Re: wine and IE
-- Paul Johnson <baloo@ursine.dyndns.org> wrote
(on Friday, 21 February 2003, 01:54 AM -0800):
> On Thu, Feb 20, 2003 at 11:17:46AM -0500, Matthew Weier O'Phinney wrote:
> > And, contrary to popular belief (hint: sarcasm!) coding
> > standards-compliant HTML and CSS does not mean that if "it works in one
> > browser, than[sic] it'll work anywhere." Not all browsers implement
> > standards the same or correctly --
>
> OK, then people with broken browsers or webmasters noticing such bugs
> in W3C compliant pages should be filing bug reports with the vendors.
> The more reports, the more likely the vendor is going to get off thier
> ass and fix thier broken software. At this point, if you can't render
> XHTML 1.1, its broken. Life is too short to bend over backwards for
> the lazy.
The vendor may already have fixed the bug in a later release -- but not
everybody upgrades their browsers regularly. More below.
> > and, with the number of older
> > browsers out there, you have to be worried also about graceful
> > degradation of the code so that bugs in older browsers don't make a site
> > unreadable.
>
> At this point, HTML 4 has been deprecated in favor of XHTML 1.x, and
> has been for three years. If you can't be bothered to update your
> browser once in three years, why should everybody else bend over
> backwards to use obsolete standards?
Just because it's been deprecated doesn't mean that it isn't used and/or
isn't widely used -- most of the "current" GUI web editors for
Windows/Mac are creating HTML, not XHTML, for instance.
But that's not even the point. How many people upgrade their browsers
regularly? Do you remember how hard it is to do when you're on a dial-up
line (due to the download sizes)? And how many people have their browser
dictated by corporate policy? (Some of my clients are university
departments where Netscape 4 is the installed browser/mail client --
they don't have a choice in the matter.)
Sure, I upgrade regularly, but then I develop for the web and want to
see what new features exist. But I also need to make sure that pages I
create for my clients can be seen by their audience -- and, lazy or not,
if the intended audience cannot access the information on the page due
to a rendering bug in their browser, more likely than not they'll move
right on to another site before upgrading their browser.
Sure, I don't like having to test in as many environments as I can get
my hands on, and I'd prefer to code once and have it viewable anywhere.
But I also realize that standards or not, the world is a diverse place,
with diverse software, old and new, and if I want people to see a site,
I have to accomodate them.
--
Matthew Weier O'Phinney
matthew@weierophinney.net
http://weierophinney.net/
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