On Tue, 2002-12-31 at 09:16, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote: > > I think you missed the main point: > > > > 5. Bottom line - drives away potential business (customers, partners) and > > misses the whole point of having a web site. > > This they won't agree with, on the basis of "98% of customers use IE > so the extra expense is not warranted."
I think the issue is much deeper -- it all comes down to awareness, or lack thereof to be more correct. I know a few people who do this kind of web development. They either have never heard of Linux, or they've heard that there's such a thing but don't know what it is, or they know what it is but simply don't make the logical connection that people who use Linux don't use IE 6. Or they know what it is and what it means, but they don't imagine that more than five people in the country use it. But even those people are already quite rare. It usually goes like this. The boss wants a web site, so he hires a web development company to create one. The developers in this company are obviously not people with a dozen years of computing experience, but people who have gone through a couple-months-long HTML course and have some artistic creativity in them. For them, the criterion for a working and well-looking piece of HTML is that it loads in their IE. If they're really really sophisticated, they may change their font size or resolution a couple of times to see that the site still looks good, but most don't (that's really pro stuff). They create the site and present it to the boss, who loads it in his computer, makes sure that it works, admires the bells and whistles which make the site look pretty and original, and writes the cheque. Linux?! I think asking most of those companies to support Linux is like calling your Co-Op, saying that you use a glider to move from place to place and complaining that they have no space to park it by their store. It's all awareness. Neither the web development company nor their client think that there are any normal people in their right mind who are not using IE. I think it never even gets to the point where they count percentages -- in most cases, I think the reaction is more like "go away, freak, stop pestering me". -- Alex Shnitman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.hectic.net/ UIN 188956 PGP 0xEC5D619D / E1 F2 7B 6C A0 31 80 28 63 B8 02 BA 65 C7 8B BA ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
