W
Whitecrest
"Steve said:
By use the the word "nerds" it is obvious your company has done little
investigation into the browser usage of their customers.
By use the the word "nerds" it is obvious your company has done little
investigation into the browser usage of their customers.
W
Whitecrest
news27 said:
And that is EXACTLY what it should do if it is a direct revenue source.
W
Whitecrest
A much better phrasing of the question
Lets expand it to three things: Standards; Browser compliance; Browser error
correction....
You know, if they code the HTML for IE, then the site probably works
perfectly well in 99% of the other browsers just fine.
If the OP is worried about it not working for someone then he would be
much better off worrying about how they use Javascript than if they are
writing compliant code. My experience is a company that unknowingly
abuses one will abuse the other.
R
rf
Whitecrest said:
Nope. There are plenty of IE specific things that don't work in other
browsers. There are plenty of mistakes one can make on coding that IE
corrects that other browsers barf on.
Er, javascript is an add on to a web page, not a part of it.
True. Hence the plethora of sites out that are buggered without javascrip.
Then again look at the number of (big) sites out there who are buggered if I
simply change my font size.
Cheers
Richard.
B
Barry Pearson
Jukka said:
What is this actually trying to achieve? If you have to play games like that,
perhaps standards are not so important after all. I don't believe they make
much sense unless there are sound commercial or legal reasons for them. (Yes,
standards *are* needed - but much of the value of standards is not to do with
authors, it is to do with browser & authoring-tool developers, and in fact
with other standards-developers).
A problem with the "bjg" quote above is discussion of "moral arguments".
Unless this relates to serious ethical considerations, based on some ethics
process, then it sounds like a variant of religion. But that isn't how
companies make money, and disabled people get helped. I believe there *are*
aguments that can be used with hard-nosed business people, but the arguments
must relate to *their* objectives. What are the "win-wins"?
Well, that's blown "moral arguments" out of the water!
A hard-nosed business person or project manager should spot that one, and
you've lost your credibility. The problem is that this topic isn't being
treated like an exercise in team working, it is being treated like how to get
one over on the management or other colleagues. If the department is so
disfunctional, either stay and set about improving its maturity over years, or
join a better one.
Sometimes it just needs a bit of investment on your part. I've noticed, for
example, that people may be resistent to have a project documentation
standard. Until you give them one, perhaps as a set of Word templates and a
spreadsheet or database to record the documents, then they sigh with relief
because it is now one less thing to worry about. Perhaps they think that style
standards will cost too much - until you give them a preliminary CSS to work
with, and HTML templates that link to that CSS.
I believe that most people don't behave the way they do from malice. They do
so because they have so many things to worry about that they can't tolerate
the idea that they have yet another problem. People are quite capable of going
into denial over new problems! Take some of their problems away - they may be
all they really wanted.
D
Daniel R. Tobias
Steve said:
I'd like to know what company that is so I can add it to the Hall of
Shame on my site.
W
William Tasso
rf said:
and spell-checkers. you have no idea how long I sat, trying to make sense
of 'bread' in that context ;o)
C
Chris Morris
Jukka K. Korpela said:
If you're going to do that, of course, why not just tell them that due
to severe unpatched security holes in Internet Explorer
<URL: http://www.google.com/search?q=unpatched+internet+explorer+security >
many companies/organisations are moving/have moved to other browsers.
We've (University of ~20k staff and students) been using Gecko
variants - Netscape 7, with a migration in progress to Mozilla 1.x -
for over 18 months here, as the supported browser [1]. IE is
available, but the homepage is set to an internal page reminding users
that they should be using Netscape.
[1] By which I mean we support users who want to know how to use it,
not that we only write/test pages for it.
B
Barry Pearson
bjg wrote:
[snip]
Just a thought. If you want to get them thinking about browsers other than IE,
demonstrate Firefox + Web Developer Toolbar to them. (I'm not sure what the
commercial implications are).
Don't "sell" it as a browser they need to cater for. They probably don't
*need* to. Sell it as a valuable authoring tool (especially the Toolbar). Show
them that it can help them identify problems that may affect some of their
user-base, such as the "speed report", or the ability to see the structure of
documents so that problems with the code can be seen, or the ability to resize
the window easily, etc. Show them how it can make their life easier. (It
certainly makes mine easier - but I doubt if that will impress them!)
It is then a good "Trojan Horse" for standards compliance - it is so easy to
validate stuff in several different ways. That can follow when they are ready.
[snip]
Just a thought. If you want to get them thinking about browsers other than IE,
demonstrate Firefox + Web Developer Toolbar to them. (I'm not sure what the
commercial implications are).
Don't "sell" it as a browser they need to cater for. They probably don't
*need* to. Sell it as a valuable authoring tool (especially the Toolbar). Show
them that it can help them identify problems that may affect some of their
user-base, such as the "speed report", or the ability to see the structure of
documents so that problems with the code can be seen, or the ability to resize
the window easily, etc. Show them how it can make their life easier. (It
certainly makes mine easier - but I doubt if that will impress them!)
It is then a good "Trojan Horse" for standards compliance - it is so easy to
validate stuff in several different ways. That can follow when they are ready.
L
Leif K-Brooks
bjg said:
If you had coded to Netscape back when it was the most used browser,
your pages would look awful in today's popular browser. Same goes for
Mosaic. Browser markets can shift suddenly, why not fix your site now
rather than later?
W
Whitecrest
I completely agree.
W
Whitecrest
If your site has not changed in that many years, you have bigger issues
than browser compatibility...
J
Jukka K. Korpela
rf said:
How perceptive. But I was commenting on your non-answer being
a non-answer to a non-question. HTH.
J
Jukka K. Korpela
Barry Pearson said:
Understanding the importance of creating pages that make sense.
I don't think I said they are. I was commenting on the _new_ question
on why it is not sufficient to check that "it looks good in IE".
Quite right. So wouldn't they be interested in the threat that time and
money will be wasted and the customers that will be lost when the site
turns into a junk in the next release of the Browser?
Do you seriously think that they have the least understanding of the
technical basis? What matters is which papers and brochures they read.
For detailed strategy, you would need to know that.
You seem to live in a better planet than I do.
Indeed. That's why issues like "validation" should be the last we throw
at them - it's quite often now the first one. The real problem with
most pages is they don't work even on IE when you change the functional
parameters (font size, window width, disable JavaScript, things like
that).
J
Jukka K. Korpela
Whitecrest said:
Maybe. And if your site _needs_ a rewrite every year or so, then you
are probably redesigning it to make it incompatible with previous _and_
future browsers.
There's a lot of content that is just as fine today as it was ten years
ago. Consider a poem, or a novel, or a presentation of the basics of
mathematical topology. If the site was redesigned, it was probably a
mistake, since pages written in early 1990s should work just fine.
Besides, although most sites need some updating (which is quite often
neglected while the _appearance_ is redesigned every year), this does
not mean that their structure needs to change much.
K
Kim André Akerø
Whitecrest said:
Much better than mine, actually.
Well, "corporate" website is probably a better way to put it. More like a
website for my one-man business. I slip into bad words every now and than,
but hey, I'm Norwegian. Is that a good enough excuse?
Oh, and the website isn't done yet, but a preview of it is here:
http://www.betadome.com/main/
Most of the links lead back to the old site (with the old business name), as
I intend to keep part of the old directory structure and replacing some of
the old links with redirects to the updated links.
Perfect conformity to XHTML 1.0 Strict, according to W3C's validator. At
least for the pages I've tested.
B
Barry Pearson
Jukka said:
Hm! Here is what I was replying to & querying:
Jukka K. Korpela:
Was that *really* about "Understanding the importance of creating pages that
make sense"? It looked (and looks) to me as though you were proposing playing
games with colleagues. If you were not, then I apologise - but surely you can
see that it looked that way?
[snip]
Yes! And that is exactly the point. *Demonstrate* that. Show them that *their*
objectives will be damaged by non-adherence to standards. Understand their
objectives. Show that you are trying to help them achieve them.
But, of course, be prepared when they point out that the next release of the
browser will attempt to be backward-compatible. Which, of course, it will. All
the organisation needs to do is be comfortably within the bulk of the web
sites on the web. No browser will become popular if it denies access to the
bulk of those sites. A browser may survive if it can't handle some small
percentage of existing web sites. Just don't be among that small percentage.
It doesn't matter. It is for you to convince them, not for them to prove you
wrong. They are the ones who get fired if it doesn't work - so they will fight
for survival. Don't try to sell them snake-oil, or *appear* to be doing that.
Possibly. But it is a view gained over decades of helping to design
large-scale computer systems. Managers want people who can take some of the
pain away. They don't want people to tell them they have even more problems
than they already knew they had.
When trying to persuade people - analyse "what is in it for them". Make them
realise you understand their problems, and have answers.
True. Which helps to answer the subject of this thread. In effect, it is the
wrong question.
J
Jukka K. Korpela
Barry Pearson said:
All the world is a game and all the men and women merely players.
In this vase, the game, or play, was a demonstration through a thought
experiment. Unfortunately the future cannot be seen, so we need to
"play games" if we wish to stay tuned to the future at all.
Well, we can always list down things that have not been backward-
compatible. And point out the Java incident. There's also a growing
movement away from the relatively stagnated IE to Mozilla and other
browsers, strengthened by security considerations.
Most of all, remember Mosaic. It was _the_ browser, often regarded as
identical with the WWW. Later, Netscape ruled the earth. Little did
most people anticipate what was to come. Changes can be pretty fast
these days.
How could you know you're in the crowd? Surely the future browsers (or
versions) will aim at compatibility, often after a heroic attempt at
conforming to specifications. But full compatibility is impossible
in practice, and sites will be lost, and how do you know you're not in
that crowd?
The real question is how to create pages that make sense, now and in
the long run. The "standards" are a good starting point, but much in
them is just experimental, or poorly designed, or unimplemented, or
horrendously poorly implemented. Moreover, as many people have said,
the real problem with very many sites is that their designers never
really though _why_ they are creating them - what the site should
accomplish. No standard can cover such things. Many sites are just
exhibitions of their authors' technical skills (sometimes real, often
tragicomic). Little does it matter if pages "work" on IE, or on any
browser for that matter, if their content is just boring brochures.
And it seems that quite often brochures are what the management wants.
I have no cure for that.
K
Kevin Scholl
bjg said:
One of the most succinct responses to this question I've ever seen comes
from Dan Cedarholm's SimpleBits site -- http://www.simplebits.com
- Decreased bandwidth and server space
- Improved accessibility to all browsers and devices (including those
with disabilities)
- Increased separation of presentation layer code from content
- Simplified updating of look and feel
- Faster page loading
- Lower costs
I would also add to that more consistent, universal browser support. Why
code for IE-only when standards-compliant code will largely work not
only in IE, but also a host of other modern browsers?
--
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======================================================
Kevin Scholl http://www.ksscholl.com/
(e-mail address removed)
K
Kevin Scholl
Steve said:
Your company policy is foolishly narrow in vision. Everything is cyclic,
and users are fickle. Just ask Netscape. What is your company going to
do in the next year or two, as more people continue to move away from an
outdated IE, to newer, superior browsers? What are they going to do in
2006, when users decide it's not worth upgrading to Longhorn to get IE7?
--
*** Remove the DELETE from my address to reply ***
======================================================
Kevin Scholl http://www.ksscholl.com/
(e-mail address removed)