This is just a reminder about some OSNews-related stuff. First off, by reading the survey results, we saw that a lot of people were complaining about the popup ads, while these have completely stopped as of 2 weeks ago. Also, other people complained that OSNews does not look good on Lynx. OSNews looks pretty good on Lynx and w3m and Links and even AvantGo, while we even have WAP support (check screenshot on the above link). But you will need to read here first how to have these services working for you. Also, we are always looking for people to write articles for OSNews. These days we generally serve more than 40,000 page views per day, so this could be a good way to have your voice heard on OS and other technology-related matters.
Just Some OSNews Reminders
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Is it possible to submit one or two articles or reviews without making a formal commitment to the site? I’d love to write some, but I don’t have the time to do this regularly.
There were popup ads on this site? Thank God for non-MS browsers.
I think you miss the point regarding web standards.
First of all I don’t want to have to point lynx at a seperate version for it to work decently. Maybe I’m just not curious enough, but I simply did not know that you had several versions of the site going here. And I’ll bet that a lot of other people didn’t know either.
It also presumes that there will not be other browsers on other platforms that you have not forseen which might not be able to handle your particular blend of font tags and table-based layouts.
The only solution for all people is to use a standards-based design with a stylesheet-based layout.
An example is the WaSP website itself ( http://www.webstandards.org/ ). One site, one design and yet it is eminently readable in any handheld from the Palm Pilot to the Newton (the third screenshot). (Found at http://www.zeldman.com/ ).
http://www.zeldman.com/daily/pilot.html
http://www.dashes.com/anil/stuff/wasp_ppc.png
http://www.splorp.com/junk/wasp020625.gif
It’s not really about simply supporting handheld browsers but about supporting standards and admit that you can’t account for every single browser/platform combination out there.
Anyway, like this site otherwise. Except when it is treating Microsoft marketing material as valid content. I think that was the only real mistake in the last few days (a pretty bad one though).
Keep up the good work.
Baldur.
I agree that it’s annoying to have different urls for different browsers.
Unfortunately though, WaSP don’t have a plan for usability in older browsers. These users are supposed to accept a less usable site with their outdated browsers. This is despite the fact that the graphical browsers can do columned layouts, and can do sans-serif fonts (section 508, or NZ Government Web Guidelines link to several studies on reading speeds and sans-serif wins every time).
It’s important to note that WaSP themselves don’t promote coding to standards and ignoring how the browser renders the page. They recommend hacks to avoid N4, and hacks to avoid IE4, from sites like Glish. There are many browser hacks still required to get usable and accessible to the many browsers still out there regardless of ‘standards’. In that Zeldman page they mention that due a browser fault in MacOS the page doesn’t render properly. Those like WaSP and Zeldman put the blame on the browser – and it is their fault, but the users shouldn’t be expected to understand that. They just want to use a site.
You can either go for standards to be read by computers or you can go for humans and how they use a site.
I like the HTML produced by this site. I like Metafilter.com’s layout too.
Nice work, Eugenia.
I think there is a limit to how long you can or should support old third party software (which is what a browser is to a website owner).
The Netscape 4.0 series is five year old software and is pretty much the only piece of software from that time that remains publicly supported by large companies and institutions.
This represents a huge loss in productivity because NN4.* is a pain to design for and because standards based designs are simply a lot easier to maintain and author.
Users should be expected to understand this. The shift towards a standards-based web is as fundamental as the shift from driving on the left side of the road to the right side (which is a shift many countries in the world had to go through).
The user should be expected to understand this and partake in this.
Also regarding those ‘hacks’: The bad @import support in old browsers is not a hack. It’s a limitation of the old browsers that fortunately works to our advantage. It happens to be very much in the spirit of the @import rule as well (different stylesheets for different media and situations).
The Glish, standards-compliant, box-model hack is a different issue which has caused a bit of debate on a couple of mailing lists I frequent. I personally don’t use this hack and haven’t found the need to.
I disagree with your dichotomy of standards=machines, old browsers=humans.
It is rather a case of irresponsible users (NN4 and Omniweb people)versus flexibility and productivity for everyone else.
This all is pretty irrelevant anyway since the marketshare of NN4, iCab and Omniweb (the most common, flawed browsers) is miniscule. The problem has ceased being the uses who have for the most part switched to standards-compliant browsers. Rather, the problem is the current reluctance of the web-design community to design sites with the reality of the marketplace in mind.
The truth is that standards-compliant browsers are in a vast majority.
And the html of this site is a clutter of unreadable td and font tags. You may like the design but the markup is not easily readable by humans.
I like the design, though.
Baldur.
Can I submit an hypnotic article which would create slaves for my world domination plans? But I wonder, how many unique users are there coming daily, on the average.
I’m writing this on links, and the web site looks fine… i didn’t even know there was a special text-based-browsers version of the site, because the ‘normal’ version works quite good here… but the text based version is better.
thanks,
ido.
I think that people complaining about popups in the poll (after all, I did) shows that you have a few regulars, which is a positive thing.
What else did the survey show? I didn’t dig very hard, but is there a link to show us what the survey results are/were? And how many *unique* visitors does the site have per day (vs. impressions vs. survey-filler-outers)?
> First of all I don’t want to have to point lynx at a seperate version for it to work decently.
There is a REASON why we have these browsers supported better on an alternative url. And there is a good reason why. I have explained it in the past, and I will do so again for the last time.
So, home.php is the “real” index.php of this server. The index.php is automatically generated and updated from home.php by a cron script every 1 minute. This way we save CPU power when we get slashdotted and it has worked wonders for our server’s health. So, this generated index.php is pure html. It does not run via php and it does not have any server-side languages involved. This is why we cannot detect if someone is hitting http://www.osnews.com/ via Lynx or IE, so we can’t redirect it to the correct header file.
However, when someone is hitting the “real” index of this web site, the home.php, which is dynamically generated by PHP each time it is requested, I have put some PHP code there to check if the browser is Lynx, w3m, avandgo or Links. If yes, it uses an *alternative* header file that does not include the pricegrabber and the ads and the osnews menu is horizontal, not vertical (see screenshot as linked in the article). The alternative header file loads the exact same layout for the stories as comments, but without the table row on the left and without the ads. This alternative look and feel, are best suited for these text browsers.
And no, we will possibly not use mod_rewrite. And no, we will not use javascript, because these browsers in question do not even support js. And yes, OSNews is optimized to load and render adequately on *any* browser no matter how crappy the browser may be (because this site has to work with any OS) so I will not lock out the functionality of this site by basing it to CSS or js or html transition documents or whatever else like that. Just pure carefully *hand-written* html and some very light CSS only when they do not hurt the other browsers.
And yes, I have some “html mistakes”, like not closing the <P> tags, in order to go around rendering bugs from older browsers, so no, we won’t pass complete validation, just because we need to go around old bugs. These small “mistakes” were intentional. OSNews is the way it is, because it was tested and it renders well on any damned browser out there. Including some japanese cell phones (and I am not talking wap here)….
As for the stories and a formal commitment, you do not have to do any. Just send us any articles you think that are good for this site, when you have them ready.
They were pop ups on this site? LOL, Thanks god I am using a small 60KB pop up blocking program (freeware) lol. MSIE? I love it
But sometimes I do prefer Mozilla 
Have nothing against either of them. Mozilla has some features that I love, too bad they are not in IE 
BTW, if you want to see them yourself, this is the normal header file that it is requested by all our pages, when the browsers are not lynx, w3m, links or avantgo:
http://www.osnews.com/header.php
And this is the header that is called by all the osnews pages except the index.php and the Phorum, and it is used for these text-based browsers:
http://www.osnews.com/header-text.php
As you can see, the second one does not produce nested tables making the rendering procedure much faster and easier, with a much cleaner look, which is something imperative for such browsers.
They were not too many popus. Only a few selected ads by one of the advertisers had 3-4 popup ads. The situation was not bad.
But now they are gone. Forever.
Also regarding those ‘hacks’: The bad @import support in old browsers is not a hack. It’s a limitation of the old browsers that fortunately works to our advantage.
It a clever workaround. It’s bending ‘technology’ to suit us. It’s a hack.
The only solution for all people is to use a standards-based design with a stylesheet-based layout.
I should have pointed this out more clearly. In this case the WaSP site doesn’t work as well as other HTML/CSS coding styles.
remains publicly supported by large companies and institutions.
I checked OSNews.com from sydney (no, wait, might have been melbourne – I get those two confused) airport with a kiosk running N4. I didn’t have a choice. The site was fine.
It is rather a case of irresponsible users (NN4 and Omniweb people)versus flexibility and productivity for everyone else.
Bad user! Go away! Come back with red shoes!
Here are screenshots of Lynx (first row of terminals), Links (second row) and w3m (third row).
http://www.osnews.com/img/1290/browsers.jpg
The left sides of the rows of terminals are running the index.php and while it is still usable, you can see how problematic rendering can be (but as I explained above we have not much choise), while the right hand rows of terminals run the same browsers but with the home.php page, which includes the alternative header file, and it looks much more easier to navigate with a text browser.
BTW, if someone comes to osnews.com/ with one of these text browsers and clicks to any other file (like the story.php and comment.php), because these other files ARE dynamic, they will automatically get the right layout for these browsers! Only the index.php is the one with the limitation. However, as long the user gets through to any dynamic page, he/she will get the right header. This means that when he clicks to the osnews logo to get back to the front page, he will now get the RIGHT page, the home.php, so from that point on he will never see the “ugly” front page because the previous dynamic script “sent” the browser to the right header. I hope it makes sense, as the process might sound a bit complicated if you are not into HTML… But it is a really simple procedure really…
<<<It a clever workaround. It’s bending ‘technology’ to suit us. It’s a hack.>>>
It’s a damn sight better than intentionally leaving out closing tags and using an amalgam of nonstandard tags and attributes.
If it’s a hack then its the most elegant and benign hack I’ve encountered.
<<<I should have pointed this out more clearly. In this case the WaSP site doesn’t work as well as other HTML/CSS coding styles.>>>
I’m all for debating the merits and flaws of coding styles, as long as the debate is about standards-compliant coding styles. We really need to leave the world of the proprietry web behind us. I’d prefer we do so now rather than in another five years time.
<<<I checked OSNews.com from sydney (no, wait, might have been melbourne – I get those two confused) airport with a kiosk running N4. I didn’t have a choice. The site was fine.>>>
With the crude and complex @import ‘hack’ a standards-compliant website would have been eminently readable as well. It would have just looked rather plain.
What would you have done if, for example, the kiosk had been using a proprietry browser designed for embedded applications that Eugenia doesn’t have access to for testing purposes, and it had failed to render the site readably?
That scenario is growing more likely every day as non-pc based webbrowsing becomes more common.
<<<Bad user! Go away! Come back with red shoes!>>>
No need to tell him to go away. Either the user will experience a plain looking, but fully accessible and readable site reminding him that his browser is a pain in the behind (politely, of course)or he can come back with a standards-compliant browser and stop worrying.
Users have to understand that they need to be more responsible users. Somebody who consistently uses buggy and unreliable pieces of software like Outlook Express or Netscape 4.* should be made aware that he is causing a large amount of people a huge amount of bother.
You have to leave the past behind at some point.
Baldur.
> Somebody who consistently uses buggy and unreliable pieces of software like Outlook Express or Netscape 4.* should be made aware that he is causing a large amount of people a huge amount of bother.
Netscape 4.x is really buggy. I mean, it does not agree even between its own versions. I remember when I was working for this design house in UK and we had a piece of valid javascript working perfectly on 4.03, but not working on 4.04, and then working again fine on 4.08 but not on 4.50. It was crazy… Except the Js stuff, Netscape 4.x had some HTML rendering problems too… Again, depending on the version! It is really difficult to work with or around that browser. Thankfully, OSNews employs some really simple HTML code and design (my philosophy is “keep it simple”
, so it works pretty well even on Netscape 2.x and other less capable browsers. 🙂
The WAP site does not work on my ericson T65. I get ‘Bad answer from origin server’. This is on UK Vodaphone using GPRS. The phone isn’t all that old. I have no idea as to whether it supports WAP 1.1, but I should hope so…
With the crude and complex @import ‘hack’ a standards-compliant website would have been eminently readable as well. It would have just looked rather plain.
Yeah – as I’ve always said. The usability, readability, and accessibility will be impaired.
The usability will be lessened for a visual user because DIVs would pancake down the page. In their outdated browser they can’t have a column down the left for navigation. They get page elements one after another down the page.
The readability will be impaired because without CSS-P to control the width of DIVs words will take the full screen width. Readability online is is best when it’s limited to a part of the screen width or else keeping track of which line you’re on is more difficult. Also, without font-styling most browsers will default to a serif family font which – as I said earlier in the show – will mean people can’t read at the same pace.
Accessibility is a little different. For screenreaders usability issues in how the page is rendered trickle down to blind users. The basic elements of an accessible page can exist in many coding styles. You can define acronyms, abbreviations, and using H1-H6 to express structure. The thing remaining is accessibility problems of table layouts in about 40% of browsers for disabled users (the greater 60% have worked around these long-defined problems). Those 40% are dwarfed a hundred times over by the numbers of visual users running N4 and such. So be aware, and don’t make tables that are nested a dozen times, but understand that a 3 column layout isn’t at all difficult for disabled users.
Now for those who are able to browse with a new-enough browser on a popular operating system there shouldn’t be a problem. But they won’t have a problem using a site either way.
It’s nice to have printable version at the spin of a style sheet. But weigh up how many users you’re going to affect by chosing a CSS-P layout over a table-based layout. Right now, the user gets a better experience with a table layout. I wish it wasn’t so, but there you have it.
T65 and T68 phones, we know they do not work. Their WAP support *sucks*. It is not our wap page at fault in that specific case.
Some of you are smokin’ crack. This website is far more browser/os compatible than most sites. There’s a ton of professional sites out there that even function if you don’t have a flash plugin or a java capable browser. There is a reason this can be justified. The users/browsers are going to have to catch up with technology. So you use lynx…so what? not many web designers checking to see if their sites render good in lynx these days. Osnews does care and even bothered to make a different versions of the site. By the way, that wasp site looks like crap, even if it does follow web standards.