[thelist] Site Review; [was Apple helps web developers]

[Lauri Watts]

On Wednesday 10 January 2001 12:31, you wrote:
> Hi Jay,
>
> Jay Greenspan wrote:
> > I had been mentally steeling myself -- through yoga, meditation, watching
> > old episodes of Kung Fu -- to present this site to Evolt under the
> > classic subject "Site Review". Beleive me, one does not present a Web
> > devlopment site to this crowd without some trepidation.

> I clicked through almost as soon as I saw this post - I have a lot of
> respect for Apple - so you can imagine my frustration when the first
> thing I notice is that the fonts are f**ked.  (I'm sending you a
> screenshot off list.) I use Linux as my OS and browse using NN 4.7. I
> persevere, (making note to self to make someone at apple aware of the
> problem) and arrive at the font gallery.  This is the bit that really
> got my goat - you've got examples of IE 5 and NN4 on MacOs, and IE 5.5
> and NN4 on Win, but no mention of Linux anywhere! Now, Linux and MacOS
> have similar size desktop market share (especially compared to the
> Microsoft giant!) and if designers should care what their site looks
> like on the a Mac, then they should also be encouraged to care how it
> looks on Linux, especially when the source of the information is a
> company like Apple - I mean c'mon this is the sort of behaviour I'd
> expect from Microsoft :-)

I fear you are making the same mistake to an extent.  There is no single "the 
linux platform" and there is no one browser.  In KDE's Konqueror, the site 
looks quite fabulous, both from a linux machine and from a BSD box.  I do 
agree it'd be nice to see some "other" platform screenshots.   Even the 
opposition (Gnome) Galeon did pretty well.

> > As for my role: I managed the content for the site. So, as it concerns
> > this list, I'm most interested in the your opinions about the articles.
> > But if you notice any design/layout/markup issues, I will make sure they
> > get addressed.

If you want an article on any particular concerns for Konqueror let me know, 
I can soon find someone to write a piece for you.  

Actually, I can't think of any real problems just now, other than noting you 
can easily and selectively turn off things in Konq (my personal favourites - 
you can set a minimum font size and anything smaller will display at least 
that large, and you can turn off opening of new windows) and it can fake it's 
UA very easily, so don't rely on it doing what you want without testing for 
functionality rather than UA, which is pretty good advice anyway. 

We have a solid and growing share of the UNIX/Linux desktop sector, and we 
also have a fast, pretty, standards compliant browser that handles Java, 
Javascript, Flash, SSL and much more.  I guess I'd would like to think that 
worthy of consideration :)  

-- 
Lauri Watts, trying hard not to evangelise, but probably failing,
Köping, Sweden