future,
> so they offer little current benefit. However, if you're building a web
> application that you expect will be around for three to five years, it
makes
> sense to build it in such a way that you won't have to replace things
> unnecessarily over the lifespan of that application.
Though I agree in principle, this hasn't proved an issue (yet). Most public
Web sites I've worked on get a major look-and-feel overhaul (for marketing
purposes if nothing else) every one to two years. There simply isn't any
longevity as far as the public sites go.
Designing intranets for corporate customers is a different story. They pick
a version of Internet Explorer and use that for 4 years. So, we design to
that version, using every proprietary trick Internet Explorer provides to
provide the best experience, usability wise, that we can.
If they chose Mozilla, we'd use every proprietary Mozilla trick. Some would
argue about my definition of proprietary since Mozilla's open source.
Nevertheless, Mozilla offers a lot of technologies that aren't Web standards
(though they may utilize them).
Regardless, corporations tend to pick one thing and stick with it for a long
time. If they do upgrade, they generally pick the path of least resistance
(i.e. the latest version of Internet Explorer) and Microsoft tends to be
pretty good about backward compatibility (hence, the tangled mess that many
of the applications and APIs are in).
-ben
[Todays Threads] [This Message] [Subscription] [Fast Unsubscribe] [User Settings]
