On Sep 22, 1:30 am, Mike McNally <emmecin...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Advice to "never" use browser detection is good advice, but in my
> experience it's simply impossible to follow. The bad behaviors of old
> IE browsers - behaviors that are, in effect, bugs, and therefore not
> "features" that obey any particular logic - are numerous and
> pervasive. Facile advice like "avoid troublesome features"
> constitutes a grim curse on site design: "don't do anything that
> doesn't work reliably in IE6" is what that amounts to, and I think
> that's terrible.
There are, and will always be, features that are available in some
browsers but not others. An evaluation must be made whether a
particular feature supported by certain browsers is worth having so
badly that it is OK to offer a lesser experience, or even deny access,
to users of other browsers. Are transparent PNG images *that*
important? Is there *no* other option? Is javascript the only, or
best, solution?
A common fix for the PNG issue is to use conditional comments to sniff
for IE and insert a different stylesheet that replaces the PNG images
with others.
That solution suits some (I guess it suits IE users at least), but if
the replacement images are OK for IE users, they are probably fine for
others too. And at the same time life has been made better for every
browser that doesn't support transparent PNG images (there are likely
a number of mobile browsers that don't support them either).
There are always those who wish to push the boundaries of what can be
done on the web, good for them. However, for everyday business web
sites, simpler is better and flashiness just distracts from the job at
hand. In a few years time, well look back at accordions, carousels,
show/hide effects and such much the same way as we look at blink and
marquee elements now. They are annoying distractions that rarely add
to the functionality or usefulness of a site.
For example, here's the home page of my ISP:
<URL: http://www.iinet.net.au/customers/ >
The primary purpose of this page is to allow their customers to login
to the site.
You'll note that the focus is automatically put in the login field. A
username can be entered, tab pressed, then a password, but it is
impossible to navigate to the toolbox button without using a mouse.
Whoever designed it was clever enough to create those wonderful
buttons (which always leave me wondering which is on and which is off)
but was incapable of maintaining keyboard navigation supported
natively by every desktop browser since Netscape 1.0.
So you can see that I have a slight bias when functionality is
restricted just because someone decided to poorly implement a pretty
UI component. :-)
Similarly, the second set of login links at the top are impossible to
use without a pointing device - they can't be selected with a tab key.
The page is spectacularly bad at the one function it is supposed to
perform. And they don't use transparent PNGs anywhere! ;-p
The point here is not necessarily to build every site to the lowest
common denominator, but to not deliberately do things that break
functionality that has been available in just about every browser for
a very long time. Javascript and CSS should enhance the user
experience, not break it.
--
Rob
