Re: Non-Browser Compliance
Thank's for your information. I find this very interesting because I've
made it to a sort of a hobby to harass webmasters that ignore anything
else than IE, and those are not few. More and more sites seem to become
almost exclusively IE centered, even sites that are entirely financed
with our own (tax-payers) money which of course is unacceptable.
The strongest argument we got is that this is supporting a kind of
monopoli that is reprehensible, a completely un-ethical behaviour.
Long live the freedom of choice!
Cheers,
Helgi Örn
On Sat, 2002-06-08 at 20:33, Bruce wrote:
> First of all, thanks for the various hints as to what was actually happening
> on my system; that makes more sense, so my assumptions about Mozilla stomping
> out Netscape 4.77 were wrong. My apologies to the maintainer at assuming you
> had done something wrong. And, a general thanks to all Debian maintainers.
>
> As for the problems with the sites in question; when I say "don't work",
> these are sites with browser checks that refuse access to Netscape 6/Mozilla.
> Though changing the user agent settings will "let me in", the site managers
> are not kidding, because many things, such as navigational tools, will not
> work. Netscape 4.77 is the only (Linux) browser I have tried that will work
> properly on these sites. Opera might, but I have not tried.
>
> The two sites in particular are my credit union (www.metrocu.com) and
> QuickLaw, a subscription-based comprehensive database of Canadian legal
> decisions.
>
> Last I checked, the credit union was "working on it".
>
> As a lawyer, I use QuickLaw extensively. Quicklaw has been around for a long
> while, starting out long before anyone I know had ever hear the name "world
> wide web". It implemented web-based access in the past couple of years, prior
> to which it used a proprietary Windows/Mac based access program.
>
> I contacted QuickLaw about the non-support for Netscape 6/Mozilla. Here is
> the response:
>
> "Browsers implement, and expose to JavaScript routines, something call the
> Document Object Model (DOM). The features of the DOM along with the ability
> to manipulate it via JavaScript are collectively referred to as Dynamic HTML
> (DHTML). The vast majority of websites employ some amount of DHTML. We
> make fairly heavy use of DOM in our search templates, and as well as to do
> things like the "locate next" and "locate previous" functionality.
>
> Netscape Navigator/Communicator 4.x supports a very primitive version of the
> DOM while MSIE 4.0 (and higher versions) support a more advanced (but still
> not standard-compliant) version of the DOM..
>
> In order to make the WBI work with both MSIE and Netscape 4.7 (on both PCs
> and Macs) we had to do quite a bit of work to tailor HTML for the different
> browsers and execute different JavaScript streams that account for the DOM
> differences.
>
> Then along came Netscape 6.x. This browser is built on a completely
> different code base than Netscape 4.x. Furthermore, Netscape decided to
> drop all of the proprietary and non-standard features. Pages using DHTML
> features that work in Netscape 4.7 do not work in Netscape 6.x.
>
> The good news is that Netscape 6.x now implements a version of DOM that is
> similar to the version of DOM that MSIE implements. The bad news is that
> the versions are not exactly the same and some things that work in MSIE
> don't necessarily work in Netscape 6.x (or don't necessarily work the same
> way)."
>
> I understand this to really mean: "We designed our site to work with Internet
> Explorer's non-standard handling of DOM/dhtml, because most of our customers
> use IE. Now Netscape/Mozilla comes along and adheres to W3C standards, and
> our site is designed to work with IE's non-standard implementation." They
> also indicated to me that they are working on fixing their site to be
> standards compliant, so should work with Mozilla in the not-too-distant
> future.
>
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