Readers' Comments

Reader Comments on Aardvark Daily 4 Apr 2001
Note: the comments below are the unabridged submissions of readers and do
not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher.


From: Giles
For : The Editor (for publication)
Subj: EMSA page

It seems they have fallen victim to the well known Netscape
4.x resize bug - where NS fails to correctly execute non-
table based layouts after the browser is resized.  It's
always a bit of a trip up for young players as it won't
show up in testing unless you explicitly resize, but it's
nothing a couple of lines of code couldn't help.




From: grizzz
For : The Editor (for publication)
Subj: emsa web page

I think you are being way too hard on tea ladies.
There are way too many Xspurts that should stop and get
some training from the forementioned tea ladies.




From: Julian
For : The Editor (for publication)
Subj: eMSA - Design Lawlessness

Now I don't in any way profess to be the greatest
designer/developer out there, but after looking at the eMSA
site I was shocked at the lack of talent.

Do they want to be found? How about some Meta's, ya'now
Keywords and stuff like that...

And code quirks... Here's a sample:

document.onmouseover = getonme ;
document.onmouseout = getoffme ;

"Hey, Get off me!" - The site just screams out "Get off me"
by it's sheer lack of asthetic value or interest for that
matter. If it's not bad enough the placed red type on a
grey background, at least they went to the effort to make
the nav text go light pink sporadically on rollover
(doesn't go too well on grey folks)...

Hmmm, I'm wondering whether it's neccesary to put in place
a standards authority for astheticism . . .




From: Michael Smith
For : The Editor (for publication)
Subj: New Tune

 Jeeeze Bruce, get another tune to sing, so no-one checks
to see if the outdated, buggy, non-standards compliant
Netscape works on their site. So what ??

 Its not suprising that most of the 'mistakes' you point
out regarding Netscape, are actually bugs in Netscape that
don't occur in IE, such as the CSS error you highlighted
the other day, IE gracefully ignores that error, whereas
Netscape prevents you from viewing anything.

 Not every web development effort has the ability to almost
triple their budget to account for an extremely small
percentage of users who insist on using outdated, buggy,
crapola products.

 In fact, essentially what you are saying is that this
minority of NS users has the right to effectively tax IE
users. That is exactly what happens when the company is
forced to triple their development budget to account for
all the problems and non-standards issues with the minority
userbase insisting on seeing everything 'like they do in
IE' under Netscape - and those increases in costs are
passed on to all consumers.

 Save us *all* some money, and use the best, most standards
compliant, most widely accept web browser available - IE -
and stop insisting the rest of us should subsidise your
need to hangon to the dying Netscape.

Aardvark Responds:
Like it or not, there are still tens of thousands of Kiwis
who  use Netscape as their preferred browser and I know of
few websites or online businesses that can afford to ignore
that number of potential visitors.

People use Netscape over IE for a number of very valid
reasons including the fact that "it's what they've got and
they're a "user" not a techo.  The thought of downloading
megabytes of software over a dial-up modem and then
installing the file onto their PC just scares some people.

Others have chosen Netscape because they're tired of having
to download and apply new security patches on an extremely
regular basis or face the potential for malicious fools
exploiting the near-endless list of holes in IE.

You may call IE the "best" browser -- those who have been
bitten by its security holes or are tiring of the endless
updates and patches needed just to keep the hackers out
might not agree with you.

Finally -- many of the incompatibility problems between
IE and NS are very quick and simple to check and fix.
After all -- the eMSA managed to fix almost all the problems
I described within a couple of hours.

Websites are a business or organisation's window to the
web public.  For a website to turn someone away or expose
them to a sub-standard browsing experience simply because
the developer is too lazy or cheap to spend a little extra
time testing a 7-page website for compatibility with a
browser used by tens of thousands of Kiwi Net users is
just plain dumb!

After all -- if it's good enough for McDonalds to provide
a special toilet for paraplegics (who constitute a tiny
percentage of the population) as an acknowledgement that
their custom is just as important as that of the rest of
the population then what's wrong with expecting website
owners to cater for the 10% or so of the 250 million Net
users who choose (for whatever reason) to use Netscape?

We're not talking rocket science here!
Now Have Your Say