From: Hetz Ben Hamo (hetz_at_nonexisting.hamakor.org.il)
Date: Tue 04 Mar 2003 - 18:36:32 IST
I would like to say a few words about $SUBJECT..
As you know, in many companies (be it Egged, government offices, etc) they
place a bid for a 3rd party company to build them a site according to specs
given by the company.
As my previous boss in Tehila told me:
"Hetz, there are 2 ways to choose from:
1. A repsectable company who will build the site with PHP, MySQL and will
fully check that their web site will work on various browsers - those
companies ask for X*2 price
2. A small company who will build the site on IIS, with ASP and will only
check it against latest version of Explorer - they will ask for X price.."
Guess who wins the bid?
There are also 2 ways of browsers:
1. Konqueror, Opera - these browser do whatever they can to support what
Opera's CEO calls "streets HTML" - which means either non standard HTML or
buggy behaviors - both browsers support those kind of HTML in addition to the
W3C standards - that way you can browse many problematic sites.
2. Mozilla and browsers based on Gecko - those browsers stick to the W3C
standard, so when you approach a site which doesn't support the standard well
enough - you'll get either bad rendering or you won't be able to use the
sites.
Financially speaking - writing a web site and maintaining it work with the
latest variant browsers is a PITA. You got tons of quirks to do in order to
make the site look good on MSIE and Mozilla, and that part alone sometimes
costs more then maintaining 1 browsers - and companies don't want to pay for
it - they are fine with Explorer...
Just for a kick - try to take the google web site and pass it through the W3C
validator. It fails. Many people have asked Google about it and they simply
refuse to make it fully W3C compatible. Do you want to boycott Google? good
luck, I won't be one of the participants...
So yes, you can complain to the webmasters of those web sites (start with
Egged, Bank Discount, Globes, Ynet, etc) - see how much they are willing to
make their web site work in Mozilla - not much, although THERE IS hope - look
at the Visa CAL case for example.
Thanks,
Hetz
=================================================================
To unsubscribe, send mail to linux-il-request_at_linux.org.il with
the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command
echo unsubscribe | mail linux-il-request_at_linux.org.il
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Mon 06 Oct 2003 - 23:44:23 IST