Subj : Freebies To : CHARLES ANGELICH From : Roy J. Tellason Date : Thu May 05 2005 09:15 pm CHARLES ANGELICH wrote in a message to ROY J. TELLASON: CA>> I'm not saying the website is right or that you are wrong for CA>> being annoyed with them but from their perspective they had IEx CA>> capability (90% of the browsers in use) and Netscape (at that time CA>> possibly another 5%)? Only a very small percentage of users (other CA>> browsers) were having problems - or so it might seem. RJT> I'm not sure about those percentages. I read somewhere that since RJT> it was introduced firefox has snagged about 20%, though I have no RJT> way of knowing how accurate those figures are. CA> Not very accurate at all apparently? CA> http://informationweek.com/story/ CA> showArticle.jhtml?articleID=159902316 CA> Looks like FF is about 6% as of last month. Still not bad considering the short time that it's been around. RJT>> Fast forward a couple of years. Now they have a browser RJT>> capability test" that you have to get past to use the site. CA>> "Browser sniffer" - few of these are complete and many are CA>> quite poorly written. RJT> Indeed. RJT>> Their list of "ok" browsers also includes Mozilla, but my copy of RJT>> firefox, which is based on Mozilla, wouldn't get past it. CA>> I'm not familiar enough with FF to know where to change the CA>> browser ident but there _should_ be a way to have FF ident as CA>> 'mozilla'? RJT> There is, and I don't think I'd have too much trouble finding it, RJT> but should that really be necessary? CA> Yes because there are too many browsers out there that do not fully CA> support cascading style sheets and other W3C recommendations that CA> are now 3 years old. It's those who write browsers that are messing CA> with you as much, or more, than webmasters. RJT>> It barfed on the browser name, it barfed on the version number RJT>> (!), and it barfed on such things as me not having flash RJT>> enabled/installed. Excuse me? WTF to I need that for? CA>> FLASH is a pain but to be objective the lack of uniformity of the CA>> 'majors' for embedding a player doesn't help web builders write CA>> the proper codes for rm, wmv, or mpg videos. FLASH OTOH is reputed CA>> to have remained more consistent from version to version and is CA>> quite compact for both sound and video. I'm only trusting other CA>> people's opinions on this since I don't use any FLASH on my CA>> webpages. :-) RJT> Well, I don't use it in my browser, nor in any of the pages I keep RJT> here, so I guess we're even. :-) RJT>> So I'll find my info elsewhere... RJT>> You could talk to those guys, and see if they can possibly RJT>> understand the problem with the site, and if they won't change RJT>> it, then that speaks volumes toward their attitude in general, RJT>> and they are probably best avoided anyhow. CA>> Again, it's sloppy web design/code and shouldn't be done that way CA>> but with 95% of the people's browsers accepting the code getting CA>> them to spend more time/money on the website might be like the CA>> flea thinking it owns the dog. ;-) RJT> Maybe. Or maybe they'll guess that they're seriously alienating RJT> folks and at least consider looking into it. I can't ask for much RJT> more than that. CA> Many do look into browser compatibility when designing their CA> webpages but it is really discouraging that those who write the CA> browsers can add 'features' and eye-candy but can't accomodate CA> years old coding recommendations from the W3C. FF is as guilty of CA> this as the others are btw. I look at it this way... It's a "pull" medium, I find what I want or I look someplace else and find it there instead. If I want what somebody is offering, then great. If not, they lose. Traditional media are "push", they put it out there and you take it, and the choices are few. This _should_ lead to a fairly radical difference between one and the other, but there are still a lot of folks who don't have a clue. Have you ever read the cluetrain manifesto? I got the book, first, but I'm pretty sure that the whole book is online at this point. That pretty well summarizes a lot of my thought processes on this stuff, and explains why those who continue to try and push are doomed to fail. --- * Origin: TANSTAAFL BBS 717-838-8539 (1:270/615) .