what's wrong with this page?

Discussion of general topics about Mozilla Firefox
User avatar
priior
Posts: 374
Joined: November 10th, 2002, 3:45 pm
Location: montreal

Post by priior »

thumperward wrote:It doesn't cost a fortune to remove a bogus element from a CSS layout. It seems that often the cost implied in making a site standards-complient is blown well out of proportion.
- Chris


It's not as simple as that... (and i AM playing devil's advocate here.. i try to write all my pages in xhtml strict)..

but imagine ur an e-commerce company and 95% of ur target market uses ie 5.0 in 800x600 resolution (these figures are not made up)... Do you write pages that support standards even if they might break on ie5 because of bad implementation? or do you write pages that "look good" on ur target market's browsers?

I don't necessarily agree with the latter... But it's just to illustrate it's not a clear-cut simple issue.

I believe all personal (or non ecommenrce) webpages should be written in xhtml sctrict in an attempt to force people upgrade their browsers. :)
User avatar
Orbite
Posts: 3757
Joined: November 4th, 2002, 8:23 pm
Contact:

Post by Orbite »

priior wrote:Do you write pages that support standards[...] or do you write pages that "look good" [on most browsers]


This is the most commun misconception about web standards. It's not a question of choosing between one or the other. Web standards were not conceived to make web site complicated, costly and ugly looking. Exactly the contrary.

But if you insist to work with conceptors who are inexperienced in standards, surely you'll take you a lot of time and money to obtain butt ugly designs doing only partially what your old site is doing right now.
User avatar
Orbite
Posts: 3757
Joined: November 4th, 2002, 8:23 pm
Contact:

Post by Orbite »

priior wrote:I believe all personal (or non ecommenrce) webpages should be written in xhtml sctrict in an attempt to force people upgrade their browsers. :)


Our priority shouldn't be to force people upgrade their browsers.

Popular browsers, like IE, are almost fully standard compliant. Of course, they need to perfected a little more, but we are 95% done.

It's a completly different case with web site designs. More than 95% of websites don't have basic HTML syntax done correctly. And I'm not talking about CSS2 or Javascript.

Most HTML editors are not able to generate a proper page structure (doctype, head, body) and make a layout without adding useless tags or flagrant errors.
seb
Posts: 1578
Joined: November 4th, 2002, 11:26 pm
Location: Paris, France
Contact:

Post by seb »

Orbite wrote:Popular browsers, like IE, are almost fully standard compliant.
Not really, no.
For example, this page'll show you how much IE6 lags behind Opera7b1 and Gecko-based browsers (such as Phoenix, Mozilla, AOL for Mac OS X, etc).
User avatar
Orbite
Posts: 3757
Joined: November 4th, 2002, 8:23 pm
Contact:

Post by Orbite »

Yes. If you compare browsers against each others, you'll see that the Mozilla family outperforms IE.
That is not my point.

The quality of browsers is far superior to the quality of websites.

If browsers are almost standards compliant, websites are rarely standards compliant.
User avatar
Stefan
Posts: 2051
Joined: November 5th, 2002, 2:46 am

Post by Stefan »

Orbite wrote:Popular browsers, like IE, are almost fully standard compliant. Of course, they need to perfected a little more, but we are 95% done.


Well that depends on what you look at. In eg IE 6 (not to mention 5.x) 95% of CSS 2 is broken...
There are also a lot of very fundamental CSS concepts compleatly up the walls (eg IE still is not able to center a blocklevel element with the correct margin:0 auto; , which is outright astonishing).

But indeed, websites in general is severly lagging behind the browsers.
On the other hand, there is a bit of a catch 22 in this, becuse things are connected

A) (non power)Users won't upgrade their browsers as long as it work just fine on all pages they visit.

B) Webdevelopers won't start coding valid pages until a large enough portion of browsers implement it correctly (which brings us back to A).

Thus there need to be some deliberate forcing involved to give users an incentive to upgrade their old crappy browsers that is holding back the progress of the net.
User avatar
Orbite
Posts: 3757
Joined: November 4th, 2002, 8:23 pm
Contact:

Post by Orbite »

Stefan wrote:Thus there need to be some deliberate forcing involved to give users an incentive to upgrade their old crappy browsers that is holding back the progress of the net.


And there is an immense, much greater, need to promote good, standards compliant, web designs.

As in every Catch 22 situation, the vicious circle is broken when we deliberatly stop doing the same old mistakes, over and over, even it feels strange at first. Our objectives should be focusing on what we rationnaly want to acheive, not the comfort of bad habits we loose.

As you have shown, the users are interrested in browsers only because it's a tool the access the Web. They don't care for CSS2 or XML, as long as they can enjoy a good time on the Web. They want it all and they want it now. That's why promoting browsers upgrades is not enough to improve the web and ensure progress. You need also promoting websites upgrades.
User avatar
laszlo
Posts: 5225
Joined: November 4th, 2002, 6:13 pm
Location: .de
Contact:

Post by laszlo »

Orbite wrote:You need also promoting websites upgrades.

Which is what this Mozilla department is doing at its best.
User avatar
Stefan
Posts: 2051
Joined: November 5th, 2002, 2:46 am

Post by Stefan »

Orbite wrote:That's why promoting browsers upgrades is not enough to improve the web and ensure progress. You need also promoting websites upgrades.


Yes, I'm agreeing with you (though I guess it was kind of fuzzy).

I'm just underlining the point that promoting browsers upgrades and websites upgrades. is basicly the same thing. Both are needed and both will fail on their own :)
User avatar
priior
Posts: 374
Joined: November 10th, 2002, 3:45 pm
Location: montreal

Post by priior »

i think we're all agreeing and pretty much saying the same thing.. but certain people are being slightly aggressive :)

whether we like it or not... In order for web standards to BE standards... (1) people have to upgrade (how good are thr w3c standards if everyone is still using Netscape4?), (2) designers have to be vigilant (how good are the w3c standards if designers are worrying about Netscape4 users?).

And as Stefan mentioned, those 2 points are interrelated...

My original point was.. this isnt a simple issue. If it was, then we'd see a shift towards web standards by every big company out there, right away... Yet, the way things are today.. even microsoft's webpage isnt w3c compliant... (neither is amazon.com)
User avatar
Orbite
Posts: 3757
Joined: November 4th, 2002, 8:23 pm
Contact:

Post by Orbite »

priior wrote:how good are the w3c standards if designers are worrying about Netscape4 users?


What amazes me is how much designers are still worrying about N4.xx. Yes in 1996, N4.xx ruled the Web with about 80% of market shares. But in 2002, the last time I checked global browser usage statistics, N4.xx was down to 4% and falling...

Users have switched to more recent browsers but designers still live in the past...

Browsers used by 7970 hosts in 70 countries - latest stats
Current browser statistics
TMOLI42
Posts: 2
Joined: December 9th, 2002, 11:15 pm
Location: Southern California
Contact:

Post by TMOLI42 »

At work more than half of the users of our intranet sites use NS4. The biggest cause of this is because the IT department preloads all computers with it, including my shiny new Win2k comp I recieved last week. I write my code to be standards compliant and still usable on NS4, which under other circumstances would be a waste of time. This problem is one of the reasons we are possibly looking at a Java/XML based interface in the future.
User avatar
colfer
Posts: 643
Joined: December 4th, 2002, 9:34 am
Location: Bear

Post by colfer »

NS4 is good for testing whether you left off a </table> tag!
User avatar
Stefan
Posts: 2051
Joined: November 5th, 2002, 2:46 am

Post by Stefan »

colfer wrote:NS4 is good for testing whether you left off a </table> tag!


http://validator.w3.org is even better :)
User avatar
xfranky
Posts: 2059
Joined: December 5th, 2002, 11:10 am
Location: Italy
Contact:

Post by xfranky »

Stefan wrote:
colfer wrote:NS4 is good for testing whether you left off a </table> tag!


http://validator.w3.org is even better :)


Agree :mrgreen:
..::XF::..
Post Reply