On Tue, 4 Nov 2003, Shoshannah Forbes wrote:
>
> On Monday, Nov 3, 2003, at 22:35 Asia/Jerusalem, Shlomi Fish wrote:
>
> >> I regret being so blunt but, no, we are not going to change our
> >> website in
> >> the near future. We have developed an amazing website,
> >
> > "amazing"? By this do you mean full of non-portable bells and whistles,
> > and other idiosyncracies? Sorry, but that's not an amazing web-site
> > according to my book.
> > A good web-site is either simple and clean, or includes
> > standard-compliant, portable embelishments. (which are usually not
> > necessary).
>
>
> Actually, a site doesn't have to be clean, and can have all the bells
> and whistles you want and still work with mozilla. Hell, you can even
> make a site which is full of bells and whistles and is still
> accessible, if you know what you are dong. IMO, telling web-masters
> that their site must be simple in order to work with mozilla is
> shooting ourselves in the foot- you will get the same response that you
> got here "then why bother?". They think that Mozilla is limited and
> won't even try, although in fact mozilla has a few tricks up it's
> sleeves that IE can't handle to save it's life.
>
My point was two-fold:
1. If you want to make a web-site with a lot of bells and whistles, do it
right, by following standards.
2. Else, you can make it clean and standards compliant.
Now option #1 will cost you a lot of time, effort and money to maintain,
and was shown to actually reject surfers. Option #2 OTOH requires
relatively little maintenance and web-surfers like it. I always go with
option #2, unless there is a specific reason why I need to embellish my
site. And even then, it is isolated and not necessary for the site to be
usable.
What he claimed was that they had an amazing site and that it costed them
a lot of money to maintain. Now their site has lots of bells and whistles
and they don't make sure it is standards-compliant. So if their site was
kept clean and simple (mostly static HTML, no JavaScript, no Flash, etc.)
it would be accessible by all browsers while still being easy to maintain.
That was my point in this context.
Sites that contain a lot of embellishments are hard and costy to maintain.
This is why I dislike them, and it was shown that more surfers are
attracted to sites without them, too.
> IMO, a better approach should be:
>
> * the W3C wrote web standards. sites built to standards work in all
> browsers (present and *future*) with minimal adjustments.
Not necessarily. I recently discovered that MSIE 6.0 (normal and SP1) does
not support the child selector (html > body). It has many other
incompatibility bugs. I read somewhere that MSIE is the new NN4. But it is
still possible to build standards compliant sites that will look and
function well on all browsers. It's just that you have to test it
everywhere.
> * not building the site for standards, and instead building it to a
> specific browser only, limits your teachability and market share.
> * many of those people you are missing on just happen to have
> demographics that advertisers love... (educated, high income, people
> who will try things (=gadgets) before everyone else).
>
Right.
But I still think that using unnecessary embellishments for a site is
considered harmful.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
>
>
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>
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----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Home Page: http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
Writing a BitKeeper replacement is probably easier at this point than getting
its license changed.
Matt Mackall on OFTC.net #offtopic.
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