Herouth Maoz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > At 18:47 +0200 on 11/3/2003, Alon Altman wrote: > > > The question is- does it support MSIE 7.0? The answer: They don't know. > > This question is the same for a standards-compliant site, because you > don't know when one of the browsers is going to pick up on a new > standard and ruin everything.
If a site is ruined by a new - but existing - standard it cannot really be called compliant, can it? See below... > This has happened to me lately: I've > always used cookies for sessions, it's as standard as muck. Now > marketing has asked me to put that site within a frame so that "the > location bar will show our domain and nothing else". The frameset is > in domain A, the frame within it is in domain B. So far, no standards > broken, Mozilla works perfectly, MSIE 5.5 works, hunky dory. > > But MSIE 6 doesn't accept my cookie. This is because is an early > adopter of a W3C standard called P3P, which is a standard defining > privacy policies. Apparently, in default mode MSIE 6 accepts cookies > from the main domain of a given page (i.e. the frameset), but requires > something called "Compact policy" to be sent over, in order for it to > accept the cookie (which comes from domain B). Darn, now I have to > study the P3P standard, study the part about compact policies, learn > what I have to stick there Well, if you are working for a web development company that crerates web sites on a contract basis, then it looks like a very good investment for you company to let you learn the new standards... > (and nobody in marketing is going to tell > me what our actual privacy policy is, because we don't actually have > one) to make it work. In the meantime, many users can't register to > our service. To them, the site is "broken" (unless we convince them to > change the default security setting, and I don't like doing that). And if you do web development in-house, on a one-time basis, then it is between you and your colleagues in marketing - it's your jobs - to analyze the situation and factor the time you need to spend on learning the new standard to implement the ideas of marketing. You need to get together - geeks, marketeers, and beancounters, and it's your job to spell out what is involved on the technical side, it is the marketeers job to explain why it is needed, and it is the job of the beancounters to figure out if your company can afford doing it. One of the possible solutions may be to outsource it to someone who is already fluent in the stuff and can do it faster and at a lower cost. There will be a hidden component to the cost there becuase your company will not gain in-house expertise. Now your situation only strengthens the agrument for standards. If you ignore the standards the IE6 users (and possibly Mozilla 1.4 users in a few months, and Opera 9.118 or whatever, etc) will see your site as broken. Which it is, because standards are ignored. Again, your suits asked for a feature. The proper way to implement the feature is through standards. It is possible to do it faster breaking the standards, but it will cause problems for some of your clients. The only way to claim out of hand that the quick'n'dirty non-standard way is cheaper is to ignore the cost of lost business and reputation. That's a business decision, and no one can tell the management how to run their company. One can, and should explain the drawbacks - in financial terms - to them. Incidentally, losing a part of the customer base may in some cases be cheaper than keeping it. Thius is what "out of hand" means in the previous paragraph. I suspect the claim is made without proper consideration in the vast majority of cases (can you make a back-of-the-envelope estimate of the cost of your learning P3P vs the cost of losing business because IE6 and likely other stuff will be broken?). > So that argument is out the window as well. Yep. -- Oleg Goldshmidt | [EMAIL PROTECTED] ================================================================= 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]
