N-day

By anders pearson 21 Feb 2001

in support of the WaSP’s browser upgrade campaign, i have redesigned the site to make use of the standards that web developers have been fighting to get browser makers to support for the last six years. that support arrived in the form of mozilla and IE5 yet we’re stuck using the same workarounds and hacks to make things work for the old, non-standards compliant browsers because some people are still using them.

aside from a basic table structure to provide the columnar layout, all formatting and presentation on this site is now done through CSS. because netscape 4 and other older browsers have such broken CSS engines, they now get the “retro” version.

some explanation for non webdesigners: different web browsers have, historically, rendered html differently. a page that looked right in netscape might not be at all legible in Internet Explorer and vice versa. this was partly because of bugs in both browsers, but more often was because the browser makers purposefully made it that way, the idea being that webdesigners had to more or less choose one or the other to support and if they could get designers to write their pages to work for one browser only, they would be able to own the market. since neither managed to completely dominate, the end result was that designers couldn’t afford to support just one and had to spend hours and hours figuring out complex workarounds to get their pages to work in both browsers. i can say from experience that webdesigners usually end up spending about 75% of their time in the frustrating cycle of getting things to work in browser A, seeing that it’s broken in browser B, fixing it for browser B, seeing that it’s now broken in A, etc, etc. it’s really sad that so many creative people had to spend so much time doing that kind of tedious work instead of creating innovative, beautiful sites just because of a few companies’ greed. technologically, the web was set back years.

the previous incarnation of this site contained countless hacks to make it look right in netscape 4. the result was bloated code that took longer to download and render and was a nightmare to modify.

no more.

i know that a few of you are still using netscape 4.x (a 4 year old browser; a lifetime on the internet). consider this a gentle urging to upgrade. i recommend IE5 if you’re on a Mac and Mozilla (NOT netscape 6, which just takes an old version of the mozilla engine and piles on hundreds of AOL ads) or Opera otherwise. i also realize that due to old systems, slow connections or things just being out of your control, some of you probably don’t have the choice to upgrade. well, now you get a lighter, faster loading version of the site that is less likely to overwhelm your connection or your poor computer and is less likely to crash your browser. meanwhile, the rest of us can get on with our lives.

i would also like to point out that while some members of the WaSP advocate automatically redirecting non-compliant browsers off your site to their upgrade page, i have to strongly disagree with that tactic. this site will remain accessible to any and every browser with no exceptions; it just won’t look quite as shiny unless your browser is standards compliant.