Jeffrey Zeldman: "99.9% of Websites Are Obsolete"

Yet another call for standards. Book excerpt.

[luma]

You can read an excerpt from Forward Compatibility: Designing & Building With Standards [digital-web.com] by Jeffrey Zeldman, to be published by New Riders in early 2003.

[As] this book will show, standards make it possible to design for all browsers and devices as easily and quickly as for just one. Between the spiraling cost of backward compatible versioning and the futile short-sightedness of building for a single browser, web standards provide the only approach to development that makes a lick of sense.

[andreasfriedrich]

I donīt think that there is anybody out there who will disagree. The problem are the old browsers still being used, that do not support the standards to a level neccessary to build state of the art websites.

[Filipe]

The problem are the old browsers still being used

The problem is also that newer browsers aren't supporting the existing standards.

[luma]

Actually the article also talks about broken HTML that shouldn't work in any browser and that's easy to fix. For example, on a newly redesigned page of a big player (xipolis.net) you can find the wrong img attribute "heigth" instead of "height" all over the place (38 times on one page). That means they probably don't use any source highlighting while coding and don't validate their code. A strict parser would stop displaying the page as soon as it encounters an unknown attribute. Right now, the only problem might be a slower loading time cause the browser has to wait until the image is loaded to decide how to render the page. Stupid typos like the above can easily be caught by a validator. Validating is a MUST.

[gsx]

So, everybody should upgrade to newer browsers? What happens (and I know several people in this situation) if they cannot upgrade to IE 6, because that does not work under Windows 95? They cannot upgrade to Windows 98 because their processor is too slow or they do not have enough memory. So in order to view YOUR website, they have to basically spend a lot of money upgrading, when 99% of the time their computer is perfect for the typing and spreadsheets that they create.

It is short-sightedness on a webmasters part to not support older browsers. Any new standards that YOU CHOOSE to adopt, should work on older browsers that do not support the newer standard, without looking too bad. For example, if you use stylesheets to create different coloured links in your document, it is a new standard that is not supported in older browsers, but because they will simply ignore it, it is safe to use that standard.

[madcat]

So, everybody should upgrade to newer browsers?

It is short-sightedness on a webmasters part to not support older browsers.

I don't think that's the point, atleast from the books I've been reading. People with older browsers probably aren't looking for an ungodly graphics display or any visual enlightment. They most likely want the information, which they get anyway be being in compliance (which is not a 100% cure all by any means). This way your information isn't locked out and your audience gets bigger. I think it's forward thinking.

[copongcopong]

Please remember that CSS and the web standards are very very flexible and you may generate or create a page that would still validate and would appear good in all browser. All we need to do is to create a small extra effort in adjusting our coding habits.

I know most of our problem is NN4.X, ... IMHO, the only best thing for NN4.x is for our site to be functional in this browser and it does not need look the same with new browser.

peace. :)