Re: ASP Threshold information -- MIDRANGE-L

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

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