Push Button Paradise
Micah Dubinko
Mon, 17 Apr 2006
Night of the living dead browsers
Imagine yourself as a web developer. You wake up one day in an alternate universe, one with no Firefox Web Developer extension. No DOM inspector, no JavaScript debugger. In fact, no Firefox at all.
No Safari, not even IE. Opera is still around and kicking, but every other browser on the planet has been replaced with a randomly mutated copy of Navigator 3.0, with "View Source" disabled. Over a dialup-speed pipe.
As you get desperate to debug some content that appears horribly mangled on your particular mangled browser, you start making a catalog of what works and what doesn't--and there's no discernible pattern. CSS works on some browsers, and crashes others. Meaningless differences make the difference between working, not working, and crashing. Ditto for XML declarations. And DOCTYPE declarations. And tables (Well, maybe there are a few advantages in this universe).
In a place like this, what role does separating content and presentation play? How important is semantically-meaningful markup that results in unusably-bad displays on a significant fraction of the browser population? How much of what you've learned over the years about usable and accessible web design goes out the window? How do you make the pain stop?
Welcome to the mobile web, 2006. The questions above aren't rhetorical. Answer in comments below.
(Not to sound too negative, but this situation is actually a vast improvement over the way things were even five years ago.) -m
posted at: 23:05 | under: 2006-04 | 2 comment(s)
Then you take a bunch of the worst spammers from earth and take them to this parallel universe where they´ll pay the browser aliens for browsers that will get their stupid-old messages to all creatures, e-mail and web, as they´re used to. After the alien browser builders have literally eaten all the spammers´ money, and other aliens keep contacting the spammers but never buying any of the spammers products (who needs viagra with such low gravity) the spammers gone bankrupt and browser builders have learned something about making a profit with using standards.
Then you take a bunch of standards-loving webdevelopers (take a few rather smart ones, they always no better, just to get some variation and competition in browsers :-) ) from earth and send them to this alternate universe where companies are now very eager to hire them.
Opera would do rather well in that universe
OR: make a (ironic) FireFox Flick video about MiniMo :-)
Posted by stelt at Tue Apr 18 00:26:24 2006
But as most phones use proprietary operating systems (excepting the "smartphones"), with limited opportunities for upgrades, ghosts of the browsers past will haunt us for some time to come.
In principle the phone world should be, and in time will be, a poster child for semantic markup. I know that our capability to adapt the content to the device is greatly improved when we know what the content actually is. In the WAP world you had no such opportunity, if you wanted to add an 'h3' you would have to do something like "<b><big><big>" to achieve a similar effect, Netscape 3 indeed. Another consequence is that a well-crafted HTML document is always smaller than the equivalent WML document. In the phoney zone that matters.
Posted by Jonny Axelsson at Tue Apr 18 03:23:09 2006
