Re: ASP Threshold information

["James H H Lampert" <jamesl@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

rob@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> No, it's not absurd and I don't know that.
> You have your favorite browser.  You have your enemy - 
> Microsoft. 

And that has precisely WHAT to do with the current market 
price of rutabagas?

To quote Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web:

"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser 
X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad 
old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance 
of reading a document written on another computer, another 
word processor, or another network."

I might gain a certain amount of personal satisfaction by 
writing web pages with the specific intention that they 
break down to unreadability under Imploder, but that would 
make me as guilty of bad web design as anybody who wrote 
pages that ONLY worked under Imploder. Worse, it would 
make me guilty of malicious web design.

Some years ago, one of my pages (the joke page) actually 
DID have an imploder-compatibility problem: the sneaky 
method I was using to conceal punchlines only worked under 
Netscape. Once I discovered the problem, I came up with a 
browser-neutral way of concealing punchlines, one that 
works on any browser capable of displaying forms (whether 
they're capable of submitting them or not, since there's 
no submit-button involved).

Frequently, I find pages with JavaScript that doesn't work 
under Netscape 4. This in spite of the fact that it was 
Netscape that INVENTED JavaScript. Even though Netscape 
itself considers its own early implementations thereof to 
be non-standard, it really takes very little effort, in 
many cases, to code JavaScript so that any browser that 
does JavaScript at all can handle it properly, or at least 
degrade gracefully. Then, too, there's Java. Our products 
are designed to use the Java Plug-In, and they're designed 
to use it whether the browser itself can be configured to 
use it as the default Java implementation or not.

Then, at the other extreme, we have IBM's enormous mess, 
the InfoCenter. Why they ever abandoned something as 
browser-friendly, easy-to-use, and stable as the web 
version of BookManager, I dunno. And yet they replaced it 
with something that makes just about everything I try to 
look for ten times harder to find, assuming one can get 
the damned thing to work at all, even WITH the recommended 
browser.

James H. H. Lampert
http://www.hb.quik.com/jamesl