Reader Comments on Aardvark Daily 9 July 2002
Note: the comments below are the unabridged
submissions of readers and do
not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher.
From: Annon For : The Editor (for publication) Subj: IE, Netscape, Opera I am the lead developer for a highly successful online store in the United States, with annual revenues in the low NZ$Millions (as eCommerce goes, a pretty serious site). I have been building websites of one kind or another for about seven years now, and I come from a very much 'pure code' background, where the idea of building browser- specific sites has always been anaethema. Coming from a Mac OS background, I know all about platform (and now browser) discrimination. However, my client has told me NOT to bother testing my code against Netscape (or other) browsers. Why? Because it really does take a lot more time to develop cross- browser web applications, and they're not prepared to pay for that time. Short-sighted? Perhaps. But this is the very real commercial challenge that developers face, particularly in the post dot-com-bubble era. I highlight the fact my customer has significant earnings, because they thus have reasonable development budgets. If a customer the size of mine doesn't want to pay to test against other browsers, then who will!? I'm sure there are exceptions to this, but my point is: it's not my decision, as a developer, to build web applications that are not cross-browser-capable, and I would guess that nine times out of ten, that's the case elsewhere. The people who pay for the development -- the marketers who would rather spend their development dollars on advertising, the bean-counters who ride them about budgets, the CFO's and CEO's who want to crow about how cost- efficient their business is -- are dictating the IE-only scenario. And let's face it; if you were them, with their budgets and their objectives and their timeframes, wouldn't you? Would the NetScape and Opera users REALLY seem that important to you, if you were them? It is simply not cost-effective to develop for more than just IE when you're building anything of considerable size or complexity. Anyone that has tried to build web applications that rely heavily on JavaScript is bound to concur, let alone trying to satisfy requirements that are easily done with DHTML, or ActiveX, or IFRAMEs etc but a nightmare to port across to non-IE browsers. People reading this might be tempted to scoff and say 'Rubbish, if you build your code according to W3 spec then it'll work on both browsers first time.' I say to them: it NEVER works first time (on one browser, let alone multiple!) and the dollars soaked up by testing multiple browsers can (and do) kill projects in the pilot phase. Back when we were building a US dot-com a month in '00, our customers had venture capital coming out their ears, and sure, we tested against both IE and Navigator (at least). How things change. In January, my registry file died and I had to re-install all my applications. I must admit, I didn't re-install any Netscape products. I wonder if, one day, I'll need to? From: Andy For : The Editor (for publication) Subj: The IE Monopoly As a website designer who has also struggled with the question of whether to 'design for all' or just concentrate on the industry-standard browser, I have to say that I try to ensure pages I produce are at least readble by others but don't bother to produce 2 or 3 page versions that work completely as intended for all types. It's simply not economic to do so. The comment that maybe we are cutting out 10% of visitors I find doesn't really stack up in reality - I've checked site stats from several of the sites I've done and found in all cases the ratio is 95-97% IE versions 5-6 and 3-5% all others. It used to be more like 7-9% Netscape even last year, but not anymore - sad in a way, but true. From: Allister For : The Editor (for publication) Subj: Browser Agnosticism (OK, so that might not be a real word) The problem with browser extensions and the like is that damn near everybody has forgotten (or entirely missed) the point of HTML. HTML was designed to mark up the *semantics* of a document, not the *presentation*. The use of <b>old and <i>talic tags has long been considered bad HTML. Any decent book on HTML will point this out (at least 5 years ago this was true). It will also point out that not all browsers are visual. You're not just saying 'if they don't have the sense to use IE, to hell with them.' you're also saying 'if they can't see, to hell with them'!! The real problems in the industry were two. First, CSS did not appear on the scene quickly enough (in terms of actual browser support) to be caught up in the web explosion. Second, 'snazzy' became 'best'. This last was possibly the fault of so-called "web designers". HTML is designed to convey information, CSS to make it look nice. The IMG tag, believe it or not, was designed to provide accompanying illustrations, not to actually make up the page. Perhaps the saddest fact is that Netscape, until very recently, had a shocking implementation of CSS (Netscape 4.x) whereas IE was released in several versions, each of which improved on support for CSS. IE 5.5 is actually very good at rendering CSS 1. Now Netscape 6.2 and Opera 6 are also very good. But it may be too late. I have two websites, on which I do not support Netscape 4.x. This is not for reasons of snobbery, but simply because it is too costly for me to support. Netscape 4.x would hold me back from doing things the way I want to - properly! From: Mike Dawson For : The Editor (for publication) Subj: Xtra network infected by worm? For the second time in about a month I am being sent emails infected with what I believe to be the Klez.E or a derivative virus, through the Xtra network. This, most recent, round of infected emails has been occurring for 12 days. I have spent many hours researching, tracing the original source of the infection, forwarding header information, and corresponding with various departments at Xtra, to no avail. Even their auto-responder is in on the act, spewing forth great gobs of rhetoric about how computer viruses work. Xtra have admitted that they have infected clients, (I have kept copies of all relevant correspondence), and have, supposedly, dealt with the problem. This is incorrect as the problem remains. Further investigation reveals that this problem is affecting users that are not in this particular "loop", and it's worth noting that when I contacted Xtra by telephone, their technician asked if the virus was Klez.E. This would seem to indicate that the problem is widespread. Xtra's handling of this situation has been ineffective and, in my experience with them, totally unprofessional. Indeed, all the correspondence I've had to enter into is adding to the problem. I have notified Xtra of my intention to take this matter further, including informing various media organisations in an effort to have the problem resolved. From: Ian Connelly For : The Editor (for publication) Subj: Netscape/Mozilla vs IE After moving from netscape to IE a couple of years ago, I have moved back to Netscape with the release of 7.0 preview release 1, and it is wonderful. The tabbed browsing is the best feature that has been added to this browser, once ou have set it up so tabs open in the background, I can read aardvark and click the links and the contents load in the background, the icon on the tab changes once loaded. It has made browsing a much more pleasant experience through dial-up. There are two sites that I currently revert to using that horrible MS product - MS Windows update - to get OS patches, and JDEdwards.com as their customer site only supports IE. But I will still use Netscape for all my general browsing. I have also recently converted to using OpenOffice.org and it has opened every word document/excel spreadsheet I have pointed it at wihtout an issue. Open source is truely moving through that stage where only the geeks used it into mainstream applications with sufficient quality and stability not to have to know all the ins and out of you machine. (Unlike the first time I compiled emacs/gcc on AIX which took three days) From: me. For : Right Of Reply (for publication) Subj: IE HTML Websites I agree. The World Domination attempts by MS are going to far. Long live alternatives. And if I was unable to buy something from a webpage that is not viewable by my browser (netscape) then I'll happily go to a rival that is! From: Don Mackie For : Right Of Reply (for publication) Subj: The Gooey For what it's worth - The Gooey doesn't work with the latest version of IE for the MacOS. From: David Slack For : The Editor (for publication) Subj: Telstra Clear Same here in Devonport. I switched to Paradise a couple of months ago, and just in the last week I've been noticed some difficulty getting fresh content on some pages. (Including, to my exasperation, one I'm developing on my site which sits on a server in Kentucky.)Hit Reload For Latest Comments
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