JeffM wrote:
as most folks/companies simply aren't aware of standards,
>
aka incompetents. aka don't know how to do their jobs.
I will say there are a few things at play here:
* Big-Wigs in company, and sometimes their own press/PR departments
don't get the web. They get paper/print/etc. media
What that means is that when they price out a job or talk to the ones
doing the website (IFF they even hire someone rather than having some
relatives kid do it) They rely on what it looks like to them and make
explicit remarks or requirements about how it should look/behave, not
even comprehending how that affects other browsers/users/etc.
* 3'rd party outsourced programs, scripts, etc. That make some of the
wrong decisions out of the box. Some of these are marketed at the
higher-ups who don't get the logistics of proper web design, and cost
hefty for pre-built packages. In these cases the requirement is
something like "We bought product Y it comes with support and features
ABC, lets style it for our needs and deploy it" (one of my old colleges
did this, when i was on the technology committee even when I worked
closely with the project lead of the entire website infrastructure)
The problem here is that among the budget of the team/developer/etc. you
can't really tweak the product itself into working for more than its
already working for (and sometimes you don't even have access to change
the code that makes these assumptions even when you have paid for it).
And many of these companies (at least in the case of the app that
deployed at my old college) have builtin VERY VERY SPECIFIC UA string
parsing, that says what browsers they support, etc. and if you don't
match you're busted and unable to view the app/website/whatever. Causing
a dependency chain that is hard to break due to pressure from people
with little to no technical knowledge in this field having invested lots
in the tool you are using that is broken. And thus unwilling to invest
in a team to write a new tool, or a better tool, etc. (Also many of
these types of tools have all the bells and whistles but make automatic
data migration hard to impossible)
* the last category of problems, is those who just don't know better.
They may be people who got lucky and got a job doing website design, and
never even heard of the w3c, or any "standards" bodies, all they know is
what works for them, in the popular browsers/devices they have tried.
Got by from trial and error and seeing other peoples published
examples/code over the internet. Always looking for mere solutions to a
problem, never looking for the right approach to the problem.
I once fell into this camp, at the time only coding for IE (4) and only
being told by one guy I was helping out with his website that it didn't
work for him. and after a lot of back and forth found out he used this
thing called 'netscape' (a really old version at the time) and I learned
about document.layers and how to do what I wanted there, but all the
while not understanding why both were different. Eventually I wrote two
distinctly different pages, where the main (IE) one had a link "If you
use netscape, click here". Yea I loathe my ignorance from back then,
but this level of ignorance still exists today. Just in different forms,
(mostly at present re: Firefox/IE being the only beasts, and most not
understanding how problematic a website is on mobile/tablets)
--
~Justin Wood (Callek)
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