[thelist] Jumping In With Both Feet

Mark Howells mark at mountain.ch
Tue Dec 11 09:08:38 CST 2001


>> should web development be driving with the
>> hand brake on because of users who have made this decision?
> 
> That's one of the central principles of user-centred design, yes.

So what you're saying is that all websites should be designed with specific
users of that site in mind, then? And that there is no point in a user
upgrading to a new browser with improved performance and enhanced or
additional features?

What happens when a large company decides to update its desktop policy to
state that their PCs will all run Netscape 6 instead of IE 5? The company
intranet, which the developer has tailored specifically for IE5 using
proprietary tags and IE-centric scripts, will require a major overhaul,
which wouldn't be necessary if the site had been built to work in all
browsers (whether current, legacy or planned) using common code.

This isn't just about making the developers' lives easier (although that
must be a factor in this industry), but the subsequent reduction of future
development times and costs and the ability for more "non-standard users" to
be able to develop websites that work across all browsers - desktop based or
not - without changing a single piece of code.

One of the current articles at A List Apart
(http://www.alistapart.com/stories/netscape/) says more on this subject.

>> Moving towards the separation of content from design using
>> XHTML, CSS and the like will mean that more pages will be legible in both
>> legacy and standards-compliant browsers (albeit with different styling and
>> functional capabilities).
> 
> ie, it won't look or work properly. There are few users (and fewer clients)
> who would put up with that.

Hold on there ... who said anything about it "not working properly"? I'm
sure that you'll agree that users and clients, in the main, will be happy to
accept a website (or web application) that functions as intended at the
concept and planning stage, prior to it's release.

I'm coding a major web site and application at the moment, which supports a
vast international organization containing users across governments and
organizations from over 100 countries across the world, on many types of
platform, browser and connection speed. The main development of the public
and intranet access websites is keyed on the fact that the design and code
must work for all these users.

At the project planning stage, in which I was able to play a leading role,
the client representatives responsible for the project agreed that
compatibility was more important than making the site identical in all
browsers; as a result of this, the entire site is being coded to comply with
XHTML and CSS recommendations and while some styling features are lost
(which is of no real importance to the user), the site content and
functionality remains intact for browsers from v4.0 onwards (across all
platforms). (After studying the site requirements, we felt that the decision
to use code that works on a four year old browser is sufficient in this
case.)

In summary, there's no question of the site "not working" for people with
older browsers - the idea is that it will work in these instances, just
without bandwidth-heavy CSS and Javascript-laden files that won't work
properly anyway. With a bit more project planning and a bit less "copy and
paste" from a four year old code library, most sites can be improved by a
little more attention to the code.

> Really, what *user* benefits does anything
> introduced since then actually offer?

None, if you take ease of use, download speed, interface functionality and
data security out of the equation.

Regards
Mark Howells
Working in a Winter Wonderland
http://www.mark.ac






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