Hi folks, I hereby publicly declare that my days of complaining to website authors that I cannot view their site at 800x600, and then opening my big mouth about other dubious issues I notice on their site, are now over.
I dropped a line to my ISP (ostensibly to enquire about my account) and mentioned I could not find certain information on their website (and suggested it might be a usability issue), that the horizontal scrolling was giving me RSI (joke), commented on their massive use of javascript in the <head>, and their use of CSS in the <head>, and for good measure commented on some validation issues (missing alt text, no closing <td>s etc). I have been soundly trounced and put back in my box. When I could not find what I was looking for I was told: "I recommend that this issue in this case has not been a usability issue but instead has been a logic issue on the clients side, and I would recommend that you re-attend year 10-12 english classes in order to know this in future cases." When I complained about horizontal scrolling I was told: "I would recommend that you take a look around the real world, not just your own room and classroom, and see that these days even seniors are using the resolution of 1024x768. And from a design standpoint, fixed width is definitely a good idea, due to the complexities that arise from fluid layouts. And you do have a choice, you have the choice of increasing your resolution, or alternatively to scrolls when you want to see anything to the left or down on the website. To the best of my abililty that looks like a choice, albiet one that you may not enjoy. But then again, I am sure the world does not revolve around you." When I commented on the huge amount of javascript in the <head> I was told: "unobtrussive javascript does not work on a number of browsers short of the newest, and as such, since [our] site was designed to cater to the widest audience possible, inline javascript was deemed necessary to perform the tasks that were required in these cases." Javascript pulled from linked files doesn't work in some browsers? As for the CSS that was in the <head> (body {margin-left:0px;margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px): "CSS was actually designed to be part of the header. It is only since that point that separate CSS files have been designed to store this layout information. While myself, I prefer to have the CSS file seperated out from the rest of the code, as this makes for a more efficient and clean source code file, it is by no means required, and it is definitely not the whole point of CSS, but simply a very useful side-effect." and.. ".. could not be solved with a simple margin:0 as you have stated, which is only the newest standard in relation to this issue, but which does not resolve the issue in the browsers that this code is targetted at. It also does not render correctly in most older browsers due to the fact that it is a newer standard." CSS was designed to be part of the head? margin:0; is "new" and won't work for some browsers? As to validation: "the W3C are self-appointed, and the standards they impose are self-regulated and are only recommended standards. Additionally, our developers are well acquiantted with the W3C, however, they are also well aware of when it is necessary to break these standards in order to create efficient, less bandwidth code." My own fault, I asked for it, obviously. I will now be a "good little backyard hobbyist web-designer" as they called me (actually, it's my day job too), and never mention standards again. Just thought I'd share. Sorry if this is list clutter. (not so) sunny ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************