[CLUE-Talk] JSP and browsers?

[Matt Gushee]

On Wed, Jul 31, 2002 at 10:34:51PM -0600, Crawford Rainwater wrote:
> An odd occurance happened today.  A vendor of
> ours referred us to their web site for a potential
> invoice from a recent expo (Boulder Chamber Of
> Commerce one), and I noticed on the URL that the
> site was JSP (I presume Java Server Pages?), yet
> the site was only oriented for M$ Internet Explorer
> 5.0 (noted on the bottom of the page)?!?  

I wouldn't say that's particularly odd, just moronic. JSP, after all, is
a server side technology that you can use to output any combination of
HTML, JavaScript, and CSS you want. And browser compatibility depends on
what the browser receives, regardless of how it was produced. So
apparently whoever created those JSP pages coded them in such a way that
their output would work best (or perhaps work only) in Internet Exploder.

By the way, did your experience confirm that the site would only work
with IE? I find that often those "IE-only" statements are not literally
true--they seem to be more along the lines of "we only care about IE, so
don't bug us about any problems you may have when using Netscape."

> Am I missing something about Java these days or...?
> Open to comments from the programming and web crowds
> out there on the list.  Is this one of the "fine points"
> of the .NET plan?

I don't think this has anything to do with .NET. .NET, as I understand
it (and I don't think anybody fully understands it, because it's another
one of Microsoft's amoeba-like marketing concepts) is not intended so
much for developing human-readable web sites as for Web Services (web-
based distributed application components). And since it appears that
one of the reasons Microsoft created .NET was to destroy Java, most of 
the Java community, and certainly the major Java vendors, are trying to 
avoid supporting it.

> Just a potential oversight for those
> who thing M$ rules the web realm?  

Well, IE does have something like a 90% market share, and arguably
delivers a much better user experience than Netscape. There are times
when I wish there were a Linux version of it.

-- 
Matt Gushee
Englewood, Colorado, USA
mgushee at havenrock.com
http://www.havenrock.com/