typos in the HTML, proprietary and deprecated tags, and versioning can all limit the forward compatibility of the page.
Read the article and you'll see that Zeldman is arguing that web designers should be developing with forwards compatiblity in mind. Unsurprisingly, yours is one of the 99.9% of all sites that have not.
Re: Backwards vs. Forwards Compatibility (Score:5, Insightful)
The parent was talking about backwards compatibility of the browsers (being able to properly render old HTML code in a new browser, where the onus of compatibility is on the browser author).
It's semantics, but I didn't start the nitpick
As for the parent that wanted browsers to be backwards compliant
This is very hard to do if you want interactive sites, or at least was until recently when most browsers began to pay more attention to standards such as the DOM (document object model).
Again, we're back to a very basic problem. Do you write your page to work in old browsers or do you use the latest standards? I'm less concerned with this (as the author of the book seems to be) than I am with the idea of writing code to today's standards and having it work in future browsers.
I as a user understand that I'm taking my experience in to my own hands if I try to load a modern page into Netscape 1.0 (but it is fun some times
However, words can't express my frustration when I have the most modern browsers available and I can't load a page because it was written for an older browser. This happened to me yesterday when trying to sign up for a service from my phone company. The reps kept saying "I see that option, you should have it to". 30 minutes later I decided to load the same page into a 2 year old browser and it worked fine. It had used some tags that were horribly broken, not in any standard, and later abandoned by all involved.
If the modern browsers had had to be compatible with everything since the dawn of the web, they would be twice as large and 4 times as buggy. I would much rather that web authors stick to published standards and not rely on proprietary tags for public pages.
From what I see, this is what the book's author meant by "obsolete" and I agree. Most websites, if locked down and not changed for 3 years, would no longer render in the browsers that are new in 3 years.
While they will naturally work to fix these issues as the new browsers are released, they would not have to if they wrote to the basics. And the problem with fixing things as they evolve is that some pages (like that damned phone company page) get ignored and by the time they're found no one knows how to fix them.
This is just a book advertisement. (Score:4, Insightful)
Near as I can figure out, he's claiming "the web is broken, don't bother."
The book looks broken. Don't bother.
Re:This is just a book advertisement. (Score:4, Insightful)
The irony is that no one beside Yahoo's management cares what Yahoo looks like. The site's tremendous success is due to the service it provides, not to the beauty of its visual design (which is non-existent).
I just want to know, what part of this makes it obsolete? That it uses html work arounds, looks right, or is a great service?
Then he goes on to complain about this extra html causes huge bandwidth charges, which I can assure you are negligible, even over millions of page views. If you take a look at my August statistics [oswd.org], on the 22nd you can see the sysadmin disabling mod_gzip. On the 28th, you can see me panicking about bandwidth and switching our old font tags to CSS. You can see the page views are about the same as the 27th, but the bandwidth goes from 871megs to 838megs. 40 megs is a very small difference for possibly breaking browsers that don't support CSS! Seeing as the bandwidth for a site like Yahoo is bought in bulk, even a gig of difference a day wouldn't be that much. And this is with mod_gzip turned off, that 40 meg gap would be turned to nothing if it was on. With yahoo, most of their bandwidth is in news images and content anyway, not their design. So I wouldn't recommend taking the time to read his book, or even the sample chapter, it's bogus for sure.
Let me qualify... (Score:4, Funny)
Back in Reality... (Score:5, Insightful)
They are developing XHTML 1.0 trans or HTML 4.01, maybe adding CSS to go foward. NN4 will be around for a while, and few people are willing to write them off simply to appease the standards gods.
In the real world, we build sites for human composition. We separate content from display with our databases and content management. HTML may be an inefficient way to get the data to the browser (XML+XSLT would be ideal, XHTML+CSS would be easier on the browser), but it works. The browser parsers are done.
Sure XHTML+CSS is easier on the browser, and that may help rendering issues. However, the reality is that old browsers will be with us for a while. Maybe in 5 years this will matter, but not until then.
Alex
Re:Back in Reality... (Score:5, Interesting)
For my own sites I simply don't care about older browsers. I provide alternative CSS files (with basically all layout stripped) that should work in netscape 4 (haven't actually tested this). Aside from that there's only IE6 and mozilla for me. I develop for Mozilla and remove everything that doesn't work as specified in IE6. I refuse to do browser detection or to use CSS hacks to get stuff working. Some people advocate such hacks to trick IE into the right behavior but I refuse to sacrifice elegance and simplicity. That is also the reason I use XHTML strict. XHTML strict is much easier to maintain than HTML dialects that are polluted with formatting and other bullshit.
Giving netscape 4 users a bad experience may actually stimulate them to install something else. If enough sites ignore netscape 4, maybe it will be abandoned by users. On most platforms there are now good alternatives (e.g. opera performs better than netscape 4.x on win32).
Technology exceeds demand.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Now that the bubble has burst, fixing "obsolete" sites is not a priority. IT staffs have been cut, resources have been redirected into projects that actually turn a profit, or the "web guys" are gone all together. Nobody is around or has time to fiddle with the brochureware homepage.
Gasp! (Score:5, Interesting)
Who on earth is running a browser earlier than 4.x? Do you expect stuff to be rendered right if you use an older version of IE/Netscape/Opera? Do advertisers want to sell to people that refuse to use the latest and greatest thing? Don't you have to try real hard to even find an older version of any of these browsers?
Sounds like a cheap way to sell a book - and a little extra helping of FUD thrown in.
Re:Gasp! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm using Konqueror 3.0 which came with Suse 8.0. Googlebot is version 2.1 according to my logs. The point is that it shouldn't matter what browser you are using, and we shouldn't be fudging markup into tag-soup in an effort to keep certain browsers happy. Rather markup a document cleanly, and use CSS to present the markup -- that way less capable browsers can strip away the CSS and have a default view of the content - which they can markup or manipulate themselves.
Do you expect stuff to be rendered right if you use an older version of IE/Netscape/Opera?
No, I don't care about the rendering, but a page would be much more interesting to my little scripts if the markup described the structure of the content appropriately.
Don't you have to try real hard to even find an older version of any of these browsers?
Not too hard at all: http://browsers.evolt.org/
Are 99.9% of Websites Obsolete? (Score:3, Insightful)
(Hmm, I was tempted to leave that as is, but I think at least a little explanation is required. Zeldman disagrees with his own thesis in as much as he says that sites like Yahoo! are important because of what they offer not how they look. So QED a site that relies on it's content is not obsolete. Tadaaa!)
99.9%??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Talk about sensationalism. The article just points out that many web sites have mark-up errors in them. Big deal. To go from that to saying that 99.9% of sites are obsolete is just dumb.
This is just a sensationist way to promote a book. Shame it got onto the front page of Slashdot. It will encourage more to do the same.
Uh-huh. (Score:4, Insightful)
Methinks somebody is confusing "are obsolete" with "will eventually be obsolete, so long as web browsers suddenly becoms fault-intolerant and the site owners leave things exactly how they are and never ever maintain them, ever".
(Not to say that I don't agree with what he's saying, but jeez, what a wanker! "I declare that everything, everywhere sucks ass! Huzzah!")
Obselete? (Score:3, Insightful)
Books vs. The Web (Score:4, Interesting)
You know, if I pick up a book printed in 1920, it's interface is going to be familiar to me. Table of Contents, Index, Chapters, Body Text, etc.
And now? I pick up a book printed today and find the same, useful interface.
Contrast that with the web, where I can find simple clean interfaces like Google or Yahoo compared to some ghastly Flash-based interfaces that do everthing they can to distract me from the information I'm seeking. Plus, I'm being told that the device (program) I use to access these sites is obsolete less than five years after being released?
I'm all for freedom of speech (and web presentation), but the web's got a long ways to go before it can become the useful instrument it can be.
How about Slashdot then? (Score:3, Interesting)
Is error free HTML a chimera? (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe learning html in a weekend [intuitive.com] or in faster [geocities.com] don't help keeping the quality of code at high level ; )
Obsolete and then some (Score:4, Funny)
Now that he's completely met his goal of total obsolescence, our webmaster spends every day looking for new ways to make our website even less useful, uglier, and more of a pain-in-the-ass to use. He's been very effective.
Re:Obsolete and then some (Score:4, Funny)
Zeldman (Score:4, Insightful)
It's easy to lament the fact that these sites aren't standard, but there are clearly reasons why most of these sites don't fit his vision of standards compliance.
For one, most sites don't have the budget to develop to standards. It's much easier to code to specifics and use non-standard work-arounds where possible then to boil everything down to the least common denominator (which standards are supported by whom). When I say easier, I mean that years of experience have instilled intimate knowledge in the seasoned web developer that almost comes as instinct now.
Secondly, all of these "standards" are interpreted differently by the different browsers, so you can't insure consistent look and feel without kludges.
Third, most of the foundations for these sites were layed out before coding to a standard was even possible, and when the mindset was not focused on any sort of standards compliance.
Finally, I've always thought that they made writing to standards compliance sound easier then it actually is, because even though it's called a standard, it rarely exhibits standard and consistent behavior across the various platforms. Most art directors and graphic designers - specifically those that migrated from print or traditional design - tend to be exteremly unyielding in the way their designs are interpreted on the web, leaving developers with few options that are fully supported by these so-called standards.
Personally, I think Zeldman needs to spend some time in the trenches working on a large site with a large development team under real deadlines for real clients. Things are rarely ideal in these circumstances.
What is it they say about armchair coaches?
The problem is people... (Score:5, Insightful)
...who don't understand what HTML is.
You're not supposed to be able to. That's not what HTML does.
HTML is a content language. The whole beauty of it is that the final presentation is NOT THE DESIGNERS RESPONSIBILITY. No web site will look the same on all platforms - that's the point.
The people you are talking about are not 'web designers' - cannot be, because they don't have a clue what the web is. If you cannot accept the fact that your content can be presented different ways (including to blind people) as appropriate to each individual client, you have no business on the web. Make .pdf files or something.
I know someone will interpret this as flamebait, and someone else will probably tell me to 'get with the real world' or the like, but in fact I am just telling you the truth, and I'm quite grounded in the real world. There has been no shortage of people explaining these simple facts about what HTML and the Web are, in simple terms and moderate tones, from the very beginning - and sadly there has been an overabundance of self-styled 'designers' that refuse to understand the medium and insist on trying to make it what they want it to be, instead of what it is. REAL designers work with their medium, they take the time to learn how it works and why, and they produce designs that are appropriate to it, rather than insisting that every media work the way their favourite one does and breaking it every time they touch it. And that is something that every decent art teacher in the world tries to teach his students. Sadly, the students, particularly the ones that go into web design, don't often listen. I'm not trying to pick on you personally, but your clueless post makes an excellent example I must admit.
'Designers' that couldn't be bothered to understand the medium of the web before proceeding to dump their work on it have done great damage to the web, and that's something I happen to care about quite deeply. Your ad-hominen attacks and dismissals of Zeldman aside, he makes a point that is absolutely true, and will have real economic consequences. All that patched up proprietary spaghetti code of mal-formed HTML-abuse IS coming down. While standards compliant pages from the very earliest days of the web still display perfectly in the latest nightly builds of Mozilla, the pages written by people with the philosophy your post shows ARE becoming obsolete, very quickly. In a way, the 'designers' that can't be bothered to learn their medium have won - the new standards will allow them to do what they always wanted to do, and what HTML was never designed to do - to specify layout and 'look and feel' issues. But it will require them to do it in ways that consistent with the underlying philosophy of HTML and the web - something they've never shown any interest in doing before. I expect to hear a lot of whining from that corner in the coming years, but don't look to me for sympathy.
Complexity vs. usability (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not saying that we as a collective need to move back to HTML 1.0, but there has got to be a solution to increasing complexity in Web information spaces. Companies that intentionally cripple some browser/OS combinations are doing the greater community a vast disservice.
The majority of Web pages are not necessarily broken, but reflect limits on the time and energy of those who create them to keep up with 'standards' that seem to shift every other week.
It's harder to play one note and have it be perfect than it is to play a thousand and have them be close. Most people choose the latter, and hope that one note hits home.
Condensed version (Score:3, Funny)
1. Standards are good.
2. Bad code that happens to work in current browsers is bad.
3. Buy my book.
The Problem Ins't Backward Compatibility (Score:3, Interesting)
Designers want to control every pixel of a page's layout, completely ignoring what the web was designed for. If everyone used logical markup to describe their data, later adding CSS to attempt to influence the layout, the web would be a much friendlier place. It may not look exactly the same on every browser (which, come to think of it, may be Zeldman's point), but with proper testing, it should look similar on popular browsers, and at least be LEGIBLE on others.
People need to be convinced that the web is not a graphic design medium. That's what PDF files are for. People don't try to build their sites solely from PDF files, because that just wouldn't fly. Instead they try to use the web to achieve the same goal, completely oblivious to the fact that it's a really poor tool for that purpose. Rather than embracing a new paradigm, they try to contort it to look like what they already know. To me, that's just incompetence.
Everybody knows the answer is standards! (Score:3, Informative)
I want to do a nice little page, and do it in XHTML because it's The Way Of The Future (or I want to display a little math, which only XHTML+MathML allows without resorting to ugly inline images). The tag soup itself isn't a problem, I just close all my tags and make sure the doctype declaration says XHTML instead of HTML, as prescribed by the standard [w3.org].
However, is this enough? The document is now XML, and therefore should have a <?xml declaration, if only to specify its encoding. Except that said XHTML standard says it is optional if the encoding is UTF-8 or UTF-16, or has been otherwise determined (think HTTP headers), which contradicts the XML standard, sec. 4.3.3 [w3.org], the last two paragraphs, one which says that no declaration and no other information means mandatory UTF-8, and the next one "It is also a fatal error if an XML entity contains no encoding declaration and its content is not legal UTF-8 or UTF-16."
So I need a declaration no matter what. But according to this page about the different layout modes in current browsers [www.hut.fi], MSIE will react to an XML declaration by switching to "quirks" mode, which is precisely what I wants to avoid by sticking to the standards... And I wouldn't want to lock out 85% of WWW users, wouldn't I?
But wait, this is only if the page was served with a text/html content-type. The right answer would then be to use the standard content-type for XML/XHTML... which should be [w3.org] application/xhtml+xml! Yes, "application"! Now if I use that content-type, all browsers I have at my disposal except Mozilla (MSIE5, Konqueror, Links, Lynx...) either consider the page an application and offer to save it to disk, or display it as-is! Same with the second-best, text/xml.
Okay, am I the only one experiencing this? Any point in not using good-ol' HTML4 and avoid doing (yet another kind of) horrible bugware?
Obsolete is an obsolete word (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's what it means: http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=obsolete
Hell, I still use lynx when all I want to do is snag a tarball. My linux boxes dont even have a GUI. If the content there has meaning, who cares if the web page uses the latest 'nifty tricks'. Is an ASCII text file obsolete? No, not if the information it contains is valid. Is EBSDIC (sic) obsolete? Probably. I cant even remember the acronymn
I'm constantly hearing how my P3 600 is obsolete. There's nothing that doesn't run on it. Hell, I have a router box running a P90.
Is my original NES obsolete? Or my Atari 2600, for that matter? Not as long as I enjoy playing them.
Is a 2001 model vehicle obsolete because the 2002 line is introduced? It does have a bigger cupholder, after all.
If people want to push their agendas, sell whatever they're selling, go for it. Just quit trying to redefine perfectly cromulent words in the english language to do so. Make up new ones, like cromulent. I propose 'obsolastweek' to mean everything that wasn't shrinkwrapped within the last 24 hours.
This article should read "99.9% of websites are obsolastweek because they haven't been redesigned because some propellerhead made a new widget"
Propellerheads (I can use that word because I am one), dont realise the cost of doing business. The world doesn't start over at 0 just because they invented something 'slightly better'.
Shame on all those developers..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, that's right. It was the fault of all those developers who didn't have the forsight to see the standards that would eventually be approved years later. What were they thinking?
It didn't have anything to do with the standards process being slow, or diverging from the needs/demands of the market (HTML 3.0). And even after the standards were finally approved with buy-in from the browser makers, no blame rests with both Microsoft and Netscape for serious bugs in their 4.x browsers, often causing their browsers to crash on many CSS features.
Yep, those developers were at fault. They learned bad techniques, when those techniques were the only way to accomplish what their customers wanted. They continued to use them when the 4.x browsers would crash on standard-based markup. Even after the really serious problems were cleared up in IE5.x, they still used their old tricks. And now, damn them, that 6.x browsers have been available for only a year or so, they haven't redesigned all the world's websites to be fully standards compliant (and broken on 4.x and some 5.x browsers which are still in heavy use).
Yep, if anyone's to blame, it's those developers.