Bob Edward's quote on the COMP4500 "Forum-Feedback" forum:
I am unwilling to tune these pages for different browsers
Must of Bob's comments related to Internet Explorer and standards compliance.
There's many reasons I can't write this on the COMP4500 forum. So I'll rant here instead (besides, this is valid to ALL web application developers).
If you are going to delve into the realm of creating a web application, a plethora of browsers is one of the things you just have to deal with. Closing your eyes and hiding behind Konqueror isn't going to make the problem go away.
By most accounts (judging by Google News), Internet Explorer still commands around 90% of the browser market. That approximately correlates to 90% of your userbase using your web application will be using Internet Explorer.
Having been a web application developer for over three years now, I of all people, know how much of a pain catering to different browsers is. Different default caching policies, different CSS policies. Even different (broken) font rendering engines on Mac OS X.
I am disappointed by Bob's comments for the mere reason that he's setting an extremely poor example. This year, I count at least two COMP4500 projects that are developing web applications. Would their clients appreciate them using Bob's "I'm not dealing with browser issues" approach? Certainly not.
Shayne and Lynette are pounding into us the "importance" of useless documentation. IEEE 12207, MIL-STD-498, Operational Concept Documents. I'm guessing later in the year there'll be even more useless waffle like Testing plans, wank wank wank. How about setting a good example? I'm willing to put money (or beer) on it that TSG does not have ANY documentation for any of their systems. Let alone the Forum. Where's your OCD, Bob? Where's your testing plan, Bob? Where's your change control procedures, Bob? Where's your quality control document, Bob?
I'm not even going to go into my shock and awe directed at Bob's (and perhaps, TSG in general) poor testing and quality control procedures. Bob made a change to the Forum code on Thursday the 6th of April -- the day before a whole bunch of project-related work was due for submission -- on the forum. This bug was not fixed (by a rollback) until Saturday the 8th of March. Too late, Bob. Submissions were due 5PM on the 7th.
This clearly tells me that Bob's Forum, along with every other "service" TSG provides is simply a
"best-effort" ... facility
- Bob Edwards, 22 Mar 06.
Comments
I'm glad your posting this here Peter! And I agree with everything said.
Sometimes it is okay to build a web page for one browser. For instance my company's internal web site is built for Firefox/Safari and if it works in IE great, if not who cares. However, we have control over what browser people use. We simply make sure Firefox is installed on each machine and is made the default browser. We have the luxury to be lazy and make the website work for standards compliant browsers.
Bob does not have this luxury. And what is worse he doesn't seem to have done ANY testing when he made that infamous change to the cache. Regardless of how crapply IE supports standards or how broken Mac OS X's font rendering (I still dispute that it is broken!) all browsers would implement caching the same. Simple firing up any browser (even Lynx) and trying to post something would have shown how broken the site had become.
On a side note can we all stop checking for browser headings and then kicking browsers out of a site if it doesn't match one of your predefined strings. I was at a site the other day and it said I wasn't using a standards compliant browser, despite the fact that Safari is one of the few browsers to pass the ACID2 Test. Thankfully once I dismissed the window I was still able to access the site. I then opened the same site in Firefox (one of the 'supported' browsers) and found no difference in the rendering! This is stupid! There are more browsers out there then just IE & Firefox - Safari, Camino, Shira, OmniWeb (and that's just the Mac Only browsers). Why test my browser if your page does not do funky stuff. Even if it does use some CSS wonders it should degrade nicely. Every webpage should be required to work nicely in Lynx. In fact that should be some sort of web badge. Kinda like the scouts - you get your 'Lynx badge for good web design' when your page looks great in Safari but is still usable in Lynx. Somehow I doubt Bob will graduate to get that badge.
This is great I can't wait to start ranting about 4500 here, safe from the retaliation from DCS.