Web - Usability - Humor
Wednesday, February 12, 2003[9:04:43 PM]
A specific case for server-side browser sniffing.
In general, it's difficult to get sniffing right, and you have to tweak the process over time. Most web teams aren't set up to do this well enough.
But here's a case where it would be handy. Say your company buys 500 PocketPC mobile phones, perhaps to give salespeople easy 24x7 access to a browser-based sales support system. Cool. But it comes with the handheld version of IE.
The handheld version of IE that came with my iPaq a year ago didn't do stylesheets, and it didn't even put a blank line between paragraphs. Targeting that browser, it would be useful if you could add some "non-breaking" spaces to the start of every paragraph, to indicate the break. Further, it's only choice for making table-based pages fit on the screen was to shrink *everything* so the entire width of the html page fit onto the three-inch screen. Not helpful. Neither is the alternative: scrolling right and left to read each line of text. So if your website normally uses tables for page layout, you gotta lose the tables before you send the page to the handheld. (Someday, we'll all use float for page layout, maybe, but not until we can have a footer go all the way across the bottom of the page.)
This kind of scenario will crop up repeatedly. A group uses some funky hardware, for which only a funky browser is available, and so you go ahead and make some usability fixes.
Once you're set up to do that for internal users, why not use the same technology for your customers. Why shouldn't a customer with a handheld get a version of the site that strips most of the page junk, and makes it easier to find/access/process particular information they might need immediately.
[8:35:37 PM]
Googlicide: linking to a Google-censored page, thereby black-holing your blog at Google until the link scrolls off the main page?
[9:23:03 AM]
All this web stuff is just too hard. Today Zeldman's ranting about a Javascript bug in Mozilla. I don't see the behavior in Mozilla 1.1 or Mozilla 0.8 on Linux or 1.1 on OS X -- unless I turn Javascript off, and that seems fair. Then he rants a little about Bugzilla, which I can also understand. I think you just have to leave Bugzilla for the people who use it constantly.
We're making progress, though. The positioned background image in the alternate stylesheet is *way* sexy. People should do more of that.
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Last update: 3/7/03; 10:19:56 AM.