[CLUE-Tech] Re: Browser Protest Day

[David Snyder]

jbrockmeier at earthlink.net wrote:

>On Sun, 28 Apr 2002, David Snyder wrote:
>
>Why lump proprietary tags w/JavaScript? Because JavaScript started
>as a proprietary technology and was one of the major catalysts in
>propigating pages that work in only one browser. (And, yes, I know
>Netscape was the one that started this...) It's still a big
>problem even though there are now standards.
>

Back when it was conceived NS was really the only browser worth worrying 
about.  MS was the first one who decided to compete on this one with 
JScript.  Still, yes, it started out proprietary but doesn't a lot of 
things start that way?  It wasn't until IE 3 that NS had any kind of a 
serious challenge but that still dates back before dynamic sites were 
common.  

Proprietary elements didn't start really getting bad until the 4.x 
browsers - Netscape took its route and submitted it to the W3C and MS 
took theirs and submitted that to the W3C.  The W3C liked MS's plan 
better and adopted a DOM that matched theirs pretty closely.   On top of 
that, the Netscape engine had never been rewritten since 2.0, more and 
more crap was "bolted" onto the code - resulting in spaghetti code that 
was difficult to maintain and had 1000's of quirks and bugs.

The web is a medium for data and content delivery that is still evolving 
faster than any other in the industry.  Unfortunately this means that 
technology is released before there are standards, other times standards 
are released before the technology can truly embrace them (SVG).

>Also, the evils of JavaScript have been well documented in previous
>threads. Yes, there are some good things that can be done
>in JavaScript assuming that:
>
>1. The script is written so that it runs correctly in all browsers.
>2. The script is not being used to take away user control of the
>browser.
>3. The script is actually necessary to achieve something that couldn't
>have been done with a w3c standard supported in ALL browsers or 
>done on the server-side with CGI, PHP, Perl, Python... etc. 
>  
>

Agreed, but JavaScript can be very useful do some things on the client 
such as showing/hiding data, sorting, et al - stuff the server was only 
capable of doing.  This saves server load, bandwidth, and time.  This is 
why DOM compliance is so important!  I don't blame JavaScript, I blame 
the browser companies for improper implementation.

JavaScript can do MANY things server side scripting cannot do.

>More often than not, however, this isn't the case. We have JavaScript
>to thank for pop-unders/pop-ups, forced browser resizing and a host
>of other evils. If you want to be able to use Yahoo! Mail or a bunch
>of other services on the Web, you have to keep JavaScript turned on,
>meaning that you have to suffer all the other crap that you don't
>want.   
>  
>

That's like blaming CD-R drives for software piracy...  yes, with power 
comes the dark sides, bad uses of it.  Even BugZilla, a great 
open-source tool, uses popups, even though it doesn't abuse it like 
advertizers do.  I for one hate it when a technology like JavaScript is 
abused, but that doesn't make the technology itself bad.  It just means 
I'll never go back to their website or add the offending advertizer to 
my magic hosts file.

Consider this, browsers are starting to have popup killing functionality 
built in... how long before you think the obnoxious advertizers start 
abandoning that tactic?  It will happen.  They'll have to come up with 
some other idea that hopefully doesn't annoy people too much.  I expect 
interstitial ads to be the next big thing - click a story, see 
commercial, then get story.  Business drives the Internet and short of 
paying for all your content, ads will be always part of the web.

>Even if the latest version of Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, 
>Opera and Konqueror all render pages exactly the same as of tomorrow 
>there are a lot of people using older computers in school labs and 
>at home where they can't necessarily run the latest versions of 
>the browsers. If your company wants to do business with anyone 
>who's blind or visually impaired, you have to support text-mode 
>browsers. There are a lot of people out there who don't want to
>upgrade their OS/browser every six months to be able to do a 
>little banking online. That's not an unreasonable attitude. 
> 
>

On this I agree.  For a business site, advanced JavaScript and Flash are 
best reserved for ENHANCING, not core functionality.  And I get (very) 
annoyed when some companies, Verizon for example, doesn't code their 
site in such a way that I can use my Mozilla to pay my bill, I have to 
use BillyBrowser (IE)...  

Admittedly my own site uses advanced DOM Scripting very heavy - but I've 
also created an alternate version for JavaScript/DOM impaired browsers 
because I don't wish to exclude people.  But as a web developer I love 
having a JavaScript DOM compliant browser because it lets me do that 
much more on the front end to enhance the efficiency and useability of 
the website.  Modern browsers are easier to code for.  The biggest 
problem is that the earlier browers had it so wrong in terms of handling 
even simple HTML - if I had it in my power I would make all non W3C 
compliant browsers vanish from this earth because cost time and money to 
placate all their bugs.

How much effort are you willing to invest to get around a quirky driver 
that is obsolete?  At what point do you say "I'm sorry, but you need to 
use X driver because it contains several bug fixes".  Browsers are much 
the same to a web developer as a bad driver.  

I can't really comment on doing a web application UI for someone 
visually impaired - I've personally never had to do that.  Have you?

Regards,

David