After doing some heavy duty coding and pondering on the state of the internet I have decided it’s about time for a rant. The state of the internet (especially in terms of coding and browser support) is horrendous. Long have been the days when making a website was a simple matter where browsers would happily render a site... and then came Internet Explorer. The scourge of every website developer who’s renegade actions have resulted in a browser war which still exists to this day... the enemy Internet Explorer has fought off Netscape (a browser who was probably the lesser of two evils in the fact that it didn’t rely on active-x and other damaging scripting languages like VBS) and in its place the hero of the browser world Firefox (the coding offspring of Netscape). Not only Firefox but the dark horses Safari (built upon linux\'s konquerer) and opera (now free) have shown themselves worthy of being used by the masses due to their extensive support for web standards.
However we are stuck in a position as website designers that people to this day use OS\'s as far back as windows 95 (possibly even further back if you look hard enough), and therefore we are forced to support browsers who just simply wont work, unfortunately users refuse to change browsers in the most cases and at best will upgrade to the highest version their OS will support. And guess what? IE5.5 for Win9x... what a way to go, I know my site has managed to dig its way into working using an extremely painfully long amount of coding (time based).
Granted its our job to make things work equally for everyone but with browsers like Internet Explorer who can barely work with even the most simple of CSS without deciding to alter things to meet its own end we just cannot, all we can hope for is to make our sites standard compliant and either...
A ) Hack our code to pieces using filters and hack scripts to take a shiny axe to the browsers head to force it to do its job.
B ) Tell the browser to get lost and force users to use a different browser if they want to visit the site.
C ) Leave the bugs as they are and just hope they don’t impede on the user experience.
What are we meant to do? There’s no good solution, there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. Users will never stop using old versions of a browser unless they are forced to find alternative means of browsing (due to sites no longer allowing them) but we can’t kick them off otherwise we loose out on potential customers.
Basically since the browser wars we are still fighting, the terrain may have altered (CSS, AJAX, etc) and the players may have retired and sent their siblings in to fight the war however as designers and developers we are forced to suffer the never ending result of the web browsers mistakes and continue to try to make the most out of an awful situation. What makes it worse is that colleges and universities teach these bad practices and methods depreciated years ago to new designers and developers who keep the requirement for browsers to keep supporting the browser war while those who choose to write their code by a standard (granted not a perfect one but its something at least) have to try and keep their head down in the trenches and hope that some duct tape and band aids will keep their site alive.
Essentially the state of the internet is this... a war is going on between the browsers for supremacy, emerging technologies are being used as collateral and weapons (just like in the old days between Netscape and IE) and websites literally begin the slow process of dying as soon as they are born as new standards which cant be agreed on and impossible harmony between browsers forces us to keep patching our sites for the latest browser or the latest technology or the next fad of the internet.
I know I sound pretty bitter but I want the web to be unified with a single set of standards... we do not need competing formats like ASP, PHP, JSP, CFN! it would be nice if we could agree on a format as web developers and make that a standard so that we could gradually improve it for its users rather then turn the web into a fighting ground... if you use internet explorer you have to be given preference in how your site functions as the majority of users use it otherwise you loose business. Simple as that.
I’m going to end this rant with an analysis to show you exactly why its so hard for developers to make anything work first time... we have to work with multiple server side languages (none of which are perfect), we have to make our websites work in an ever increasing amount of browsers (wait till the mobile phone browser wars... I’m not kidding), we don’t have any clear accessibility guidelines yet were told to meet them, we only have generalised usability and design convention standards in designing sites (which due to their subjective nature aren’t perfect), so we end up with no true standards, no preferential coding style, a slacked attitude to implementing standards of any kind by the browsers and the ignorance of the importance in keeping an up to date browser by the user (there would be so much less hacking if users knew more about what was involved in doing what they do on computers).
End rant! grr! <img src=\'http://www.killanet.net/forum3/public/s ... >/blum.gif\' class=\'bbc_emoticon\' alt=\':P\' />
Website Design
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Website Design
Unfourtunately my friend, that will never happen as long as Microsoft is out there. We both know that MS will never abandon IE.
IE is totally intwined into the OS. You are absolutely right that it's the administrators and developers that take it on the nose. Usually by Bosses that wouldn't know the difference between activeX and js if it walked up to them and kicked in the arse.
Mebbe we can hope for an anti trust case that will actually have some teeth and newture BG and his DOG MS.
<img src=\'http://www.killanet.net/forum3/public/s ... nsored.gif\' class=\'bbc_emoticon\' alt=\'(cens)\' /> <img src=\'http://www.killanet.net/forum3/public/s ... inegun.gif\' class=\'bbc_emoticon\' alt=\'(gun3)\' /> <img src=\'http://www.killanet.net/forum3/public/s ... >/boom.gif\' class=\'bbc_emoticon\' alt=\'
\' /> <img src=\'http://www.killanet.net/forum3/public/s ... violin.gif\' class=\'bbc_emoticon\' alt=\'(violin)\' />
Forgive the spelling Lady and gents.
IE is totally intwined into the OS. You are absolutely right that it's the administrators and developers that take it on the nose. Usually by Bosses that wouldn't know the difference between activeX and js if it walked up to them and kicked in the arse.
Mebbe we can hope for an anti trust case that will actually have some teeth and newture BG and his DOG MS.
<img src=\'http://www.killanet.net/forum3/public/s ... nsored.gif\' class=\'bbc_emoticon\' alt=\'(cens)\' /> <img src=\'http://www.killanet.net/forum3/public/s ... inegun.gif\' class=\'bbc_emoticon\' alt=\'(gun3)\' /> <img src=\'http://www.killanet.net/forum3/public/s ... >/boom.gif\' class=\'bbc_emoticon\' alt=\'
\' /> <img src=\'http://www.killanet.net/forum3/public/s ... violin.gif\' class=\'bbc_emoticon\' alt=\'(violin)\' /> 
Forgive the spelling Lady and gents.
Website Design
It really sucks as web developers because we do not have any browser that will render complicated (or even simple) pages 100% correctly. We have Microsoft the monopoly distributing Internet Explorer everywhere and IE is horrible.... IE7 is horrible too.
If every browser developer companies were to all join together, decide together what standards to include in every browser, and all agree on the same code to use I think we would be a lot better off.
Of course each company could still use their own features in the browser application itself, so everyone wins in this situation.
I think all the companies need to unite and create a rendering engine that supports everything we need (and add CSS3 capabilities! even though the browsers don\'t have all of CSS2 capabilities implented) and make one universal rendering engine.
Just my views. I\'m sticking to them <img src=\'http://www.killanet.net/forum3/public/s ... >/blum.gif\' class=\'bbc_emoticon\' alt=\':P\' />
If every browser developer companies were to all join together, decide together what standards to include in every browser, and all agree on the same code to use I think we would be a lot better off.
Of course each company could still use their own features in the browser application itself, so everyone wins in this situation.
I think all the companies need to unite and create a rendering engine that supports everything we need (and add CSS3 capabilities! even though the browsers don\'t have all of CSS2 capabilities implented) and make one universal rendering engine.
Just my views. I\'m sticking to them <img src=\'http://www.killanet.net/forum3/public/s ... >/blum.gif\' class=\'bbc_emoticon\' alt=\':P\' />
[align=center]
“If you stop learning, you stop living.” ~Tami Quiring
“It's the rare man who understands the value of a single perfect rose.”
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“If you stop learning, you stop living.” ~Tami Quiring
“It's the rare man who understands the value of a single perfect rose.”
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Website Design
Look for it to happen in the year 2560
Website Design
Opera is the closest thing we have to a standards based browser that follows the spec correctly... and does a good job at it... unfortunately it only has 6% of the browser market (approx)... problem is if they all used the same rendering engine they wouldnt be able to add their own features (cause most of what makes browsers unique is rendering based (such as RSS, microformats, atom, dublin core metadata, etc) <img src=\'http://www.killanet.net/forum3/public/s ... >/blum.gif\' class=\'bbc_emoticon\' alt=\':P\' />