But 'Any Browser' includes an outdated piece of SHIT!

[thessalian]

So I posted the whole Affils thing to the Daria community, and among the comments was "But make it compatible to all browsers. Why lose customers to poor design?", they wrote. Poor design?!? My entire arse. Not only is it a horribly impolite way of putting it that suggests that no effort whatsoever was made to make it universally compatible (and thanks to floopyboo for pointing out that we have been trying), but to call the entire site 'poorly designed' just because it won't run quite right on an outdated browser that no one with an ounce of computer savvy will be using anyway is just ... nuts. Why not try blaming the browser, for fuck's sake? It's the one that won't accept a minimum height definition.

I am getting incensed on behalf of dodgyhoodoo here. After all, I cannot take any credit for the hard work that went into designing the site in the first place. But I can damn well still get offended when someone turns around and blames a decent piece of CSS for the failings of a fossilised browser. Particularly since I insisted that dodgyhoodoo leave the damn thing alone after hours of poking around and shouting "bastard bastard bastard" at the computer. After all, there are some stresses that no one needs.

I quite understand that it's nice to cater to the technologically challenged. I understand the whole "the customer is always right" mentality. But the sheer arrogance of that post just ... *snarl*. And you can campaign until the cows come home but the fact remains that as browsers get better and code gets better and the world moves on, some browsers are going to be made obsolete. You can't stop that by shoving your Any Browser campaign into the face of any web designer you can get your hands on.

Anger. It's better than a triple espresso for waking you up in the morning.

Comments

[floopyboo.livejournal.com]

TWO "o"s. Two!

it's flOOpy, not floPPy....

twice in one day..... *twitch*

[thessalian.livejournal.com]

Sorry. Easy typo to make. All fixed. Won't happen again.

See what I mean about the anger wake-up call, though? :)

[floopyboo.livejournal.com]

Talk to deref about it if you were offended by what he said. He's a nice guy & he does the web design thing for a living - for the government, poor lad.

I can honestly say that I don't think he meant it in an offensive manner. I know him well enough to say that.

[thessalian.livejournal.com]

I'm sure he didn't mean it in an offensive way. That's why I'm not talking to Deref about it. I'm not going to have a go at him for something like that, because I know he didn't mean to be offensive; I'm just annoyed generally, so why hammer on him? Besides, he couldn't have known how hard dodgyhoodoo tried to make it work, so why blame Deref for not being clairvoyant?

I've learned far too much about people making too big a deal about people phrasing things in ways other people don't like to even start in on something that innocent, anyway.

[floopyboo.livejournal.com]

okay then.

must go work on art & whore out my selling journal (http://www.livejournal.com/users/robori/). :D

[ethangilchrist.livejournal.com]

Can you say "asinine"? I knew you could.

[thessalian.livejournal.com]

...*blink* Context, por favor?

[ethangilchrist.livejournal.com]

Sorry. Just asinine not to realize that in this day and age it's impossible to achieve "universality" with anything but the most basic of websites. For feck's sake what about making it "universally" compatible with text browsers? lol Like those have seen use since 1980.

[thessalian.livejournal.com]

Quite right. The entire technological industry moves far too fast to get that kind of thing ... at least when part of the world doesn't make the effort to upgrade. It's one thing when you have the digital TV fascism they're having over here (as in, they're going to completely stop broadcasting analog in a few years and woe betide anyone who doesn't pay through the nose for a digibox), but Netscape, Microsoft and Mozilla offer their most recent products in free download from what I can tell, so what excuse is there for still running IE5? Or, as in the case of my office system, Safari 1.2.4? Because that breaks the Affils site too (not that you can't read it; just the look's gone wonky).

[dodgyhoodoo.livejournal.com]

Given that IE6 works on everything from Win98 (original, not even 98SE) onwards, there's no bloody reason at all. And as someone elsewhere has said on the subject, Opera users should know better than to keep hold of the old crap.

Safari's another issue - shame on Apple for only getting decent CSS support in 1.3.

Feh. Back to the drawing board.