Re: OT: Web Design - Catering to Everyone

The problem of deciding what to do for a few vocal customers is a tough one. The best thing to do is to recruit them to do testing work for you, and to try to make the system work for them. That way you get some free help in exchange for your extra work, and they become advocates of both you and your work.

I think that the site has a few browser-related problems that are in the content, not the appearance. In at least one case, the content is much easier to find in the text-based version, so people with the new browsers will not be able to find it.

Use Netscape 4 and go to the alumni page. There is a link for awards. In the page for the modern browsers there is no corresponding link to the awards. This leads me to believe that the site has two different sets of content, not one set of content with multiple views.

The site also has some common design problems that some people find quite annoying. The back button doesn't always work, for example. More user testing would help find this type of problem.

In general, I prefer to use sites that cater to the lowest-common-denominator, and I design them that way. I use a wide variety of messed-up browsers, and I have noticed that many of the sites that are important to me do a good job of handling them. The sites that don't work typically have CSS or JavaScript problems.

It is a slippery slope from "Netscape 4 is broken" to "this site will only work on the latest Microsoft browser."

Update: Fixed a few typos.

It should work perfectly the first time! - toma

Comment on Re: OT: Web Design - Catering to Everyone

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Re^2: OT: Web Design - Catering to Everyone by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Sep 16, 2002 at 10:24 UTC
Mostly I agree - except that I've long stopped caring about NN4. Personally, I try to design for the "standard denominator", that is, to do all the layout and presentation work in a stylesheet and keep the markup in the content to a minmum. I avoid .script like the plague. The initially surprising result of this dogma is that not only do the pages look snazzy in a standards compliant graphical browser, they are actually very readable in Lynx as well because the markup is tidy. So I can have my cake and eat it, too. The markup passes all W3C validators perfectly so if someone's browser has trouble it's broken, period. If someone's system is too limited for a modern graphical browser they can always use Links for a much better experience than NN4 can offer. My pages will work fine with that. C'mon folks, the HTML4 standard was finalized in '97 and CSS1 isn't much younger. You'd think vendors would have gotten a grip on those over five years later, but no. If we keep writing twisted¹ or outright invalid HTML to cater to software that was broken from the onset, vendors will keep slacking. They would have to shape up sooner or later if webmasters rigorously stuck to the standards. Strict standards compliance on all sides would make life easier for everyone involved - including the dev teams at the vendors who wouldn't have to laborously teach their software how to react sanely to insane input. You can tell the topic is a pet peeve of mine.. ¹ HTML was never meant to be carry layout instructions, after all. Makeshifts last the longest.*	[reply]

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Re^2: OT: Web Design - Catering to Everyone
by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Sep 16, 2002 at 10:24 UTC

Mostly I agree - except that I've long stopped caring about NN4. Personally, I try to design for the "standard denominator", that is, to do all the layout and presentation work in a stylesheet and keep the markup in the content to a minmum. I avoid .*script like the plague.

The initially surprising result of this dogma is that not only do the pages look snazzy in a standards compliant graphical browser, they are actually very readable in Lynx as well because the markup is tidy. So I can have my cake and eat it, too. The markup passes all W3C validators perfectly so if someone's browser has trouble it's broken, period. If someone's system is too limited for a modern graphical browser they can always use Links for a much better experience than NN4 can offer. My pages will work fine with that.

C'mon folks, the HTML4 standard was finalized in '97 and CSS1 isn't much younger. You'd think vendors would have gotten a grip on those over five years later, but no. If we keep writing twisted¹ or outright invalid HTML to cater to software that was broken from the onset, vendors will keep slacking. They would have to shape up sooner or later if webmasters rigorously stuck to the standards. Strict standards compliance on all sides would make life easier for everyone involved - including the dev teams at the vendors who wouldn't have to laborously teach their software how to react sanely to insane input.

You can tell the topic is a pet peeve of mine..

¹ HTML was never meant to be carry layout instructions, after all.

Makeshifts last the longest.

[reply]