[thelist] What is wrong with this site?

Tim Fountain tim at incutio.com
Tue Aug 19 06:43:57 CDT 2003


Monday, August 18, 2003, 11:55:06 PM, Jeff Howden wrote:
> Simon Willison wrote:,
>> Jeff Howden wrote:

>>> again, as evidenced by the original request, the developer doesn't
>>> always intend for their work to be sent as text/plain. ie is doing
>>> its best to protect the user from this mistake.

>> The reason, as I touched on before, is simple: a web browser is a
>> development tool.

> wrong. a web browser is a tool for navigating the web and viewing
> documents available online, offline, etc.

The problem is, it's both. It's a tool for navigation but it's also
the tool developers use to test pages. Therefore by protecting users
from mistakes you're also hiding them from developers, which in turn
is bad for users.

As an example, I was browsing a high profile e-commerce site a month
or two ago, I think it was lastminute.com. Their server was sending
pages back as text/plain, and in my browser of choice this made their
site completely unusable. I don't know how long the site had been like
this (it's fixed now), but it could have been a while. If all browsers
displayed the content sent as text/plain as just that I'd care to bet
the problem would have never been there, but if it was it would have
been noticed very quickly.

The reason we have standards in the first place is to try and tie all
browsers together so they behave in roughly the same way. Unless
there's a standard way for browsers to second guess mistakes, they
shouldn't do so at all, as this leads to some users seeing problems
and others not. These problems then become harder for developers to
track down (if they know about them at all), which I say is worse for
users overall.

> developers only checking their work in one browser and assuming
> it'll work for everyone is not the fault of the browser maker.

However if all browsers were 100% standards compliant, as long as your
page was standards compliant as well you could be pretty sure it would
work the same in all browsers. It's impossible for developers to check
sites on _all_ browsers, there are hundreds of them.

[XHTML refusing to render invalid code]
>> unless the next version of IE (ha! there's a joke) does proper XML
>> parsing on pages served with an XML doctype (as Mozilla does at the
>> moment) even that will be lost.

> sorry, but i don't see the problem (from a non-developer's perspective).

> if, as a developer, i make an innocent mistake, the user's shouldn't
> have to suffer. the browser should be smart enough to work around
> the mistake (providing it's not too big).

But how? Fixing text/plain served content isn't a good example here,
so say you've got a messy HTML page with lots of missing </table> and
other tags to the point where it's not obvious how it's meant to look.
The browser may "guess", but one browser's guess isn't necessarily
going to be the same as another browser's, which lead to a readable
page in one and an unreadable page in another. As I said earlier,
because you can't test in _every_ browser, this is A Bad Thing.

-- 
Tim Fountain | Web developer | Incutio Limited | www.incutio.com
email: tim at incutio.com | Tel: +44 8708 700 333 | Fax: +44 7092 181 581



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