Standards mean little to developers looking for the biggest audience online: Internet Explorer users.
Our Take: OSNews serves more pages to Internet Explorer users than to all the rest, however, being faithful to the multi-platform nature of OSNews, our site is hand-coded and compatible with all mainstream browsers. We include support for WAP and Unix text-mode browsers, AvantGO and other, older (and sometimes… obscure), browsers. More info, in our recent discussion here.
Sites Genuflect to Browser King
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
They make the net a friendly place to be especially when you’re on mozilla! Nothing like sitting on a *nix box trying to look at a page coded for IE…
Check this screenshot:
http://netoptimist.sourceforge.net/scr/NetOptimist-osnews.png
This browser is extremely experimental, very far from being done, but OSNews still renders fine.
I have seen OSNews rendering on some… japanese phones too. I was told that it is among the very few “big” sites that actually are able to render correctly on such devices.
In order to add good rendering support for all these old or obscure browsers, sometimes I need to exersise some intentional “html bugs” on my code, like not closing the <P> tag and other (mostly with minor impact for other browsers) stuff like that. In other words, I have to go around some browsers bugs, instead of the browsers trying to get around HTML bugs. It works well this way… 😉
ok, IE and its subversions do dominate the browser market in an undecent way (around 95%) but remember that AOL has recently decided to sell its client version 7.0 that is based directly on Mozilla 1.0…. And that does just create 35 million users almost out of nowhere….
All yours.
Jade, sending this post from IE 6.0
Nice work with the standards! But given the verbose nature of most user-comments on this site, does anyone actually manage to read them in full on one of those tiny japanese phones?
I remeber 3 years ago when someone asked me to make them a webpage. Well, I had a copy of FrontPage installed (this was before I learned HTML and any scripting language) so I thought, yeah, I can do that. So I fired up Frontpage and create what I would now consider to be a shoty webpage, but then, I thought, wow, I just made a webpage, and it looks good! I had all sorts of scrolling text, animated gifs, sounds, mail links, etc, etc, etc. And then I went to a friends house and tried to show it to him. He used Netscape, and you know what? It would not render properl! So my first reaction was, “Hey, buddy. You’re browsers broken”. Then I realized that it was not the browser that was broken, but my website that was. And its not like my design was bad, my choise of tool was just terrible.
Now that I am intimatly familiar with HTML, PHP, et al, I don’t even bother with WISYWIG webpage generaters anymore. Its just easier for me to work with pure code.
I think the issue at hand here is not that website designers are purposly designing for IE (admittidy, some are), its that web designers are picking tools that made to take advantage of “features” of IE, instead of worrying about being cross compliant.
My take: Less tools, more code.
Happy Coding!
K, your comment will not be authorized. Learn to READ how to create links for this comments section, and then hit that damned Submit button and then try to preach me if I am proud or not for not being entirely standard’s compliant because I am trying to support older browsers.
Get a grip and don’t play with my nerves. That was a *design decision*, not a “bug” or a “mistake” on my part, therefore it is not debetable. *I* decide about these things and by taking these decisions, OSNews today can be rendered everywhere. And that is the point of a web site.
>does anyone actually manage to read them in full on one of those tiny japanese phones?
Japanese phones have a resolution of 176×208 or 120×160. That is enough…
You are free to write OS news in whatever way you want,
and we are free to try to post our opinion, after all,
we still live in a free world, right?
And of course you are free to censure anything I try to
post here, but I doubt you will win much with that…
Is my post is wrong or stupid, people will realize it,
if not, then there is no point in deleting it…
\K
P.S.: I’ll learn to add links when I find the explanation
of how to do it somewhere.
P.P.S.: Sorry for posting twice, but it isn’t obvious at
first that yout post can be cesured…
You posted twice, even *before* I had the time to look at any of your posts and “censor” them or not. It was just that I was not in front of my PC at the time, and you did not even read below the posting form that “Your comment will not show up immediately”, let alone on how to create links.
You are right, I missed the “Your comment will
not show up immediately”, sorry… but it isn’t
so easy to see, maybe if you put it in red it
would be more evident?
\K
http://24.85.21.230/icab.jpg
iCab for OS X is still in beta. It’s my browser of choice
Yes, OSNews works well with iCab. Only problem is that iCab sees the fonts of size=2 as size=1 (of what other browsers understand)… I have emailed the programmer of iCab for it, but he says that he does not care if ALL the other browsers see the size=2 as size=+2, he prefers to see it as size=-1 and then he suggests to make the fonts bigger overall from the menu (which is something not many users do). Some developers just don’t want to listen and be compatible with all the rest… Otherwise, iCab is fine.
Don’t always trust your stat tables too. Some browsers are setup to imply IE rather than their real McCoy. Opera and OmniWeb that I myself use, but not to limit the other many browsers..
Thank you OSnews for being standards based and not regulating who gets to see your site. Even NetPositive on Be.
Most sites that are ‘optmized’ for IE are usually *un*optimized with crap that could be done without.
As for making websites standards compliant, I don’t know if I’d go as far as Eugenia and make sure it was compatible with PCs, Macs, cell phones, PDAs, toasters, and all that jazz. I’d probably test mine in Mozilla, Netscape 4.x/6, IE 5/6, Opera 5/6, and all of the others suffer for all I care .. ya gota draw the line somewhere
> ya gota draw the line somewhere
Not if you are running OSNews, that it HAS to be accessible by ALL OSes. It is the very nature and target of this web site to be accessibly by all OSes. Otherwise, we are not being truthfull enough of the service.
When I was working as a designer, I was only testing with Netscape, IE and Opera. But OSNews is a different kettle of fish.
As for the standards compliancy, we do not violate any important rules. Only minor things that *DO NOT* have impact to mainstream browsers, but they do fix broken or older browsers. Like the <P> tag for example. If you add a </P> at the end of your paragraph and before you close the <TD>, most browsers include an additional line of empty space! Which makes the tables and the overall rendering of the page, look like crap! I need the new paragraph’s empty line to be created if I add another <P> for the next paragraph after I closed that </P>, not because I happened to close a paragraph above with a </P>. The new empty line should be created with the <P>, not with the </P>. Even IE 5 falls into this problem.
I use IE. Imagine my surprise when many of the more complex sites failed to render. I eventually realized my ad-and-trash filter was set to blank out my browser identity. When I reallowed it, sites worked again. The problem was simply that the site code checked for specific browsers, with no default choice for an unknown type.
I have ever-after wondered how many alternative browser users set themselves up to return IE’s ID tag, simply so they can get by such code to be allowed to try to render a page.
Please take into consideration the fact that, very often, non-IE or Netscape browsers identify themselves as IE, for the sake of compatibility. My browser is OmniWeb (running on OS X) but I ask it to identify as IE since a web service I use frequently request IE or Netscape, and nothing else.
For example, look at the source code of the front page of OSNews. I want the alignment of the text to be set to “Justify”. The original idea was to use the ALIGN=”justify” tag inside the <TD>. Problem is, IE does not support the Justify attribute inside the TD, even if it does support it elsewhere, either through CSS or through the <P Align=”justify”> (IE bug?). Other browsers, like Opera, support it just fine wherever you place the alignment.
So, I had to use the <P Align=”justify”> instead of inside the <TD>, as IE is the dominant browser around here. Problem is, if I add a </P> at the end of the news item/paragraph there to close the above <P Align=”justify”>, it creates that nasty, ugly empty line/space just before the </TD>! So, I have to go around that defieciency as well, and not include the </P>.
It all comes to trade-offs at the end of the day. It is not about Web Standards, it is not about likings and it is not about bad HTML. *It is about what works best, given the available tools.* Everything is a trade-off in development.
Actually I don’t see a trend to IE-only sites. I can’t remember when was the last time I encountered such. It seemes to be a reduced to a few braindead wannabe webdesigners who know how to design but nothing about the web.
Today it’s really easy to create websites that will work fine on every modern browser (even if you use the latest DOM features) and will still work (although not fine) on w3m and co.
I wouldn’t expect any more complicated site to work on Netscape 4 though, that’s one buggy and standards uncompliant beast.
Eugenia: Most of the mark-up problems on OSNews CAN be fixed without breaking ANY of the standards, and still allow the pages to render properly in all the browsers and devices that you mentioned. ( http://www.webstandards.org/ has a lot of relevant information )
But, I can undestand that it would require a decent amount of work, and it won’t give any immediate and obvious advantages. And as long as the site does render in such a veriety of browsers, it’s probably ok.
The main problem with non-standard compliant code is that it’s bound to break in the future, and that’s when you’ll have to fix it.
Anyway, you are doing some great work with this site
.
I try to make my homepage as browser agnostic as possible; to look good across a variety of browsers. It isn’t easy but it’s worth the effort. My page is even usefull with text based browsers.
http://homepage.mac.com/zizban
My homepage is usually graphics free but since I just published a book, I am promoting it 😉
I just saw your code Chris. It is obviously written in a WYSIWYG tool and except the broken images you got there, you got things like:
<td height=”8″></td>
Which will gain you nothing in many browsers without the use of one-pixel gif. IE will give you that 8 pixel height, but not Netscape 4, for example.
> Most of the mark-up problems on OSNews CAN be fixed without breaking ANY of the standards
You are free to try. In my book, there is no other solution for this specific issue that will satisfy all browsers. I explained above that trying to close the <P> after the news item paragraph, results in uglyness, which is something I will not accept for the OSNews front page.
….is that MSIE evolves to be more compliant with standards ( its better now than it has ever been, not that that is saying much )
Eventually, ther will be so little difference between MSIE and other better selling browsers in rendering that we should start to have less of these problems..
Actually not closing <p> tag is allowed in HTML 4.01 ( http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/text.html#edef-P ). I was talking more about the other little problems that you can see when you try to validate the front page using http://validator.w3.org/ . Absolute majority of those corrections will not affect the browsers and devices that were mentioned.
Once again, I’m not trying to blame you for not doing it, and I understand your constraints. You can’t really hire a dedicated XHTML+CSS programmer, who would spend a few hours/days to create a code that would be both standard compliant and would work everywhere.
There are some fixes that can still be done, like closing the <FONT> tags on the osnews menu on the left (I was testing something about 3 months ago and had took them out, and then was too lazy to put them back), but the majority of the other corrections that this (somewhat borked) validator is suggesting, are out of the question. I use some IE specific tags that the validator does not like, tags that DO NOT affect the other browsers, but they are nice to have to look good on IE, and also MOST of the suggestions there have to do with the fact that some of the tags I am using are not part of the specific set of HTML tested.
But I do NOT want to specify which version of HTML I am using, because this will be devastating for the older browsers! My code is neither HTML 4.01 or HTML 3.2 or CSS. It is a mix, mixed in such a way that serves ALL browsers and it is proven to work! We even have some XHTML here!
Thing is that because I want to keep the cross-platformness, I can not and I will not tie OSNews to a specific HTML set. With this in mind, OSNews will NEVER pass that validator. The validator only validates against a given HTML set/version, and OSNews does not and will not have one. It is the only way to stay accessible by all browsers and at the same time look good.
This is going a little off topic, but still it’s related to the standard compliance issue. I would be interested to hear your opinion on the following:
What will happen when there are new widespread devices/browsers only that support valid XHTML, but not HTML? The reason why i’m asking, is that old browsers CAN show valid XHTML even though it won’t always look very nice. On the other hand some newer highly specialized browsers can’t afford to go through all messy code and figure out what it really meant. It’s a lot easier and more efficient to write a browser for some documented language than for some unknown entity that you say you are using
.
> I use some IE specific tags that the validator does not like, tags that DO NOT affect the other browsers, but they are nice to have to look good on IE
Those IE specific tags can be substituted by CSS, that will work both in IE and other new browsers, and will simply be ignored by older browsers (like IE tags are now).
Personally, I think, standard compliance HELPS “cross-platformness”. On the other hand when companies break standards – users are hurt (Microsoft with Java, both Microsoft and Netscape with HTML, and so on).
I find it funny you can get it to work on Japanese Phones, they don’t even use HTML! They use a modified version called cHTML (compact HTML).
That said both they (iMode) and WAP plan to switch to XHTML (or XHTML Basic).
XHTML is amazingly picky if you are using the W3C validator but set the type to “Transitional” and it’ll work once you’ve got the bugs out. Setting the type to Strict and you’ll never get it working, It complains about everything even if it appears to be OK!
In 1998 I worked at an ISP and we coded everything by hand in the most basic HTML we could. The ISP only had a 64K line (not much faster than a modem!) so everything had to be really small and work on any browser. I had previously only used Netscape 3 to make pages and the amount of unnecessary crap it had added was amazing, I was able to cut them in half by rewriting the HTML.
I then seen a friends page which was generated by Frontpage and it made my Netscape pages look positively spartan, bloat wasn’t the word for it.
—
Where is the line drawn though?
I guess at some point Mozilla will eventually remove support for Netscape 4 style pages will OSNews?
You could I suppose generate 2 sets of pages – one standards compliant XHTML and another for older browsers.
I believe Mozilla has 2 parsers for much the same purpose.
BTW even Net+ can make some sense of XHTML!
~Seedy~: only real hope…is that MSIE evolves to be more compliant with standards ( its better now than it has ever been, not that that is saying much )
Hmm, well I really don’t see how you can cast the blame at the foot of a single browser. The problem is really industry wide.
Oddly enough, the same problems exist in the hardware world that exist on the Internet. People think that by creating standards and getting companies to sign compliancy agreements, that they will be 100% guaranteed to end up with a standards compliant product. This is not the case in actuality. As it turns out, companies are interested in making money, and the will do whatever the least amount of work is that they must in order to make that money. Sometimes standards get left by the wayside with this type of approach. It goes farther though, in some cases, well meaning developers just make mistakes. Writing a web browser is in fact very hard. It is not like writing a C compiler, were there are specific rules about the way things work (more or less) and the rules have always been in place. It is more like writing a C compiler that also understands Java and VB, all mixed together at random.
Standards enforcement is a real problem, and one which is not easily solved. I think that Eugenia’s brute force approach – testing every single browser she can get a hold of against her site – is just about the only way to make a compliant site. This being the case, what incentive to authors have to make the site work for all browsers? I mean really, if you’re the author of a streaming media site which only offers content in RealAudio, and an OpenBSD-pmax user wants to pull down content, what service can you really offer them?
For my money, IE offers some pretty cool things that other browsers just don’t do. For one, I think ActiveX is very useful. I can just pop a full application down on a user’s machine, and then provide an infinite array of performance conscious functionality. It would be great if you could do that with MacOS! Another area where IE really shines is DHTML. This is a big win for sites trying to minimize bandwidth usage by passing down lots of UI on the first request, then showing and hiding the UI dynamically based on user input.
Anyway, that’s just my $.02.
> BTW even Net+ can make some sense of XHTML!
No, it can’t. Even today, I have to manually change the <br / > to <BR> each time a comment is rendered, because the PHP new line parser creates the tag in XHTML and Net+ does not support it.
As long there are users who are still using BeOS, OS/2, QNX etc, OSNews will remain as it is. I do not care about the new fashions of XHTML and the like. I will leave the other sites to use it first, and I will follow when it will be sensible to do so, in the distant future.
Standards are a good thing for non-practical people.
If you have a boss/customer (we all do) he will tell you to do the document or form to comply with the 95% of the internet browsers (= IE) and leave the other 5% alone.
(Unless you are working for a site like osnews or mozilla.org
It would be neat if the comments section of OSNews posted the OS/Browser that was being posted with. It would slow down a lot of the annoying comments from overzealous Linux “users” who are really posting with MSIE. . . of course, they just use it at work . . .
As long there are users who are still using BeOS, OS/2, QNX etc, OSNews will remain as it is.
FYI Mozilla is ported to all that platforms… and some more.
\K
Yes, but Mozilla has many problems under BeOS. It is barely usable. Also, these browsers do not come with the system. People need to download them. And only a fraction of users do that. Most of the PC users just stay with the defaults. For example, we get more people on osnews browsing with the NetPositive default browser of BeOS (Netscape2-compliant!) than with Mozilla. Therefore, I have no choice.
…well, at home i’m using my old NeXTstation and Omniweb 2.7 to read OSnews. Why? Well, this geek-feeling – ya know?
Anyway: even this old browser have no problems to render the site correctly – so it’s nice to see that there are people who doesn’t “optimizing for IE/NS only”. There are not much sites left…
I know that I usually advocate a no compromise approach to site design but I must admit that I am impressed with the work that has gone into this site.
It goes beyond what you can do with total standards compliance (which is locked into the concepts of either degrading gracefully or alternate media stylesheets which require CSS support).
Good work.
I still wish that more of the other sites on the web used standards-compliant designs.
Baldur.
You’re right, Mozilla is horrible on BeOS. Crashes early, crashes often. There is a patch to correct this. It is included in Stripzilla, which is very stable.
OSnews still doesn’t work in my browser because Eugenia still can’t write sane HTML. It’s that simple.
Close your tags or shut up.
What a big liar and unrespectful you are.
Maybe she should write a book and call it “Insane HTML.” I’m sure it would sell millions. I’m really geting tired of “eXtreme everything.” Time for something new.
Can’t say I have ever had a problem in any browser on this site.
> Can’t say I have ever had a problem in any browser on this site.
Then why the fuck are you making fun of me above?
Do you think that you can walk in here and write whatever comes to your head? We are people too you know. Even if you do not see our faces and talk directly, we are people too, with feelings. Having put quite some work on this site.
As for my HTML, it is just fine and it is as it was MEANT to be. I am a professional web developer, and used to be the head of a dev team in UK for a business ISP. You don’t get that high if you don’t know your shit.
Try another STUPID and mindless assault against me once more, and these f*cking forums are going offline the next minute, along with an IP banning.
I think Eugenia has made great design decision for the audience that this site is directed to.
I do have some questions. what are cell phone and pda css capabilities? have you found any emulators for such platforms for pc’s. i would like to view my websites on those devices but dont have any access to them
Hey –
I would heartily recommend the following resources for web developers:
http://www.webstandards.org/
And
http://www.alistapart.com/
They encourage development to the W3C standards, and give some real practical advice on how to do it. Not to mention they do have a “browser upgrade” campaign. As someone pointed out if you’re still using NS4.x it really is time to upgrade. Yes it’s nice to build sites which degrade gracefully – and it’s also not too hard – but don’t come in with NS3 or Lynx and expect it to look great. Functional but not necessarilly pretty for users of older browsers is a fair motto.
I think it’s nice for people to say yeah, but you can get 5% more market share if you make things work great on old browsers. At what cost? If 5% more market share costs you 25% more in development is it worth it?
Or – if you’re a freelance web monkey you may want to make sure it’s crystal clear what you’re coding for – standards, not browsers. Otherwise you run the risk of burning 50% of your profits by working around all sorts of cruddy browser issues (early nutscrape table issues come to mind).
– Porter
“tiny japanese phones” – I suspect you mean iMode? I might be a bit blind, but I could not find a site on osnews.com that is adapted to iMode. in case you mean the normal page to be viewed with a cellphone; well, the average iMode cellphone will abort displaying and downloading if a page is too big. osnews is simply due to the banner on top etc.
No, I do not mean the iMode.
Please give me the browser tag name of iMode and I will add it to the special home.php page, so iMode will be able to render OSNews as well.
Eugenia,
No no no! I was trying to poke fun at the guy who dumped on you. I see it failed miserably. I’m sorry you were offended. All I was trying to do was downplay his rant.
Apparently things are getting under your skin at OSNews, but please have mercy! I have the highest opinion of your abilities and have said so to others. I hope you don’t feel the need to dump on me in private emails from here on. I meant nothing against you.
Again, my apologies for writing something that was much too easy to misunderstand.
I often run a browser with Javascript switched off. The major
annoyance is web sites which use Javascript for ordinary simple links.
I presume this is a result of using Dreamweaver or some similar
program.
My browsers always spoof as IE. I don’t see how anyone can know what
proportion of viewers are really using IE, or spoofing. (Except with
some very tricky Javascript tests.)
The great thing about switching off JS is that you lose the popup
windows.
Again, my apologies for writing something that was much too easy to misunderstand.
Hm, I don’t think this was easy to misunderstand at all.
But on the other hand I guess Eugenia is just a little tired of getting flamed on regular basis for “doing this” and “not doing that”.
But:
[i]Try another STUPID and mindless assault against me once more, and these f*cking forums are going offline the next minute, along with an IP banning[/I
still seems like a bit to harsh of a response.
So relax, there are always some trolls around. I too had my problems with some of your opinions/reviews, but no need to get personal. I do reviews myself and bet there are people out there not liking them. Just a thing of different opinions…
Keep up the good work as OSNews is a great site and one of my primary sources for information!
>Hm, I don’t think this was easy to misunderstand at all.
I actually did misunderstand it. Remember, english is not my native language. I am getting misundestood a lot myself…
I am using Voyager (3.3.122) on an Amiga to post this,
and I know that it spoofs as necissary to visit a site (spoofing ==
lying to the server as to what browser/os you are using).
Besides, there is the movement for open web standards… I apologize
thhat I don’t know the url off of the bat, but it is important to have
standards and to stick with them. How would the IE users feel if a
large portion of the pages on the ‘net used ARexx?!!?
Targhan
Nothing like a text based browser to speed around the internet on.
So I appreciate clean design on this web site. Thanks Eugenia.
–
No javascript.
No popups.
–
Boil the web down down to the bones and all you have is content.
I only wish that more web designers could take a few extra
minutes to set up a text only site if not for old farts like
myself but also for the ‘sight impaired’.