Web Designers Ignoring Standards and Support IE Only

An anonymous reader says "According to this story on news.com, it is becoming harder for users of Microsoft-free systems and browsers to view the web. This seems to be a new call to arms from the standards groups, and it is something we should be thinking about. Without help from web designers, using browsers like Mozilla and Opera will effectively cut off our ability to view web sites 'correctly.'" My pet peeve is when sites hype and announce new-and-improved sites, and then they come out and they are simply a gigantic flash application.

IE has the most uesrs

[The Turd Report]

And people design sites inorder to get the most users. That means having to code for IE. It sucks. But, all you can do is just not visit that site.

Sad, very sad....

[stevenbee]

The irony is, that I'm running IE6 and it's identified as follows:

You are using: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)

But I guess that MSFT has succeeded in polluting the standards to the point where
IE can totally ignore IEEE compliance.

Not a troll, just a lament

:-(

No problem

[AirLace]

I see this as an advantage. Ever noticed how the "Flash" sites are the very ones which tend to be filled to the brim with adverts and little else, or otherwise "arty" sites by self-important 'blogging nuts who think their combination of morphing pastel colours needs to be seen by the whole world? Sorry, but that's not what the Web is to me -- I use it for information, and that's why I use Mozilla.

Complain to webdesigners

[brejc8]

When I find that a website doesnt work with Linux or my browser then I send them an email.
Often they just ignore them but for examle the inquirer [theinquirer.net] just this morning corrected their site after I emailed to the webmaster on friday with the bug.

The sad truth.

[swagr]

The boss tells the web designer what to do. (I wan't Flash, dynamic animated menus, this, that, etc.)
The boss uses IE.
The boss doesn't care if some small percent isn't using IE.

Re:Pet Peeves....

[jandrese]

...flash is fun...

Until you hit your back button to see a previous page and get dumped clear out of the site. Flash sites are the worst at "Is that a control or a decoration?" syndrome. Sometimes I find myself aimlessly clicking to try to find the non-intuitive custom controls on some flash page, and worse you can't even expect the cursor to change when you hover over a link like you can on a web page.
Flash should not be used for your main page. It should be used for interactive demonstrations, small movie clips, or other highly interactive content. It should not be used for simple data retrieval (I don't want to fire up flash to find out what the stupid VCR codes for my remote control are), or your main website as it breaks the web UI model. It should also be used sparingly as some people will not be able to use it (blind people in particular).

Just my $0.02

Personaly...

[autopr0n]

I usually design web pages using w3c documentation, but Microsoft's MSDN documentation is a lot easier to sift through for a some of dynamic things. I'll usually design using IE and then tweak it until it looks good in IE and Moz. (even when using 'cross platform' code, it still never works right in both, in my experience)

Netscape 4 users can go fuck themselves, though. Seriously.

Something's missing...

[Masem]

They've covered 3 of 4 (or 4 of 5) participants in web standards: the browser makers, the web designers, the end users, and possibly the web standards setters. However, they're missing the biggest reason why a chunk of web pages are incompatiable: poor web page authoring programs.

Even if you ignore Frontpage's effects, a lot of the more recent authoring programs don't put out the cleanest code. Not necessarily as bad as tag soup of the past, but still putting out code that works with no problem in IE, but not good in Netscape/etc. And unfortunately, if you consider the cycle of web advancements, they are typically late to the game (that is, they won't add support for a standard until a browser with majority support includes it). So we're only now seeing these WYSIWYG editors including support for XHTML and CSS level 2 stylesheets, despite all the major browsers supporting these (to a good extent).

Of course, there are some that say "the best HTML editor is Notepad" (or vi, or EMACS, or...), and those are the people that I expect to have no problem with any browser on their sites. Unfortunately, that group is the minority, the majority seem to want to ignore HTML and just get it right in the WYSIWYG. And right now, that approach can easily lead you to the IE-only site.

Re:flash...

[krog]

Flash is the bane of search engines. If the web all moved to Flash, we could kiss the harvesting of useful information from the web goodbye.

Also consider that 98% of the time, Flash is the wrong solution and only gets in the users' way.

Re:Standards according to who?

[Mr Windows]

Who set these mythical "standards"?

The w3c [w3.org], of course. What makes you say that they are "arbitrary"? I suppose you could say that "HTML is arbitrary", which to some extent it is, but it's not very hard to produce standard-compliant HTML (and also to verify it [w3.org]). It's all very well to talk about de facto standards, but you should remember that all the world isn't a Windows PC, and that's going to become increasingly true over time.

Lynx rules

[Tune]

Though Lynx may seem hopelessly outfashioned, don't forget that some search engines (like Ilse [www.ilse.nl]) still use it as a prefilter. Experts say nothing beats its power to convert HTML into plain text, though it obviously cannot handle flash, pdf, or even frames properly.

Lynx is also a good test to experience what your site looks like on a cell phone (WAP-converted).

Last but not least, imagine what your site would "feel" like when "viewed" by blind people. Forgot that "ALT" text with you IMG tag? You're all alone in the dark with Lynx as well.

Adopt the standards. Gain customers

[Neil Watson]

I was in a meeting lately when following web standards was debated. These was some resistance as it was going to take some people longer to design their web pages. My boss hit the nail on the head:

Don't think of it as having to change your design for 5% of the people. Think of it a designing to gain 5% more customers.

Please stop.

[autopr0n]

Stop supporting netscape 4. Netscape four is a bane on the internet. It is black death.

The sooner users get a browser that dosn't suck, the better.

Re:Gnome or KDE?

[FooBarWidget]

Rediculous. W3c is far from irrelevent. If you comply to HTML 4.0 your website renders just fine in Internet Explorer!
"The best possible experience". Are you saying that you can't create a good website experience without Microsoft HTML? I know enough sites that display just fine in Mozilla and Opera but still have a good website experience (easy to navigate, pretty animated menus with JavaScript, etc.)

Let's face it, you don't need Microsoft HTML to create a good-looking website! W3C standards are good, dispite what all the Microsoft fanboys say. There's no excuse for not complying to W3C standards, except when you're creating a site like Windows Update.
I've been creating websites for years, and the fact that people refuse to comply to W3C standards is totally rediculous.

And there's one more thing: our rights. People have the right to choose whatever they want. If I don't want to use Windows or IE, then that's my choice. Standards are created to make sure that I can still view the Internet, no matter which OS/browser I choose. But people like you are effectively taking away our right to choose.

"Hell, even when I tried making my stuff NS compatible, Mozilla is so full of rendering bugs that it was impossible."

Then either you're using a Mozilla build from a year ago or you just don't know how to code HTML properly.

Full Circle

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the days of Netscape, the exact same argument was given. Netscape blatantly ignored the standards, polluting HTML with all kinds of garbage.

That Microsofties are doing it is nothing new, and no surprise. The standardized web has been dead since the days of Netscape.

Re:Standards according to who?

[tapped_spine]

Yeah, but what IS the new standard? If it's a STANDARD, why can't they publish it?

Bah

[autechre]

I'm sure that there will be plenty of poorly designed Web sites that only allow proper functionality with IE. For that matter, there will be poorly designed Web sites that are not really helpful at all to the person who wants to buy something, due to their (lack of) organization and structure. I deal with these sites in the same way: I buy from someone else.

I can't remember having run into an IE-only problem on a commerce site; the second type of problem is much more common. I've been able to use my bank's Web interface with Mozilla for months (and before then, I only had to use NS4, not IE).

That said, I was pleased to read about the push by the people in Netscape/Mozilla to get Web designers to create compliant sites. Sure, I'm never going to visit most of the sites on the Web, and if I have a problem with one, there will likely be an alternate. But it's nice that one browser maker is pushing for people to have as much choice as possible (it's likely that their efforts will also help users of Konqueror and Opera).

McMaster is doing the same thing...

[2nesser]

My school [www.mcmaster.ca] is re-designing it's page. It's about time for a new web page since it's currently old and bulky. But the company that has been hired to do it worries me a bit. Their site is built on flash mostly.[www.cossetteinteractive.com]

Mac's site will not be a flash based application, because the content is the most important but I have a feeling we are looking at IE & Netscape > 5.0 browsers for CSS and java code (my mozilla doesn't have a java plugin!).

Anyway, it's going to be interesting to see how the university reacts to this change.
It's nice when things look pretty, but if it doesn't say anything, or not everyone can read it, then you've just spoiled your "target market" and your "branding" doesn't matter any more?

Chris

Re:Standards according to who?

[qengho]

Who set these mythical "standards"?

Volunteers from academia and industry, just like the people who set up the "mythical standards" for the Internet.

The W3C has been irrelevant for several years now.

Then why are the browser manufacturers working so hard [webstandards.org] to make their products standards-compliant?

AOL

[Mr_Silver]

"From the beginning, the situation has been that we listen to our customers and deliver what they ask for," said Whitney Brown, a representative for Shutterfly. "We have had very few requests for Opera--most of our users are on a PC using IE, and the next largest group is on a PC using Netscape. We have a pretty mainstream user base, which has moved away from the early adopters who may be aware of other browsers out there."

The solution isn't that hard.

As soon as AOL starts using Mozilla as their standard browser everyone who maintains an IE only page will be forced to sort their HTML out or lock out a potential 34 million customers [aol.com] .

That should give them food for thought.

IE is the standard unfortunately

[M_Talon]

(and I'm going to ignore that "complaining about flash" != "debate about coding standards")

Right now IE is the dominant browser. As we all know, the winner of a war gets to write history. Thus, IE is the standard as far as most business and personal users are concerned. Your average Joe Blow off the street doesn't know or care about any standards body making rules. All he cares about is whether www.whatever.www will work in his browser, which statistics show is most likely IE.

We can lament the failure of Opera, Mozilla, etc to be the Redmond giant, but that doesn't change the fact that programmers will be told to code for IE because that's what everyone uses. When time is an issue, the big suits are going to want it working on the majority of systems in the shortest amount of time. That means coding for IE and leaving the rest behind.

If you want to make a difference, go to the sites that are coded for IE only and let them know there is a demand for them to be cross-browser compliant. Word your email rationally and explain why they are losing customers due to their lack of support for other platforms. If they don't respond, don't go there anymore. Enough people doing that should get the suits attention (if they care, and if they don't then why do you bother). MS will only take over the web if you let them.

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Re:IE has the most uesrs

[The Turd Report]

You are making the assumption that we are talking about rational people here. :) For whatever reason, designers have gotten it in their heads that people want all sorts of flashy bells and whistles. They want things following their mouse around. They want Flash. IE has all these flashy widgets, so the designers design for these people. IF they wanted to make an easily navigtable site that everyone could use, then yes, they should use a base standard. But, most sites are just here to sell you something, so the flashier the better.

Re:IE==De facto standard

[jandrese]

Boy, imagine if your code monkeys were saying that. Gee sir, I can code this up faster if I ignore all of the design standards and just stick GOTOs everywhere and skip the documentation. Or how about: we're not bothering to stick to the TCP/IP standard on our stack, we figure that it'll work OK with Win98, and it would cost more to actually make it standards compliant. What do we need standards for anyway, most of our users are still using Win98. Nobody in the software design field would last long with that attitude, but yet we allow it in our web designers. How odd.

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Re:Other Browsers Don't Support Standards!!!

[oldstrat]

There is no excuse for a browser to operate on pages that contain broken open and close tags.
Internet Explorer ignores/substitutes for missing close tags in tables.
Netscape 4.X incarnations at least do not.
Unfortunately users tend to blame Netscape for not ignoring a glaring error, and compliment Explorer for allowing them to view what may be error laden information.
There are standards that go deeper than simply being W3C compliant. Explorer fails at adhearing to these core programming standards.

Legalities of Accessibility

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing that is rarely mentioned in web page standards discussions is the growing requirement to make web pages accessible to _everybody_ - this includes those with special needs. This is where a lot of the W3C work really comes into its own.

Standards make things like client side style sheets for translating pages into something a text to voice system (for the blind for example) can actually understand much simpler. Mainly as parsing and translating valid XML or HTML is much simpler than broken HTML (IE). Braille output systems are another example of where good use of XML/XHTML/CSS could make a huge difference.

Web designers who don't stick to the standards should especially take note of this as there is growing legal pressure to force accesibility of web pages. Many government and university pages already HAVE to be standards compliant for these very reasons.

As for flash - I have no idea how you convert those pages into braille?

Not relevant you say? Only a small percentage of the population? Think about how many wheelchair access ramps you've seen? Why do you think they were put there?

Numbers Everywhere

[great throwdini]

From the article (I made the link a bit more obvious):

IE is used by more than 85 percent of all Web surfers by many counts, and may go even higher. One recent study showed it with 95 percent share [com.com].

The referenced study actually reported 95.3% use of MSIE, down from 96.6% as reported the month before. I don't care if it's true, the audience of users to whom I serve web documents is far more diverse. I believe it would be foolish to permit numbers of overwhelming IE dominance sway you into the IE-centric camp of Web design.

Here are my overall use percentages. In cases such as those which feed the numbers below, I don't really have much choice but to be agnostic about the browser in use. Percentage of documents (HTML only) viewed by various browsers, top ten:

• 60.13% MSIE (order: 5.x, 6.x, 4.x, 3.x)
• 9.37% Netscape (order: 4.x, 6.x, 3.x, 7.x)
• 8.56% Opera (order: 6.x, 5.x, 4.x, 3.x)
• 7.14% Mozilla (order: 0.x.x, 1.x.x)
• 5.43% Identified Robots [!!!]
• 2.57% Konqueror (order: 2.x, 3.x, 1.x)
• 2.04% Galeon (order: 1.x, 0.x)
• 1.40% AOL (order: 7.x, 6.x, 5.x, 4.x)
• 1.05% Mac MSIE (order: 5.x, 4.x)
• 0.66% Lynx

I really won't go into reasons why I've split AOL or Mac IE from Win IE ... I could rejoin them or group all the Gecko-based browsers together, but the above provides me with a pretty clear indication of why I shouldn't care whether 95% of those not visiting my sites are using IE exclusively. Would I really want to forfeit over 1/3 of my visitors' experiences? Would you?

Numbers are great. Context is better.

Re:Adopt the standards. Gain customers

[Baki]

Think of it a designing to gain 5% more customers

Not to mention that one never knows what the next version of IE (6.5, 7.0) does and implements.

By sticking to the standards, and not to what current IE happens to implement, you have more chance that your site keeps working with future versions of any browser, including IE. So even in an IE only world (god forbid) it is risky to use non-standard HTMl/Javascript.

Re:Pet Peeves....

[ReVMD]

Your Flash peeve will be redundant, as the latest version of flash (MX) now supports the back button and will work with content inside the flash file, it's only a matter of time before most web sites are upgraded.

standards

[ooshy]

i stuck with designing stuff with clean (by the book, w3) code, even though i knew that NS couldn't/wouldn't display properly...

i was safe in the knowledge that as soon as mozilla was available mainstream all my designs would suddenly look fine.

and they do.

they still look good in ie too.

webstandards.org/upgrade [webstandards.org]

My favorite non-compliance message...

[SPYvSPY]

... is MSN's games page. [msn.com] (Note: You will see an error if you're not using IE.)

When my girlfriend tried to log in to play her favorite time-wasting game, she saw this message and told me (again) that Macs suck. It's so nice to see Microsoft mind control at work in your very own home.

Re:Gnome or KDE?

[Viqsi]

What Bugzilla bugs? Keep in mind that if you reported bugs that basically demanded a return to the rendering model of yesteryear then they're likely to remain languishing for quite some time. Switching to standards-compliance requiures a little more than just slapping on a 4.01 Transitional doctype and praying.

You might try looking here: http://www.hut.fi/~hsivonen/standards.html

And as a small aside point, yes, you *can* choose to keep coding for MSIE; it's just that doing such is a very unwise course of action.

Re:Adopt the standards. Gain customers

[Neil Watson]

So you're saying 30% of the effort for dual-maintenance needs to go into luring in 5% of the customers?

How much will %30 of the effort cost? How much revenue will be gained if you lure 5% more costomers? Will the investment payoff?

If you design the website using the proper standards no dual maintenance would be needed. What you design would work on all browsers.

Market Share

[nosilA]

Except those 5% are presumably not being targeted by any of his competitors. Let's say this company has a 10% market share. Adding another 5% that are virtually guaranteed to go with him is actually a 50% increase in sales, which is well worth the 30% increase in development costs.

Let's put it another way... let's say that this 5% of customers will bring in $1million in profits to the company. This 30% extra development time will cost, say, $50,000 to the company? Which makes more sense?

When comparing percentages, it's always important to pay attention to what you're comparing to.

-Alison

Re:flash...

[ceejayoz]

Almost every site I've seen done in Flash could have been done in plain old HTML just as well. If a page has "Skip Intro" it has been badly designed, and whole-site Flash animations are almost always horrendous.

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Yes, but complain to the site owner

[dcavanaugh]

I agree that complaining is the way to go. Without any feedback, what is to prevent the web designers from taking shortcuts and ignoring browser compatibility? In the case of corporate sites with the IE-only defects, the good-old "contact us" generic mailto might be worth a shot. The trick is to get the site owner to start whining to the web developer, "Why do people complain about our website being incompatible with their computer?"

Of course, the real problem is the choice of lowball labor for the task of website development. If you hire a high school webmaster wannabe or a disposable HB1 and pay them minimum wage to produce your website, this is what happens.

We hired a supposedly reputable company to make a simple but graphically pleasant corporate website. Browser compatiblity was an afterthought for them too. They did all kinds of funny things with tables that just happened to work in IE but not with anything else. I knew we were in trouble when I saw the first prototype and it included (for no apparent reason) a Flash intro that was really more like an infomercial. Our marketing manager insisted we needed more bandwidth to support the website, which led to an interesting discussion about page bloat and it's effect on load time for dialup users.

The people who develop websites for a living need to realize that browser compatibility is one of the things that distinguishes the professionals from the wannabes.

Internal Company Issues Don't Help

[Anonymous Coward]

With some corporations, they have internal software recommendations for their employees workstations in order to prevent 15 different types of word processors, for example.

Usually, this means that the internal support will only help you with that one product: and with browsers, that's usually Internet Explorer.

So you've got employees that either cannot install other software (if their draconian internal computer staff doesn't allow it) or aren't given a lot of support for other browsers.

Now, some of these folks do Web development for internal Web sites and basically tailor sites to IE 5.0 and higher, since that's what the company says everyone should have. However, these same developers attempting to do external sites don't consider that real people are on systems other than Windows PCs with IE. So they don't test, they don't care.

However, had our company instead mandated that we use a browser that renders HTML 4.01 correctly, and that HTML 4.01 is the standard to code to, not a browser version, then these problems might at least be allieviated.

I still get deafening silence when talking to internal developers and external ad agencies when they ask "what browsers do you develop to?" and my answer is "we don't. We try to code to the standard." They don't know what I'm talking about. HTML 4.0what?

And it doesn't matter anyhow. If someone builds a site that can only be used on Windows with IE, and we tell them "no" they complain to higher-ups who say "it will go out the way it is." Then when the complaints build up, they ask us for help. Dumbasses.

Re:flash...

[srmalloy]

Almost every site I've seen done in Flash could have been done in plain old HTML just as well. If a page has "Skip Intro" it has been badly designed, and whole-site Flash animations are almost always horrendous.

Even if it's in HTML, a website that has an 'intro page' is badly designed. If I go to 'http://www.companyname.com', I don't need an intro page that consists of some useless graphical chrome and an 'ENTER' link; I want to see your content, not your graphics department's latest tour de farce. What I want probably isn't on your root content page, anyway, so when I find it I'm going to bookmark that page so that next time I'll skip your home page and its useless graphic completely and go right to where I want to be -- so why go to the effort of putting it up in the first place?

Re:IE has the most uesrs

[arrogance]

I totally disagree with the Coward and his attitude (that's nice, calling someone a moron because you don't agree with him). Many clients say "I want these features and I don't give a #@$% about Netscape 4.08 since it's gonna cost me more to have you develop it. I'm happy to satisfy 9?% of my possible audience. [thecounter.com]"

Others say "I want it to do everything (DHTML, CSS, ActiveX, Flash, integrated Authorization and Authentication, SSL etc.) with every browser" until we tell them the price of the development, and the potential bugginess....

It's easy enough to say "make it standards compliant", but the different browsers implement standards differently Take CSS [css.nu], for example, and how about printing? Why do you think there are so many pages devoted to cross browser functionality? BECAUSE IT'S HARD AND TAKES TIME. TIME MEANS IT COSTS THE CLIENT.

Not every client has the $ resources of an Amazon or an Ebay. Do you work for real live clients?

Re:Great. Now find a good web page builder

[Chelloveck]

Now, how about finding a decent standards-compliant WYSIWYG web page builder [...]

There's no such thing as a WYSIWYG web page builder. HTML specifically leaves most rendering decisions up to the browser. Different browsers should render a page differently. One of the problems with WYSIWYG editors (for anything, not just web pages) is that people will do really bad formatting that just happens to "look right". Centering a line by using leading spaces or spacer GIFs, for example, instead of the "align=center" property. Looks great on their screen, but looks like hell if someone has their screen width or font set differently.

I'd also mention using physical <i> and <b> tags instead of logical <em> and <strong> tags, but that battle was lost years ago. It is an example of using the wrong markup just because it happens to "look right" on their screen, though!

If someone really wants WYSIWYG, maybe they should publish as a PDF document instead.

I'd really like to see a GUI HTML editor that does a good job using the proper tags, instead of acting like a paint program and producing crappy HTML to try to force the end user into seeing a pixel-by-pixel copy of the author's screen. I suspect this is what you meant by "standards compliant", and I'm sorry I can't help you there.

Re:I sit next to our web developer

[Lxy]

Notepad's your best bet

Correction, TEXT EDITORS are your best friend. If you're developing on Windows, I prefer CuteHTML [cutehtml.com]. It's everything good about Notepad with a complete HTML 4.0 reference in its help file as well as syntax highlighting and basic syntax checking. It also includes code snippets for Javascript and whatnot, but the beauty is that it's ALL HTML. No WYSIWYG whatsoever.

I think there's similar products out there for linux, but I haven't seen anything that I really like.

Re:Why AOL is so important

[Ooblek]

Do you want to be the one to explain to your boss why the company site doesn't work on his wife's computer?

Me: It doesn't work because the browser she is using only supports the capabilities set forth by some standards comittee. You know, a bunch of people sitting around a round table, arguing about some base set of features the web should have.

Boss: How do we get it to work?

Me: Well, since you wanted the site to be navigable in ways that would make it user-friendly and have it look good, IE was pretty much the only browser that could support that. Sure, we could have waited until all the Java virtual machines worked the same way on all browswers and made one big Java applet, but they have a better chance of creating the web standard that supports a lot of the UI features we use before that happens.

Boss: So when they create the standard, it will work?

Me: Probably not since some people think "standards" must mean feature-poor so that it is easy to implement incrementally, and doesn't make one browser totally out of date by favoring another. So everyone complains that Microsoft has historically stolen and extended instead of innovating like they say they do. Now, as it turns out, IE is actually innovative because of its rich set of features, making web applications easier to make. Now they are complaining that it is too innovative. If you can't compete, complain I guess.

Boss: What about Flash?

Me: Oh, it works well, is cross platform, and can deliver a feature rich user experience too. The only problem is that installing the rendering engine on each desktop comes with its own challenges created by each OS it is supposed to work on. Everyone also seems to complain about it since the mindset of Flash designers seems to be, "Because we can, we should," and you get these really nifty animated websites that are flashy, but useless for imparting the information you intended.

Boss: OK, we are uninstalling AOL when I get home and going to Earthlink. My wife can figure out how to use Eudora and Yahoo Messenger, and she'll have all she has with AOL, except for the unwanted ad bombardment and A/S/L requests.

NO - tell their marketing department.

[simetra]

NO - Don't compain to the webmasters. The webmasters don't give a flying fig that you don't like their IE-only site. Complain instead to their marketing department. Tell them that their webmaster has made a poor choice, will limits their potential market. Tell them that you'll take your business elsewhere - and actually do it!

Re:Personaly...

[VZ]

> Netscape 4 users can go fuck themselves, though.

Thanks for your gentle advice, how thoughtful of you. The arrogance of the Web designers never ceases to amaze me -- especially combined to the fact that everyone seems to find it perfectly normal unlike, say, the programmers saying that the latest version of their program will require a Pentium ++N with at least 1Tb of RAM. I really wonder why is it so and how is the above different from saying "all non-IE users can ..."?

And what do you think of lynx users, BTW?

Re:And write multiple stylesheets

[adewolf]

If you stopped writing browser specific code checking the browser would be unnecessary. The only reason the Opera lies is because some sites will only let you in if you return IE for your browser.

Alex DeWolf

Coding to standards should not even be a question

[WebMasterJoe]

I see a lot of comments here along the lines of "we're still going to use IE because thats what 99.99% of my users use and added development time costs money" and that just sickens me. Why? Because if coding a site to standards is even a question, then you shouldn't be in that line of work. Doing the job correctly is part of doing your job. If you write proper xhtml (all your attributes are quoted, every tag is properly closed including <p> and <li>, etc.) then your site will usually look correct. If you learn how to do a "neat trick" by looking at code generated by a Microsoft editor, then you'll have problems.

But, but, but... most of my users use Internet Explorer! If everybody tailored their work to "most" of their audience, there would be no handicapped spaces in parking lots, restaurants would not have vegetarian menu items, record stores would only carry "Top 40" music, and bars wouldn't serve Guiness. I don't want to live in that kind of world.

But coding to standards is more work! Yeah, and not falling down the stairs is more work than walking down. But that's the way it should be done. If you can't do it right, don't be surprised when somebody who takes pride in his/her work shows up and gets your job.

But I want to use those special IE-only features! Most of the world can do without page transitions. If you need some special eye candy, it can most likely be done with Java, Flash, or plain old DHTML coded properly. The flash plugin exists for the major browsers (and works under linux too) and can be done properly, but again that takes some work on the developers part.

And to those who are hiding behind their huge IE user bases, think about this: What if some other browser begins to get significant market share? Maybe current users will generally not notice that the gecko engine can't render your site the way you want it to look, but users next year might have some problems (especially if AOL does indeed incorporate the gecko engine in an upcoming release). Is it better to learn how to write proper HTML/XHTML now, or write quick semi-correct HTML now and then have to fix it in a year? And chances are, if you aren't writing proper HTML now, you're not commenting your code eaither.

In conclusion, I agree that blame should be placed on web developers who only want to develop for IE because that's easiest. If you don't want to do the job right, then too f-ing bad. That's why they call it work. If it was supposed to be easy, then they wouldn't pay you - they'd pay the neighbor kid because "he's good at computers." Do the job you're paid to do. People might not find out if you slack, but the more you slack, the harder it will be to correct it when the time comes.

Disclaimer: My site (listed above) is not currently XHTML compliant. There is a new version being developed which will be compliant, though. And if you see browser-specific features, that's because the template for the site is chosen based on the user agent string.

Enough already

[phpdeb]

I look at it this way, if the site doesn't show up in my browser(Galeon) - then I don't go there. If the company is trying to make money from that site, they just lost some.

Businesses that are serious about making money on the web are going to make their shit work on as many browsers as possible.

Some businesses may not care about the 5 - 10% of the traffic that can't view their pages. I find that strange. That would be like 711 not allowing some people into the store and basically throwing money away. Some businesses may have such a targeted audience of IE users that utilizing the "extensions" in IE makes sense.

I have been a web developer for over 5 years now and I look at it like this:

1. You are spitting out HTML. Use the standard HTML unless there is some compelling business reason to deviate. Even in that case, you should still cover non-IE browsers.

2. This is off-topic. Don't rely on Javascript to make an online "application". Javascript is a supplement that should be used to make the user's experience more pleasant, but shouldn't break your site if it's not enabled.

3. Just make good clean HTML. If you are a web developer that doesn't understand HTML and can't created good clean HTML, you might want to buy a book.

4. Don't use WYSWYG editors. I don't care how much people complain about typing. No one ever said making a web site was supposed to be easy. Good clean code will serve you well into the future and something you can build onto rather than throw away everytime you want to make a change.

This is a statement that I think most web developers will get pissed off about but here goes: I think designers should design and web developers should make this shit work. Example: A web designer creates PSD's of all the pages and hands them to the web developer who breathes life into them. I think that the web developer should be an expert at HTML and should know how to cut up the PSD and make that shit work. The web developer should own the entire site, not just their little PHP or Perl code. That works best for me anyway. I love having total control of the process. And it frees the designer up to focus on designing, which is what they do best. A nice spec. from the designer helps too. Of course, in larger businesses replace the previous term "web developer" with "web development team".

HTML can be tedious at times, but you would be amazed at how pleasing it is to work on something that you know inside and out. Plus it is fun to break apart sites and simplify and eliminate duplicate html code and really make that site maintainable. Programmers kick ass at making things easy, that's what we do.

Don't be afraid of HTML, it's not that big of a deal. One last thing, lose the attitude toward designers. If it weren't for designers all web sites would like Slashdot. I can sitdown with a good designer for an hour and they can make my crappy site look like it's something I can be proud of. It aint shit if you people can't use it.

Re:IE==De facto standard

[fozwinkel]

Actually its a call to email $BIGCORP and tell them their site sucks. Suites won't pay extra for fancy features that scare away potential customers.

Re:The sad truth.

[DrXym]

Well then your boss is a fucking idiot. Imagine running a real store where you turn away 10% of your potential business, simply because they're black or chinese. It's just stupid business, especially where those customers could make the difference between bankruptcy and success. At the very least you're turning away more profit which is just as dumb. Businesses stupid enough to turn away customers who have taken the time to visit their site deserves to fail and a lot probably do.

The same for business who stupidly as to lock themselves into a single vendor for their intranet. It might mean short-term relief from writing a system that works with any reasonable endowed browser but let's see how smart it the next time Microsoft clobbers them for licence fees.

Long live Darwin.

A web designer's pain

[aaandre]

A couple of years ago designing web sites was a major pain -- IE and Navigator had different opinions about almost everything -- from HTML to Javascript (especially the Document Object Model) and Cascading Style Sheets (very, very broken Netscape).

Right now IE has over 90% penetration on the "market" and offers almost acceptable support for CSS and stylesheets (Remember, AOL uses various crippled versions of IE, too). Netscape prior to the Mozilla based code is out of the question. Opera has very little penetration.

What was a web designer to do? Write fast and easy code compatible with IE and maybe breaking for 5% of the users (less than 5% for some big, non-geeky sites) OR spending over 200% more time accomodating for alternate templates, scripts, etc.?

The light at the end of the tunnel comes with the now officially finished version of Mozilla which is less than a month old.

Some designers got sick of the agony of coding all workarounds and decided to go for standards (load alistapart.com in Netscape 4.5, load it in Mozilla -- see?) but big sites still go with the shit flow (IE).

The actions I personally am taking is coding with standards, and avoiding using features not supported by IE -- this way the layouts work in IE, Opera and Gecko based browsers, and is readable in Lynx.

g Here are some links:
http://Webstandards.org
http://bluerobot.org
http://alistapart.com

This sounds like the voice of

[Archfeld]

experience speaking. The bottom line is and always will be CASH for development. As long as MSIE continues to dominate the market, AND CONTINUES to effectively ignore standards, the smaller standards compliant browsers will suffer. It is a proven M$ merketing tactic.

**** 100% Flash free and proud of it. ****

"not optimized for" vs. "not allowed"

[slashrot]

There's a big difference between sites that warn the user (this site may not work with your browser...) and sites that disallow access from non-IE browsers. I've found that most sites work just fine with Mozilla, even if they haven't been 'designed' to be compatible.

I can understand why 'designers' don't spend much time worrying about anything other than IE, but I'd like to be able to take my chances. Give me a warning if you must, but then I'm pretty well capable of deciding whether or not a site is usable, thank you. However, I can't forgive the decision to block me entirely if I'm not using IE.

The Benjamin Moore Paints [benjaminmoore.com] website doesn't allow non-IE browsers to even TRY to render the pages; to me this is far worse than a simple warning. That company lost me as a customer recently because I couldn't view their product information. Pretty stupid.

For the record, the arrogant, stupid people responsible for the Benjamin Moore site are Modem Media [modemmedia.com] and some woman called Ellen Zaroff Brady. Please avoid them like the plague.

Re:IE has the most uesrs

[Enzondio]

Thank you for the voice of reason.

Many times Slashdotters forget that it is not the web designer who generally decides what he codes for.

Almost invariably my clients don't care if the content doesn't display on anything but IE (granted, I do most internal web applications, but still). And I'm not going to waste my time (and it can take a lot of time) to make sure all the fancy stuff that the client DEMANDS is going to work in all browsers unless they are paying me to do that.

And one final note, I don't understand why in the post Flash is specically complained about. Honestly for robust web applications these days Flash is looking more and more sweet BECAUSE of browser incompatibilities. Flash in Netscape works just like Flash in IE or Opera or whatever (except for a few minor Javascript-Flash communication differences which are easily resolved.)

Google could single-handedly "force" standards

[c.jaeger]

Webmasters/designers would change their behavior overnight if (search engine of choice here) presented hits which either rewarded/penalized web pages for standards compliance.

e.g. Your search for "Natalie Portman hot grits" returned 1,000,000 hits...

page 1. #1-50. web sites - (standards compliant)
page 2. #51-100. web sites - (non-standard)

The point being that a pass for standards compliance lifts you up the rankings whereas IE-only would drop you onto page 2 or later.

--cj

PS: I can hear it now. "Jetson!!! Why is Cogwell Cogs higher on this search site than Spacely Sprockets?!"

Re:IE has the most uesrs

[FleshWound]

BECAUSE IT'S HARD AND TAKES TIME. TIME MEANS IT COSTS THE CLIENT.

You know what else costs the client? Lost business from all the users that can't access the client's web site.

I have no qualms about taking my business elsewhere when a company tells me that they don't want my business by coding a site that doesn't work in my browser.

The harsh truth

[CaptTrips]

I remember one my co-workers told me about this convention he went to. The presenter asked how many people did web developers. Around 90% of the room raised their hands. And of those, he then asked how many actual wrote HTML code. Only 5% raise their hand. The harsh truth is many of today's developers don't even hand code anymore. They use WYSIWYG editors like DreamWeaver, FrontPage, etc. that write the code for them. I get pissed off when I come to a major company's site and it says, "This site best viewed in IE". To me that shows a total lack of respect for me as the customer and a complete lack of talent and knowledge on the part of the web developer(s). The solution to our dilemma is to get rid of WYSIWYG web developers that pass themselves off as actual web developers.

Surf with Mozilla

[Jagasian]

Allot of slashdotters here spend hours just surfing the net. One easy way to help out is to surf the net with Mozilla, and everytime you encounter a site that doesn't work correctly with Mozilla... report it to the web admin! Not only that, but web servers can see and log what browsers its users are connecting with. Surfing with IE may seem harmless, but in fact, you are continuously voting for Microsoft each time you use it to surf.

Honestly, how many of you guys posting to slashdot are using Internet Explorer right now? For shame, for shame. Even if you are at work, you could still install Mozilla, as it doesn't take up much space at all and you can still use IE alongside it if necessitated by work.

Re:IE has the most uesrs

[reverius]

Agreed. The way people lay out most web pages now, they'd be better off using Adobe Acrobat or something meant for page layout. A webpage is supposed to look different on any platform, at any resolution/color depth, on any display, GUI or CLI. From the beginning, everyone has used different browsers that rendered pages differently. The only reason it's a problem now is that people expect pages to look the same.

A well-designed page that renders correctly (but differently) on all platforms/browsers and presents the information well should be the goal for a web page.

If you're trying to make it look like a page in a print magazine, use Acrobat.

Just my $0.02.

Three Words: HTML Validation Tools

[cyc]

Web developers need to take a cue from software developent and use HTML validation tools to check the syntax of their work. Such tools can also check for compatibility with different browsers and different versions.

This is all the more important because browsers are lenient in processing HTML with incorrect syntax. This convention has lowered the bar for letting non-programming folks write HTML, but has had the lousy side effect of having inconsistent behavior for rendering HTML in different browsers be the norm and not the exception.

Syntax checking. It's a good thing.

Pet peeve?

[anthony_dipierro]

Fix the page widening bug in slashdot then get back to us about not creating cross-browser compliant sites.

Re:IE has the most uesrs

[dabootsie]

It's nowhere near that extreme, though.
Multibrowser coding isn't at all much more difficult than coding for a single browser. Real figures would probably be closer to (and this is assuming a moderately complex site):
$2000 for IE-only
$2500 for multibrowser
$3000 for all browsers

Only a complete sucker would pay $50,000 for the front end of a corporate site when the coding really isn't all that difficult. It's the back-end that's expensive, and it's not visible to the user.

Another problem is the bad IE-centric web design practices taught at the certificate-issuing "educational" institutions like ITT. The web monkey you hire may not even know that changing scrollbar colours is not part of CSS. Hell, I bet they scrape by on frontpage for the most part.

Start hiring people who know what they're doing and actually do work they're worth, and your cross-browser problems go away for very little additional expense.

Re:IE has the most users

[Yorrike]

Groan, you're in management too, aren't you? No self respecting web designer/webmaster would say anything along the lines of "Web development is a field that constantly strives towards providing applications level functionality that rivals and imitates desktop software" - it's marketing guff with approx. 80% buzz words.

Let's get a couple of things straight: Web pages are there to provide information. Plain and simple. If your webpage requires DirectX extentions through IE, it's not a web page, stop kidding yourself.

If you want to write a Windows application, write a fucking Windows application, DO NOT pretend it's a web page. It's web designers with your kind of attitude that make browsing the web suck.

I have no problem making any of my pages display the same way in IE 5,5, Mozilla 5,6 Opera, Konquerer or even Links. I write standards compliant CSS and XHTML. Anyone who tells you that their CSS/XHTML pages don't look the same across all the later browsers is not writing their pages properly. Stick to the standards and everything works. If you find an aspect of your design doesn't work, change the design. Simple.

Re:Complain to webdesigners

[Adam Wiggins]

Agreed. The article mentions that e-commerce sites, due to whiz-bang view cart/checkout features, are often the least likely to work. These tend to be very receptive to your complaints, if you email them and say, "Hi, I'd like to buy your product, but I can't - you don't support my browser!"

I did this for an online recordstore once, and the webmaster wrote back to apologize, and request that I use IE in the meantime. I wrote him back to explain that MS doesn't make IE for my platform, and he replied to that rather shocked, "What platform is that?!" I gave him a quick Linux spiel.

What do you know - a few months later their site is redesigned, works fine with Konqueror, and no "You must be using IE" warnings to be found!

That's what YOU want from the net

[spoco2]

While you may want the web for just information and nothing else, some of us like to occasionally visit a site that's only point is to entertain via graphics, or demonstrate some very nice interactive graphics, sound etc.

Why are you determined to LIMIT the web to be a text only domain?

Sure my main use of the web is for text rich informative sites, but I don't want to be using a browser that can't support the entertaining flash driven sites with some very impressive graphical artistry if I wish to see them.

Just because YOU only want text and static pictures does mean EVERYONE wants that out of the web... remember, when reading and posting on Slashdot you are conversing with a very limited subset of the web community... don't let your view of the web community be overshadowed by that.

Re:Yes, but complain to the site owner

[dcavanaugh]

I have a five-year-old who knows that smoking is bad. I didn't plan it this way, but she's a militant anti-smoker. When she sees someone smoking, she says, "You need to quit smoking or else you won't live very long." Then we have my co-workers, many of whom are smokers. Go figure.

Now we have a self-described high school webmaster wannabe who knows enough to adhere to standards while the so-called professionals are flipping through their MS certification study guides, so they can lookup which JavaScript hacks work with which versions of IE. Meanwhile, we're all chuckling about prosecution exhibit A. [odeon.co.uk]

Seriously, if you are really as described, check out the following:

• Python [python.org]
• Zope [zope.org]
• PHP [php.net]

Every once in a while I stumble across a little piece of evidence that suggests we're not all doomed to lifetime of watching the results of other people's bad code. I hope your approach to coding is matched by a healthy appreciation for Linux and all the other Open Source goodies.

Re:IE has the most uesrs

[Darby]

Remove "Under God" and I rescind my pledge

Then you are an enemy of everything that this country stands for.

If you can't understand that freedom means not having other people's beliefs forced on you that is very sad.

Iran is a country that shares your feelings about freedom. America would be better with you there.

Re:IE has the most uesrs

[Zeinfeld]

see sites without HTML tags HEAD tags even without BODY tags, and IE still accepts them as valid HTML

No, the browser obeys the HTML spec and makes a best attempt at rendering the content.

This behaviour was specified by Tim B-L before Hakon, Ragget and the rest of us got on the case. Dave Ragget's Arena browser had a smiley face that frowned when you had bad HTML.

The lax processing model was specified to make writing scripts as easy as possible. Basically Tim thought that systems that refuse to show you anything on a page because a footnote was missing a close element were broken. I think he was right there.

The other thing that got messed up completely was the content negotiation mechanism which the folk at NCSA could never understand. First they had Mosaic sending 2Kb of accept headers ending with Accept: */* because they would go to the rescap file and look for viewers. Then after we told the this was not a good idea they cut out the headers completely. The idea of a happy medium never occured to them.

Netscape's current problems are a direct consequence of their own behavior when they began the company. Netscape went out of their way to kill any working content negotiation mechanism. They calculated that as the dominant browser it would be better for Netscape if they controlled the standard. So instead of identifying the HTML version number the browser could accept they promoted scripts that checked for the string Mozilla in the user agent field.

The news.com article actually misses the main point I presume Hakon wants to make, when Web Designers only write for IE they are only writing for people surfing from computer browsers. You lose the audience of PDA users, voice browser users, disabled users etc.

Unfortunately Javascript and flash tend to be used aggressively on sites which would often be better without. I particularly loath the Javascript designers arrogance in allowing the content to override my UI choices. If I say I want the browser to go back to the previous page I want it to go back boyyo. The only reason to deprive the user of those bittons is to pander to advertisiers, which of course Netscape did.

Re:My favorite non-compliance message...

[inimicus]

Heh... Even with IE 4.0 or later there's still an error-message [smenet.org]