[WEB4LIB] RE: Cease Fire in the OS Wars

[Rich Kulawiec]

On Tue, Aug 06, 2002 at 06:50:38PM -0700, Drew, Bill wrote:
>  I am almost sorry now that I asked my question on what was wrong with my
> web page that caused it to display badly in Opera.  Thanks to Thomas Dowling
> for suggesting a solution that worked.  If I was a newbie on this list I
> would really be afraid of asking for assistance after seeing the negative
> comments being traded the last two days. I a jaded veteran of this list with
> a thik skin so I was not bothered as much as some more recent newcomers
> were.

I suppose I probably fall into that category as well; I'd rate the
discussion/argument/whatever as being about 1.5 on a 10 scale.  It certainly
wouldn't stop me from asking for assistance because I'm used to the idea
that if it turns out my question was silly (say, because I didn't RTFM)
that I'll probably get ripped for it.  Or that if I really want to do XYZ
but a substantial number of people think XYZ is a truly bad idea, they'll
probably tell me.  Sometimes they're right.  No big deal, nothing to get
upset about, just the way it works.  I find that it strongly encourages me
to do my homework thoroughly and to get my facts straight, even when I'd
rather be lazy and not bother. ;-)  And frankly, I'd much rather have 1
or 10 or 100 people tell me what a bonehead I'm being for planning to
do XYZ now and save me the trouble of discovering it for myself later
the hard way.

As to the comment in your other note (i.e. why people come down mostly
black-and-white on the subject of Flash) I can only answer for me: I've
never seen a web page where Flash was actually used for anything worthwhile.
I regard it as mere eye candy, window decoration, glitz, baggage, whatever
term you want to use -- and what it communicates to me is *not* that the
site is striving to be high-tech, but that the site designer(s) couldn't
think of anything useful to do, so they dropped in something they think
is trendy but which I think is a waste of disk space and network bandwidth.
I suppose this is compounded by observing that often the sites which
have clearly lavished attention (and expense) on lots and lots of
Flash are the same sites who have put up pages written in MS-HTML [1],
and who therefore should have spent that time (and expense) fixing them.

So how does a site communicate to me that it's high-tech?  By using a
professional-quality web server, by coding pages to W3C spec, by
designing pages that are lean, efficient, and effective and which
render well in any standards-compliant browser; and so on.  What this says
to me is that the designer(s) Get It and realize that they're on the Internet,
not their local office LAN where a very different set of rules may apply.
But part of the problem with this is that it's not the most readily
visible part of the site, and so sometimes the Powers-That-Be don't
care about it.   But in the same way that a building's foundation is
often invisible but critical to its success, measures like this are part
of the baseline requirements for an effective web site, and IMNSHO
that's where time and energy should be spent.

---Rsk

[1] <a href="http://language.perl.com/misc/ms-ascii.html"> MS-HTML: A Nefarious and Despicable Plot</a>