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Shoddy is building sites that HAVE to support IE(unless there is really a good reason to do so) - i've done this for years and the only outcome of this is that

by ergo14 16y ago

Shoddy is building sites that HAVE to support IE(unless there is really a good reason to do so) - i've done this for years and the only outcome of this is that we contribute to the fact that users don't change their habits and use browsers with shoddy approach to web standards. How can that be better in 21st century? If i'd really want i could support everything, but how long should we keep this up? 10 years? 20? It's like you would say that games should be built to work on 286pc's. Yet no one complains about that (unless it's poor optimization). You were so kind to suggest that my work is shoddy, I would say that shoddy work are websites that use hacks, or use non-semantical markup to archieve the goal of being able to work everywhere. Overall quality of code is sacrifaced for bacwards compatibility with browser that uses 9 year old rendering engine? People switch cars more often than browser versions, I fail to understand why we allow that to happen. We have good solutions to handle legacy app compatibility like chrome frame. Everyone has right to it's own opinion, but is it wrong to want users to use proper browser? Even my phone is capable of rendering charts. How can supporting everyone at all cost be better than pushing for standards? We are forced to standards everywhere in real life, why not in IT? This is a nice quote about what happens if you support broken by design browsers forever: "Facebook explains its decision by saying that many users have complained about unstable chat sessions, or ones that stop completely. In order to improve the way connections are established and messages are sent, however, the social networking giant must make changes that aren't supported by older browsers." I'm not saying that everything FB does is right, but I think that legacy support sacrificing experience of everyone else is not a solution to the problem, and this is a good example.

prodigal_erik 16y ago
Step one should be valid semantic HTML 4.01 (or equivalently, XHTML 1.0 served as text/html). That's still the current standard, and was carefully designed to be at least accessible on every browser we've ever had. Step two is adding CSS and JS to make the experience nicer for browsers on which it's switched on and known to work reliably. It seems to me that a lot of devs complaining about IE6 have a grudge because it reveals they routinely skip step one. They had every opportunity to build something that always works and always will and then make all the shiny variations they can handle, but they prefer the "this page optimized for arguing with customers" approach.

by ergo14 16y ago

prodigal_erik 16y ago

Step one should be valid semantic HTML 4.01 (or equivalently, XHTML 1.0 served as text/html). That's still the current standard, and was carefully designed to be at least accessible on every browser we've ever had. Step two is adding CSS and JS to make the experience nicer for browsers on which it's switched on and known to work reliably. It seems to me that a lot of devs complaining about IE6 have a grudge because it reveals they routinely skip step one. They had every opportunity to build something that always works and always will and then make all the shiny variations they can handle, but they prefer the "this page optimized for arguing with customers" approach.