Note: This page was written in 2003. Some facts might have changed. I don't intend changing the content. Take it as historical document where facts have indeed changed.
This page is intended as an essay on webdesign. I was inspired to write it because there are so many websites out there, that do not conform to international standards. These pages are often not usable with other browsers than MS Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator.
The webmasters (I prefer the term Crapmaster which Denis Orlov coined in the newsgroup opera.general) claim that these browsers are the most frequently used ones. They are right, but this does not mean, that the others can be ignored silently.
Would you accept being kicked out of a shop, just because you don't wear Nike sneakers?
most common excuses
These are the crapmasters' most common excuses, why some pages are "optimised" for one of these browsers.
- It easier to maintain than different versions for different browsers
- too expensive to change the code
- nobody cares for other browsers
- our pages do conform to standards
I will try to refute those arguments on an as objective basis as possible.
"It's easier, maintaining a single version!"
Basically, this is true. It is never easy to keep multiple versions of the same product synchronized. Not only on the web, but anywhere you may think of. An example on the web might be a multilingual website. This is not an easy task without a database or some scripts.
But this argument is being raped, I might say. In most cases it is not necessary to really provide different versions of a website.
Think of JavaScript. There is a DOM (Document Object Model) specified by the W3C. If any webdesigner kept to those standards, then he would not need to maintain multiple versions of his site.
I have coded a simple example with a fallback to browsers that do not support scripting or have it disabled.
mixing up design and structure produces bloated code…
Another reason for bloated, hard-to-maintain code are authoring tools.
They do get better by the time, but they are not about to beat manually
coded pages. There are additional tools to correct automatically created
code, but they cannot remedy all the strange code that is produced by some
authoring tools.
The result is code, that is often not valid HTML. CSS is unknown or poorly
implemented to some of them. The best example is the
<font>-Tag. This one (among others) should not be used
any more, as it mixes up design and structure. If you want to change your
design a little bit later on, you will have to go through all the pages
again and correct these. Would you think, this is a good strategy?
Certainly not.
…seperate them!
The easiest way to get maintainable code is to spend some brain power and
some time over the design. Create a good stylesheet and concentrate on the
content in the HTML pages. This way the resources going into (re)design
are kept on a minimum whereas the content can be taken care of more
thoroughly. You also produce smaller HTML documents without any traces of
design elements. I remember a quote I read in a newsgroup one day (I do
not remember which one it was):
If you don't have to say anything, do it with Flash.
I could only think of exactly one easier way to maintain documents: let it do somebody else.
"It is too expensive to chage the code"
This argument is true. The problem is, that some companies spend too much money for invalid websites and then do not want to spend an equal amount again to get a valid website. Sometimes the people who code invalid sites, do not even know about that. (I was one of those, too).
Changing the webmaster might be an expensive step. This can only be prevented by insisting on platform independend code (speaking of the client side) before the first page is written. So this might be a real killer argument.
Anyway. Several banks are currently "suffering" from people using alternative browsers; they have to rewrite their sites for their customers. My bank is one of them.
To circumvene this problem, people should be more aware of the fact that the WWW-world consists of more than the "two great browsers". I would really like to give some examples for very bad websites here, but I will not do it for some other people already maintain such lists.
"Nobody cares for other browsers!"
Some people think, just because MSIE and NN are widely used, nobody uses other browsers. This is not true. And even if it was, there are other "problems", crapmasters will have to face in the near future: Changing implementatinos in the "big ones". Netscape has dropped the layer tags, MSIE dropped document.all in version 6 (done via document type sniffing).
By now (Mozilla 0.9.9 has been released) there are many pages that have
to change their code just because Gecko (Mozilla's and Netscape's
rendering engine) does not support the layer concept any more (speaking
of DOM). If you're looking for examples, Thomas Weiland's Opera Honkpage
is a good starting point: http://opera.honkpage.de/pages3.phtml (doesn't exist any more).
BTW, this is a good
example why one should try to avoid frames: Thomas' navigation is lost when you
have disabled scripting.
But back to the message of this section. More people are getting aware, that there are other browsers than Internet Explorer and Netscape. Opera is getting more popular among Windows, Linux and Mac users (5 Million downloads by 2001-10-04). Mozilla has become a real alternative on those systems, too. Since version 0.9.3, Mozilla has become faster and more stable. This might make "powerusers" change (if they haven't already).
Right now, one might think he doesn't need to take those people into consideration. But if Opera and Mozilla keep on developing their user community at this rate, they will become serious opponents of the big two.
Last but not least, there are also handicapped people surfing the web. It is simply not fair to exclude them. There are several sites not allowing blind people who mostly are using a Braille terminal with lynx (or other textbrowsers). This is a discrimination. There's no other expression for it.
"But we keep to standards…"
This is sometimes used as an excuse. The problem is, that some people consider Microsoft's DHTML or Netscape's LAYER Model to be standards. This is not true, since they are/were company standards only; not open ones. For example MSIE implements the document.all object, which is a proprietary synonym for document.getElementById (specified in DOM1). And that is the reason why so many people believe that multiple versions of websites are needed. Still, this is not true, since there is an official DOM that all script-enabled browsers should conform to. Things like changing pictures on mouseover events or manipulating content (for menus) work with this model, too. My DOM example illustrates changing images, while Roland Reck has a nice example for dynamic menus on one of his pages: DOM example
People often consider JavaScript to be the solution for any problem. Of course, collapsing menus are nice to view. But what about people who turn off scripting? It is not very difficult to emulate a collapsing menu with plain HTML files. Or button effects (which I am using here without any scripting).
By the way: Netscape and Microsoft will drop some of their proprietary code. Netscape 6 has already dropped their layer concept. That means, NN 6 is incompatible to its own proprietary code in favour of W3C's DOM. Have a look at Netscape's description page of NN6. (Note on 2002-02-23: Netscape has changed the content, but I'll leave this URL as entrance point)
Similarly, Microsoft is about to drop things like document.all, which is being widely used in JavaScripts. So I wish all those webdesigners, who cannot live without these "features" much pleasure in debugging and recoding their pages…
Further reading with more facts
A very extensive article about Morons on the Web
, as the author calls it, could be found at http://members.optusnet.com.au/~night.owl/morons.html" class="offsite">http://members.optusnet.com.au/˜night.owl/morons.html.
Now, there's and article at http://www.cameratim.com/personal/soapbox/morons-in-webspace.
It sometimes uses strong language but it is a vast collection of arguments.
The article covers the dos and donts of good webdesign and webauthoring.
It lists things that you should take care of if you want to be a good webdesigner.
R.A.G. Seely has "translated" this very article into a more moderate language on his site. And it is shorter.
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Created: 2003-04-29 — last modified: 2005-04-05 — last update of web site: 2010-06-27
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