>Jonathan, this is a corporate BS. 90% of the market is good enough for >the company. It's not good enough for us. We are not a corporation >trying to enrich itself. We are an information provider, and no >discrimination based on OS or the choice of browser is >acceptable. Yes, >it may look bad in the older or/and buggy browsers, but it should be >*usable*. If someone is stack with NS4 for whatever the reason >is, what >you are saying is f**k that user, let him figure out how to solve his >problem... oops, you just lost a mod_perl user and his "word of the >mouth", something that shouldn't happen. On one hand you say >we need the >site look more appealing, so mod_perl will be more wide spread, on the >other hand you don't care about those not living on the cutting edge, >what's the result?
You're wrong Stas, I'm not saying "f**k that user" at all. I'm suggesting that we display a page on detection of NS4 that informs the user that the site was designed to be totally standards compliant, NS4 is not standards compliant. Therefore, while we welcome that user to the site, we are simply warning him in advance that some things may look odd (but the site is still useable). I'm not suggesting that we deny him access (or force him to upgrade), merely that he sees an advisory prior to entering the site. Our options are: 1) "f**k" NS4 users - launch the site as is, and wait for the complaints from the NS4 brigade 2) redesign the template and CSS to use tables and other common HTML 4-based "tricks" to control our layout so as achieve 100% cross browser compatibility (and kiss our standards compliance goodbye) 3) keep the original "one-size-fits-all" website 4) launch the site now with an NS4 advisory Are there any other options that I haven't considered? I am completely against options 1 & 3. I would be very unhappy with option 2 (because we would have wasted so much valuable time and effort) - but I would be happy with the final result. I think option 4 is the only way to go. No one likes to think of excluding users, I certainly don't. If this were a mainstream website where Win/IE was guaranteed to be the most common browser and OS then I would be prepared to accept the compromise. I did not make my suggestion lightly - I know that the majority of OUR users will be *nix based and NS4 will be much more common there. Even so, we have to accept the inevitable, NS4 is old, buggy and not compatible with the standards we have chosen to stick so rigidly to. So Stas, we will have to agree to disagree on this one. >When this kind of talk starts I'm always thinking that leaving a plain >site we have now at perl.apache.org is the best. It works >everywhere and >nobody argues about it. Don't take this personally Stas, but that's just plain silly. Would you honestly be prepared to forfeit all of the time and effort invested in the new website? As far as I'm concerned, this is an if-all-else-fails only option. >Wait till we announce a preview and people will start complaning that >something doesn't look good on their favorite browser X platform Y. Stas, accept it, this is going to happen regardless of what we do. But the site will evolve and mature and eventually all the little quirks will be ironed out. Of course, this would depend on the site actually being launched - do we have a schedule for this? >Most likely Allan's suggestions of using tables for formatting >were the >wisest ones and would have saved a lot of grief. I agree. I also advocated tables. But the developers (too many for me to remember) have done a remarkable job and built a site that doesn't need tables, that works just as well as an table'd site and that's totally standards compliant. They are to be congratulated and I for one would be happy to have any of them on my team. But we are now asking them to take that design and get it to work perfectly on NS4. Forgive the crap analogy, but that's like asking Wilbur Wright to fly the Concorde! Jonathan M. Hollin - WYPUG Co-ordinator West Yorkshire Perl User Group http://wypug.pm.org/ http://wypug.digital-word.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
