"Optimised for": web standards vs publisher sites
Jan Vanek jr.
AKICIF in the title? Oh well.)
This was born from an online discussion after a major Czech SF
publisher announced that its semi-amateur website <http://www.laser-
books.cz> was revamped after several years (removing terrible frames)
and "complies with today's standards of xhtml code" (which, after a
formatting child-less <table> was removed from all pages, now it
indeed does elsewhere than at the homepage, even with the memorable
mess in the code including CSS class names - I never knew that having
the whole content nested in three levels of <center> is Transitional
valid. Well, it seems to be produced in a M$ software).
Anyway, the homepage boasts a footer of not only validity but also
"Optimised for the browser Internet Explorer 7 with the shell Maxthon
2", and icons for their download. This caused not a browser flamewar,
fortunately nipped in the bud, but some deeper questions: Has the time
for a web service provider to "recommend" software to the customers
not passed? Isn't the whole point of validity to, you know, supersede
these oh-so 1990s, Web 1.0 habits? (The designer said he does check in
FF and Opera.) How do they do it in the Golden West anyway?
So, first, I'd like to ask for comments: How long has it been since
you saw an "optimised for" on a smaller corporate website, and how did
it make you feel? Do you have any interesting story about SF publisher
websites, their history or anything related? (I guess we can skip the
"good thing they don't use Flash, at least" thread.)
Secondly, I did a brief survey of what seemed to be representative
sample (all US; another person mentioned that Penguin doesn't say
anything about browsers), and then it occured to me that people here
might be interested as well - at least to the extent of advising me
whether it is worth reporting to the webmaster in the last case.
<http://www.tor-forge.com> Doctype is XHTML 1.0 Strict; invalid,
though only due to 16 instances of "required attribute "alt" not
specified" in cover images. The Javascript for horizontal scrolling of
of "news and recent release" (as it says under the image header) has
display problems in FF _or_ IE with images off (my quirk), the caption
for Category 7 by Bill Evans is unreadable with "font-size: 6px;
height:4px;". No browser recommendation found. (Returning from the
last item - even CSS is invalid; there are 4 IE underscore hacks, but
also a negative padding and mistakenly repeated zeroes for "border:"
shorthand - tsk, tsk.)
<http://www.baen.com> No DOCTYPE, name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft
FrontPage 6.0". Even when stuffed down the validator's maw by brute
force (apparently some newlines where they couldn't be in fallback
default UTF-8), dozens errors (mostly seeming to come from a mixture
of a decidedly non-strict HTML with some XML slashes and namespaces).
Displays OK, though kitschy (of course). Among the ads, an
evangelizing icon "Get Firefox!"
<http://www.subterraneanpress.com> Nice, classy look (designer linked
from the footer after "Copyright © 2006 Subterranean Press" - sic),
though the three-column layout leads to a lot of scrolling with empty
spaces on the side. Tech notes limited to "Powered by Wordpress". Even
has an explicit claim of "Valid XHTML and CSS" with links to
validators that, alas, give this a lie: In fact more errors than Baen.
Most come from non-entitized ampersands in links to the e-store, but
there are also <em> and <i> drawn over several paragraphs. It seems
hard to produce invalid CSS, but they managed by leaving the size out
of the "font:" shorthand.
--
same username at Gmail
Man hands on misery to man. - Philip Larkin
L'enfer, c'est les autres. - Jean-Paul Sartre
Keith F. Lynch
> fortunately nipped in the bud, but some deeper questions: Has
> the time for a web service provider to "recommend" software to
> the customers not passed?
There never was such a time.
"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label
on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the
Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on
another computer, another word processor, or another network."
-- Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996
> So, first, I'd like to ask for comments: How long has it been since
> you saw an "optimised for" on a smaller corporate website, and how
> did it make you feel?
I've long since tuned that out, so I don't notice. It either works
with my browser or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, then the hell with
it. There are plenty of other websites I can spend my time on.
Just last night, I attempted to take the Red Cross's post-donation
survey online, as they requested I do after my last donation. It
didn't work with my browser. I emailed them to tell them that.
Today they wrote back to say that it works with theirs, and suggest
I try it again. Sigh.
--
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.
Howard S Shubs
"Keith F. Lynch" <k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
> Just last night, I attempted to take the Red Cross's post-donation
> survey online, as they requested I do after my last donation. It
> didn't work with my browser. I emailed them to tell them that.
> Today they wrote back to say that it works with theirs, and suggest
> I try it again. Sigh.
So they don't really want donations. Fair enough.
--
While its true that "you can't fix stupid", apparently you
can package it up and sell it. -- fnorgby on TMBO
Nate Edel
> "Keith F. Lynch" <k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
> > Just last night, I attempted to take the Red Cross's post-donation
> > survey online, as they requested I do after my last donation. It
> > didn't work with my browser. I emailed them to tell them that.
> > Today they wrote back to say that it works with theirs, and suggest
> > I try it again. Sigh.
>
> So they don't really want donations. Fair enough.
Or at least don't really care if people to fill out their post-donation
survey.
Ah well. Blood Centers of the Pacific doesn't have a post-donation survey.
In any event, I'm not to be donating again until next January, as I've been
to an area with a (very slight) chance of bringing back malaria.
--
Nate Edel http://www.cubiclehermit.com/
preferred email |
is "nate" at the | "A sufficiently advanced incompetence is
posting domain | indistinguishable from malice."
John Dallman
<f35a9b3e-66ac-4a0e...@j20g2000hsi.googlegroups.com>,
> So, first, I'd like to ask for comments: How long has it been since
> you saw an "optimised for" on a smaller corporate website, and how did
> it make you feel?
I can't remember when I saw it on an actually corporate website, but
most of the ones I visit tend to be fairly serious computer companies. I
mostly see it on hobby websites these days, and it has a very high
correlation with bad design and limited usability.
--
John Dallman, j...@cix.co.uk, HTML mail is treated as probable spam.
Keith F. Lynch
> I mostly see it on hobby websites these days, and it has a very high
> correlation with bad design and limited usability.
I'd say it has a 100% correlation, at least with the latter.
"Optimized for browser X" or "best with browser X" is just another
way of saying "worse with browser Y," just as "best before February
1" means exactly the same as "worse during and after February 1."
And unless nobody has browser Y, that means the page has limited
usability.
mike weber
(John Dallman) wrote:
>In article
><f35a9b3e-66ac-4a0e...@j20g2000hsi.googlegroups.com>,
>jan.va...@seznam.cz (Jan Vanek jr.) wrote:
>
>> So, first, I'd like to ask for comments: How long has it been since
>> you saw an "optimised for" on a smaller corporate website, and how did
>> it make you feel?
>
>I can't remember when I saw it on an actually corporate website, but
>most of the ones I visit tend to be fairly serious computer companies. I
>mostly see it on hobby websites these days, and it has a very high
>correlation with bad design and limited usability.
It's not uncommon to be told by commercial sites to go get a *real*
browser when i try to access them with Opera; CapitalOne recently
debuted an "improved" re-designed site that refuses to work with
Opera, for instance.
Keith F. Lynch
> Howard S Shubs <how...@shubs.net> wrote:
>> "Keith F. Lynch" <k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
>>> Just last night, I attempted to take the Red Cross's post-donation
>>> survey online, as they requested I do after my last donation. It
>>> didn't work with my browser. I emailed them to tell them that.
>>> Today they wrote back to say that it works with theirs, and
>>> suggest I try it again. Sigh.
>> So they don't really want donations. Fair enough.
> Or at least don't really care if people to fill out their
> post-donation survey.
Right. But their website is likely to discourage donations, in that
it says that government-issued picture ID is required. In fact, it
is not. But if I had looked at their website before the first time I
donated, I never would have attempted to donate. Actually, I couldn't
have done so, since the web didn't yet exist before my first donation.
But I'm sure many new potential donors do.
> Ah well. Blood Centers of the Pacific doesn't have a post-donation
> survey.
Neither did the one here in Virginia until now, as far as I know.
Perhaps it's been there for years, but they only ask a tiny percentage
of each day's donors to fill it out.
> In any event, I'm not to be donating again until next January, as
> I've been to an area with a (very slight) chance of bringing back
> malaria.
Where is that?
I was deferred after returning from Torcon, because of the risk of
SARS. When I unaccountably failed to die of this scourge, or even get
sick, despite having visited Canada's notorious City of Death, they
let me resume donating.
Kip Williams
> It's not uncommon to be told by commercial sites to go get a *real*
> browser when i try to access them with Opera; CapitalOne recently
> debuted an "improved" re-designed site that refuses to work with
> Opera, for instance.
Oh, tell me about it. I was trying to submit a PDF of a book to a
publisher today. First it didn't accept the password I'd been given,
then it decided that was okay, but it didn't care for the browser. I
knew that meant "I want buggy, insecure old Internet Explorer, the
Industry Standard!" Then it didn't have some damn Java thing installed,
so I installed that (clicking past the inevitable "Do you trust this
source?" messages) and it told me that when I went to the control panel,
I'd have thus-and-such a tab, and I didn't. Bottom line, it didn't like
it anyway, so I went to my Mac.
There, it didn't like Firefox, didn't like Internet Explorer, didn't
seem bothered with Safari at first, but even there I had to install some
dumbass component before it would agree to let me FTP a PDF.
On the plus side, I was getting paid by the hour.
Kip W
Sean O'Hara
declared:
>
> I can't remember when I saw it on an actually corporate website, but
> most of the ones I visit tend to be fairly serious computer companies. I
> mostly see it on hobby websites these days, and it has a very high
> correlation with bad design and limited usability.
>
Depends. I used to have a W3C compliance .jpg on my blog with a note
under it saying, "If anything on this page doesn't look right, stop
using Internet Explorer."
--
Sean O'Hara <http://diogenes-sinope.blogspot.com>
Doctor: Crush the lesser races! Conquer the galaxy! Unimaginable
power! Unlimited rice pudding! Et cetera! Et cetera!
-Doctor Who
John Dallman
> In the Year of the Golden Pig, the Great and Powerful John Dallman
> declared:
> > I can't remember when I saw it on an actually corporate website,
> > but most of the ones I visit tend to be fairly serious computer
> > companies. I mostly see it on hobby websites these days, and it has
> > a very high correlation with bad design and limited usability.
> Depends. I used to have a W3C compliance .jpg on my blog with a note
> under it saying, "If anything on this page doesn't look right, stop
> using Internet Explorer."
I only said correlation, not certainty!
Your classic "Optimised for IE6 at 1024x768 resolution" site quite often
seems to think that flashing text is a good idea. That's the kind of
truly bad design I meant.
David G. Bell
<34ydnbRRfrj6fD7a...@comcast.com>
ki...@comcast.net "Kip Williams" wrote:
You are going to add an allowance for the extra virus/malware scanning?
I know some outfits set a minimum billing increment, so a couple of
minutes clicking on "Scan Now" buttons could easily be a billable half-
hour. (And since it's slowing the computers for other work, I reckon
it's a justifiahle cost.)
--
David G. Bell -- SF Fan, Filker, and Punslinger.
On the horizon, a carrier task force of the Salvation Navy was
turning into the wind, preparing to launch Zeppelins.
Marcus L. Rowland
<fairp...@gmail.com> writes
I've just told the people who run a web site that there's at least one
page that is incompatible with all browsers on a PC - works fine on a
Mac, but on a PC there are unwanted line breaks in most paragraphs with
Opera and Firefox, while Internet Explorer does that and also doesn't
show the background graphic they've used properly so that the text is
black on grey.
Since the page is an interview with me this is naturally a little
annoying...
--
Marcus L. Rowland http://www.forgottenfutures.com/
LJ:ffutures http://homepage.ntlworld.com/forgottenfutures/
Forgotten Futures - The Scientific Romance Role Playing Game
Diana: Warrior Princess & Elvis: The Legendary Tours
The Original Flatland Role Playing Game
Petrea Mitchell
Jan Vanek jr. <jan.va...@seznam.cz> strode forth and proclaimed:
> <http://www.baen.com> No DOCTYPE, name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft
> FrontPage 6.0". Even when stuffed down the validator's maw by brute
> force (apparently some newlines where they couldn't be in fallback
> default UTF-8), dozens errors (mostly seeming to come from a mixture
> of a decidedly non-strict HTML with some XML slashes and namespaces).
> Displays OK, though kitschy (of course). Among the ads, an
> evangelizing icon "Get Firefox!"
Baen Books is the one sf site I've seen featured as the Daily Sucker
on Web Pages That Suck (<http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/dailysucker/>).
What you see now is slightly improved from what it looked like at the time
it was honored.
--
/
Petrea Mitchell <|> <|> <pr...@m5p.com> <mit...@osm.com>
"She who controls the spice girls, controls the spice."
---The Uncyclopedia on Sauron (as contributed by Chronarion)
Nate Edel
> Nate Edel <arch...@sfchat.org> wrote:
> > In any event, I'm not to be donating again until next January, as
> > I've been to an area with a (very slight) chance of bringing back
> > malaria.
>
> Where is that?
Tulum, on the Carribbean coast of Mexico, about two hours drive south of
Cancun. Fun vacation spot, and a rather striking set of ruins.
If you get by a graphical browser:
http://picasaweb.google.com/nate.edel/MexicoJanuary2008/photo#5157869229805513234