At 09:10 AM 30/06/2004, you wrote:
as a user, if it won't run with my preferred browser, I just abandon it and never come back to look at it again
I think the pact should go like this:
The developer promises to write code which is compliant with modern, open, non-proprietary international standards (e.g. XHTML, Unicode, ECMAScript, etc.).
The user agrees to install one of the many free browsers which is capable of handling the current standards.
Thus everyone is happy. If users choose to use obsolete or bad browsers, then that's their privilege, but most developers don't have time or money to produce code to support that kind of thing. If developers choose to write sites that aren't based on standards, they deserve to have their sites ignored, and ultimately inaccessible to the majority of people.
All of the current versions of these browsers have pretty good support for the current crop of standards:
Firefox, Mozilla, Camino, Internet Explorer (Windows), Safari, Opera, Netscape.
That's not a bad range of choices.
Cheers, Martin
At 09:10 AM 30/06/2004, you wrote:
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
As a former (long ago) programmer (software engineer ?) I understand the problem of multiple browsers, etc.
But as a user, if it won't run with my preferred browser, I just abandon it and never come back to look at it again, even though I have more than one browser on my PC. (I keep the other browser -- IE -- just for dire emergencies.) I have no idea if this bothers the folks writing the programs.
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______________________________________ Martin Holmes University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre mholmes@uvic.ca martin@mholmes.com mholmes@halfbakedsoftware.com http://www.mholmes.com http://web.uvic.ca/hcmc/ http://www.halfbakedsoftware.com