Re: OT: Browser troubles and overdesigned web pages (was Re: Where does everyone live?)

Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> Hallo!
>
> taliesin the storyteller wrote:
>><rant>
>>Ah, but you see, there are two standards. One de jure, which is defined
>>to painstaking detail by w3c.org, the other de facto, defined by however
>>Internet Explorer behaves this week. The former changes slowly, the
>>latter each time Microsoft releases a new patch. The former can be
>>learnt by reading the w3c's standards, the latter by reading the w3c's
>>standards, implementing them and then see what does and doesn't work.
>>Simple, really.
>
>
> Well put.
Maybe - it is all very well ranting. So what do we do when w3c's
standards don't work? I have a simple bit of coding which appears to
work in most browsers - but guess which one ignores it?

Unfortunately 'Jo Public' is most likely to have some version of IE
running in some version of Windows. If I want my quite simple pages to
be seen more or less the way I would like by people likely to view the
page then Microsoft seem to be playing the tune & one gets skeptical
about w3c and standards.

Yes, I *know* there are better browsers than IE and other OSs than
Windows - but the plain fact is that the ordinary 'person in the street'
is most likely to be using MS products, whether we like it or not.

>
>>However, the real problem is not Microsoft. The real problem is the
>>attitude is "What I the designer see is what everybody ought to see."
>>Why is this so hilariously wrong? Simple: You can never know in advance
>>whether the content you are prettifying will be read by another
>>designer, a real human, a program, a blind person, or a dog, on a tv, a
>>cellphone, a monitor,
Yes - I am well aware of all this. But if I am designing a page for a
population which I know is human and that the vast majority of them are
going to be reading it on a computer monitor, then it does not seem
unreasonable to me to expect straightforward stuff to have basically
similar appearance.

>>by lights blinking morse code or in some fashion
>>not invented yet. The most important of these is beeing readable for
>>programs,
Obviously!

[snip]
>
> Yes.  Many web pages are ridiculously overdesigned.
Yes, yes - I am not concerned with those.

> Those web designers use JavaScript,
> style sheets, Flash and hundreds of tricks not because it makes
> sense,
I've never used Flash - and I use style sheets & Javascript only when it
makes sense to do so.

>but merely because they want to show that they can do all
> that.  Bummer.  Load a page?  <a href="page.html"> is waaaay to
> ordinary for those folks, they invoke a javascript for that
> purpose.
Rather stupid of them, I think. If something works, why fix it?

>
>>What to do? Simplify.
I do try to keep things as simple as possible.

>>It's not the wrapping, it's the message. Use
>>Occam's razor. Cut until there's nothing left that can be cut. Ignore
>>the desire for pixel perfection. The lovely red won't be red and lovely
>>for the large amount of color-blind people out there anyway.
>></rant>
Er, sort of like having red text on a black background  ;)

Yes, I am well aware of color-blind problems - I was giving lectures on
'Human-Computer Interface' for several years before I retired.

[snip]
>
> Yes.  Test your page in every browser you can get your hands on,
I try to.

Some may remember I tried to tidy up the left navigation bar on my
Briefscript pages by having slide-out menus. But while they worked on
some browsers (even some variants of IE), some treated them oddly and
some just gave up. There doesn't seem to be general consistency in the
way browsers interpret Javascript, which is one reason I do not use it
unless I can see no alternative.

--
Ray
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