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Why do people design for IE first? I don't get it!
I view the page in IE, but I sure don't use it as the corner stone of any development.
I stopped downloading NN at about version 4.x because making layers work similarly in IE and NN just became too much work.
And this is the problem. People who design around IE, generally got sick of NN4. But I have seen only a few sites that do not work in NN7. In fact, there are only two that come to mind - an online bank and a bad webdesigner. The first claims something about security and the second redirected you to a download Internet Explorer link with a rude message. I found out the companies with high PR that linked to the second and they soon dropped their links - that site plummeted a year or two back. But both sites that don't work, both have a user-agent redirect - it's not that the site would not work but that the designer could not be bothered to check.
In fact, I have seem some designer design around IE for good reason. The only reason I have ever seen that is a good reason is they were designing for an Intranet where they guarantee 100% IE users!
My personal preference in Netscape7 to test in, but I know that really I should use Opera. All the fiddly bits and tweaks (particularly CSS) that you used to have to do to NN4 have long gone.
Your site should be designed around the W3C. Never forget that IE can drop tags in the next release or it could be less forgiving of errors without warning. How much work would you have to do if this became the case, or if another browser began to get a good market share (let's say Opera got 25%)? Wouldn't it be better that your site worked in all browsers to start with?
I could imagine the national news if a petrol/gas company released a new petrol and were discontinuing the old one for one that was easier to make. But...this new petrol/gas does not work in Honda cars. Just imagine - yet Honda have a small percentage of the market share - but there would be some very angry people out there. Why should someone be forced to change theor brand of car? Why should someone be forced to change their browser? And does their speech recognition program, screen reader or braille reader work well with IE or are we actually expecting them to buy new software/hardware to view the site? There are legal obligations here for business sites. A company may be sued for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions if a disabled person cannot easily view your site, if you have designed this site for that company, who do you think the company will sue? As stated earlier, this has already happened in Australia.
Every site that asks me to use internet explorer alway annoys me - why should I? Do they want my business? And those with redirects to internet explorer download pages or that do not allow you to view the site are simply unforgivable.
I could imagine the national news if a petrol/gas company released a new petrol and were discontinuing the old one for one that was easier to make. But...this new petrol/gas does not work in Honda cars. Just imagine - yet Honda have a small percentage of the market share - but there would be some very angry people out there. Why should someone be forced to change theor brand of car? Why should someone be forced to change their browser? And does their speech recognition program, screen reader or braille reader work well with IE or are we actually expecting them to buy new software/hardware to view the site?
I think a better analogy is, suppose i wasn't in the petrol/gas business to begin with ... but i found out there is an easily produced form of petrol that will work in 95% of the cars out there. I could either stay out of the business all together because i don't have the time/money/desire to make petrol that will work in 100% of the cars on the market or i can whip up the more easily produced petrol and attract 95% of the market. 95% is better than 0%.
It's no different than a programmer programming only for the Microsoft OS (95% of the market) and excluding the MAC OS (5% of the market).
There are legal obligations here for business sites. A company may be sued for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions if a disabled person cannot easily view your site, if you have designed this site for that company, who do you think the company will sue? As stated earlier, this has already happened in Australia.
This kind of lawsuit would never hold water in the long run. It is impossible to write a site or make your business 100% equally accessible by every conceivable handicap.
I think a better analogy is, suppose i wasn't in the petrol/gas business to begin with ... but i found out there is an easily produced form of petrol that will work in 95% of the cars out there. I could either stay out of the business all together because i don't have the time/money/desire to make petrol that will work in 100% of the cars on the market or i can whip up the more easily produced petrol and attract 95% of the market. 95% is better than 0%.
And just think of how much more business you would do by selling gas that the other 5% can use, especially when there are other places that do not sell it. I bet that 5% would increase, most likely making it profitable to spend the little extra time/money for it.
Jennifer
And just think of how much more business you would do by selling gas that the other 5% can use, especially when there are other places that do not sell it. I bet that 5% would increase, most likely making it profitable to spend the little extra time/money for it.
But if not for the easily acquired 95% i wouldn't be in the business at all. Like i said in my earlier post, for some, 95% is better than 0%.
Back to my earlier point, it's no different than MAC versus PC ... Most PC programmers ignore the MAC OS. It's not worth the extra time/money because of the low market share of the MAC. If i wanted to get into programming i would immediately jump into the PC market where i'd have instant access to 95% of the computers, i wouldn't put my programming career on hold until such time i could write my programs for both platforms.
Back to my earlier point, it's no different than MAC versus PC ... Most PC programmers ignore the MAC OS. It's not worth the extra time/money because of the low market share of the MAC. If i wanted to get into programming i would immediately jump into the PC market where i'd have instant access to 95% of the computers, i wouldn't put my programming career on hold until such time i could write my programs for both platforms.
de factoadv. In reality or fact; actually.
adj. Actual
People who worry about IE only see the world in black and white. To them, all the stats point towards one thing -- Internet Explorer on Windows. Since their pages by default become optimized for the crappiest browser on earth, many non-IE users simply cannot view the pages. Thus, the stats become extremely skewed in IE's favor. You end up getting something like 98% IE/Win users... and 2% others. Many of these "other" users visit your page, but click the back button. What does this tell you? That 98% of your visitors are using IE/Win? No! It tells you nothing more than that 98% of the page views are IE/Win users. The actual amount of users that are turned away by your malformed page may very well be fairly high, 25% or more.
How do W3C Standards evangelists see the world? Well, we know there are many colors and flavors out there. We know that though it may seem like IE is the almighty browser, reality is different. Yes, IE/Win still is the dominant browser, but it doesn't have 95-98% of the market. Why do I say that? Simply because standards compliant pages are the only pages flexible enough to accomodate for a wide variety of users. Those developing the pages are usually more aware of browser flaws, and can avoid them. I have never ever worked on a site with more than 85% IE users, and that's counting IE/Mac as well.
The world is still changing... IE is slowly losing users, not gaining. Many schools and companies have switched from IE to Mozilla or Opera for security reasons. Everyone here at the office is using Opera. My wife is using Opera. Why? Because I ask her to? No, because she likes it better!
People just need to become more aware of the alternatives. After all, I can't think of any fully developed browser that is worse than IE/Win. I can do nothing bu second TGecho's statement -- IE is what hinders the market and progress. W3C's standards are lightyears ahead of IE's capabilities. That is a fact.
But if not for the easily acquired 95% i wouldn't be in the business at all. Like i said in my earlier post, for some, 95% is better than 0%.
True, that 95% is very important and you should worry about them the most. BUT, you make it sound like if you make your site work on all browsers (which does not take much longer [possibly an even shorter amount of time] unless you write VERY sloppy code), you'll have no visitors! That certainly doesn't make sense, does it? :)
Jennifer
But questions to ask include:
And good points, victor ;)
Can I just ask, which browser would you use to 'design your site in' if IE dropped to 50% and other browsers totalled 50%?
Or, would you design around the W3C standards?
adj : existing in fact whether with lawful authority or not; "de facto segregation is as real as segration imposed by law"; "a de facto state of war" [syn: actual, factual] [ant: de jure] adv : in reality or fact; "the result was, de facto, a one-party system"
(let's say Opera got 25%)
People who design around IE, generally got sick of NN4. But I have seen only a few sites that do not work in NN7.
On the subject of programming for Macs, it's a completely different subject, but not *entirely* unrelated...
(Please forget games from this one, the sort of people that use Macs generally aren't interested in playing games anyway, and I'm no exception).
You make a piece of commercial software for both Windows and Macintosh. Something like a word processor, graphics program or whatever. The marketshare stats are estimated to be about 96% Windows, 3% Macintosh and 1% everything else (primarily Linux). By making a Mac version of your software, will you only get 3% more sales that you would if you only had a PC version? No. More like 20%. Why? Not only are Mac users less likely to be using illegal/warez software, they have less options availible to them.
For example, lets look at the four major graphics programs:
Adobe Photoshop, Jasc Paint Shop Pro, Corel Draw and Macromedia Fireworks MX.
Jasc Paint Shop Pro and Corel Draw will only run under Windows, so Mac users will have to choose between Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Fireworks MX. Because Windows users can choose between all four, the two Mac-compatible graphic suites will have more than the statistical percentage (3%) of Mac users.
So what does this have to do with IE-only vs. W3C standards? Everything. If your site displays and works perfectly in Netscape (as mine does), you will get more than the statistical percentage of Netscape users. I get about 15%, although I would've expected that to be much lower when I consider the subject area of my site.
But just what is the IE standard? In large part it is a large portion of the standards established by the W3C with various bugs and proprietary elements thrown in along combined a rendering engine that is very forgiving of erroneous markup.
End the end, those who advocate for the IE-only position are really advocating for erroneous markup and that being allowed to create erroneous markup is some sort of "freedom" or "innovation".
The fact that he did and that it was phenomenally successful suggests that when everyone uses and understands words the same way, everyone benefits.
So, why is it so controversial to suggest that if all browsers used and understood code in the same way (ie. according to the W3C spec), everyone would similarly benefit?
We shouldn't dismiss the improvements that have already been made - the situation is vastly improved since 1999/2000 when you practically had to write different pages for NN and IE. In late 2003, if you write standards compliant code you can be pretty much assured that it will work in Firebird, it will work in IE and it will work in Opera. Guess what? It will probably work in Lynx, Konqueror and Safari as well. And any other browsing device.
If all browsers were equally strict at interpreting W3C standards then you could test a new page in any browser you liked and once it worked you wouldn't have to worry about the others.
The fact is that IE lets you write faulty code.
But given that standards-compliant code works everywhere what benefit is there in writing faulty code?
To add to the order that was posted before about the browser's "forgivingness" of errors... lets expand that to rendering engines. Starting with the most forgiving:
MSHTML -> Tasman -> KHTML -> Gecko -> Opera
However, in terms of Microsoft proprietary code, it's more like this:
MSHTML -> Tasman -> KHTML -> Opera -> Gecko
In case some people don't know... MSHTML is the rendering engine used in IE for Windows. Tasman is used in IE for Mac, Gecko is used in Netscape, Mozilla etc., Opera is used in um... Opera, and KHTML is used in Konqueror, Safari etc.
Opera seems to have deliberatly followed IE's lead in a few cases (:() but that's usually only triggered in quirks mode, which I avoid like the plague (see "doctype switch").
IE is the defacto standard, but that does not make it the best browser in the world. What you can say about it is it works and most people use it. Why? Because that's what comes on their computers. That's the only reason IE is the standard for browsing (and anyone who believes that W3C sets the standards is seriously detached from reality).
Personally, I like coding to standards, but I don't spend a lot of time worrying about it. I generally have way to much to do in life to worry about small, silly things like this. My concern is does the application meet the business requirements? How much man- (or woman-) power was required to create this code and how much will be needed to maintain it in the future? Business questions like that. Standards that help create good applications which meet business requirements are adopted in my organization and standards that do not are discarded.
One thing that I object to is the incredibly fast pace of change. The "standard of the week" (exagerating) mindset sure does make it difficult to keep thousands of desktops up-to-date and hundreds of applications up-to-standard. It's already bad enough that hardware obsoletes faster than catalogs can be printed, operating systems need to be replaced every year or so and applications like SAP require TENS OF THOUSANDS of patches every year. Not a hundred or two like Windows, but thousands and thousands.
One fact that I do like about IE is that change has slowed down. The browser has remained constant for several years now, and that has made my job much easier. One less thing to worry about in our corporate environment. One less change requiring time to adopt.
Richard
and how much will be needed to maintain it in the future?
My protest to what's being said here by the "standards affectionadoes" is the statement that IE is a lousy browser and that everyone who codes for IE is an idiot, a bum and probably a deviant.
Can you give me the post numbers in this thread where those things have been said? I can't find any such statements (though they may have been deleted by the mods, of course)
One thing that I object to is the incredibly fast pace of change.
One fact that I do like about IE is that change has slowed down.
"Microsoft's commitment to open standards for the Internet is real and deep," said Brad Silverberg, senior vice president of the applications and internet client group at Microsoft. "This issue is so critical to the viability of the Web that we've made an explicit pledge to support all W3C standards for HTML. This is a pledge that we believe all Internet technology vendors need to take. Without this commitment from our industry, interoperability across products from different vendors will continue to be a customer nightmare."http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/1997/Mar97/dhtmlpr.asp
Apparently someone important at MS thinks (or thought, the quote is a bit dated) that independant standards are important. Granted, he didn't say CSS (the CSS2 spec had already been released).
IE is a lousy browser and that everyone who codes for IE is an idiot, a bum and probably a deviantIE is a lousy browser when compared to the alternatives. Yeah, "it works," but that doesn't make it good.
Just because the end application is tolerant of errors in the format of the data that is sent to it, this does not give you the right to be lax in the format of the data that you send to it.
(paraphrased as I didn't have time to find the exact wording) In other words, just because IE can render duff HTML this does not give you the right to write pages of duff HTML on your site.
In the Tables vs CSS thread I didn't see accessibility mentioned once. Seems incongruous to me. I view accessibility as much more important than cross-browser compatiblity and I've stumbled across more than one site proudly proclaiming "best viewed in ANY browser" yet I never see, "this site accessible to anyone". :)
