On 12/07/2016 02:52 AM, Richard Hector wrote:
On 07/12/16 14:42, Jape Person wrote:
I'll never forget hearing someone trying to prop an early version of
Netscape up by saying that it was a good browser *because* it failed on
badly written pages.
It shouldn't crash, of course, but I think the web would be a much nicer
place if browsers just refused to render broken pages, rather than
potentially displaying them in a misleading way.
I don't disagree. But it kind of depends on the "message". I have more
sympathy for a "cause" site that's having issues because the unpaid,
unschooled Web designer just screwed up a table than I have for a
commercial site that's causing a browser seizure because the designer
tried to put 240 ads on one page.
If the message is important, the browser needs to present it to the user.
But commercial Web sites these days are their own worst enemy. I can't
tell you how many sites I've blacklisted because they exasperated me
enough to cause my (figurative) trigger finger to start itching.
My favorite is the site that's trying to sell me something, but which
makes the process so arduous because of all of the popups I have to
dismiss or illogical link loops that I have to traverse that I finally
just close the browser and buy from someone else. That's happened to me
twice lately. I'm looking at you Dell and HP. (And these two are far
from the worst offenders.)
If browsers were to be designed to refuse to display junky pages, it
would also be nice if they could somehow send data about that failure to
the site owner -- perhaps through judicious use of whois(?).
If browsers of that type launched a daily DDoS of sorts on the site
owners' mailboxes with complaints about their crappy sites, maybe a few
of them would fix their monstrosities. But I've written many sites
personally and have received only one or two replies in decades.
That's one of the reason I'm sad xhtml seems to have been at least
partly abandoned - the rules of xml say you should just give up if it
isn't valid. That would mean web devs would have to fix their mess.
Richard
I fear that browsers which refused to display the crapola would simply
not be used by the masses. Most people just don't care about (or are
oblivious to) the junkiness of our environment.
Every day I see people fiddling with "smartphones" instead of taking
care of business (or just staying alive on the road). If you ask those
people what they're doing, they'll tell you that they're taking care of
business. But what they're really doing is swiping repeatedly with their
fingers to try to get a badly designed, recalcitrant user interface to
launch their gee-gaw ap.
I spent well over thirty years threatening dismemberment to people who
tried to touch my visual interface. Now the single most "important"
gadget in the lives of most people is a device which requires the user
to smudge that interface. To this curmudgeon, someone who fiddles with
one of these gadgets while s/he's missing the ballgame looks like an idiot.
We've always been the same. Far too many of us are easily distracted by
irrelevant detritus. Sixty years ago practically every roadside in the
country was plastered with billboards. People were dying on occasion
because they were turning their heads to read the cute little serial
Burma Shave signs. (They were kind of like the road sign equivalent of a
popup.)
Lady Bird Johnson made it her mission in life to clean up our "user
interface". She did a nice job of it, but we've recently started letting
the sign-makers encroach on the environment again. Bless you Lady Bird.
I love you for trying.
We'll never learn.
;-)
