molly.com
Wednesday 11 January 2006
JavaScript Accident at the Ajax Inn
REQUIRING ACCOMMODATION for Jeremy Keith’s Ajax Training on February 10th at the London Victoria Park Plaza Hotel, I logged on to the hotel’s web site. I was using an old browser, apparently, as you can see here.
Okay, so. I’m trying to make a reservation at the hotel where a training on Ajax is being conducted and I can’t use the site to make said reservation at all, in this assumed-to-be-outdated browser.
What’s up with that?
Filed under: humor, software, standards, web design and development
Posted by: Molly | 17:59 | Comments (21)
The ironing is delicious.
Furthermore, how can you afford to fly to all these places? Is it tax-deductable if it’s for a workshop or something?
Dante,
I personally have never liked ironing myself.
I will already be in the UK for other reasons so it’s not like I’m flying over just for that (not that it wouldn’t still be worth it if I could!) But, to answer your question, yes, my trips are all tax detuctable unless they are not work-related.
Of course you went ahead and did it with IE right? I’m assuming this happened because you were using Firefox and the site was using the user agent string to detect your browser.
Rome wasn’t built in a day… :-/
Say hi to Meri and Elly for me (not that I can’t do that by IM myself). Wish I could be there. I’ve not visited the UK yet.
Looks like “Progressive Enhancement” didn’t make it into the requirements.
The typical business attitude when it comes to supporting Safari and Opera is “they’re such a small percentage of our traffic it’s not worth the effort.” The best response is to bottom-line it with “deliberately excluding 2% of your visitors means you’re turning away $___ per day, every day. Isn’t that worth an extra hour of QA time?” That’ll shut em up.
Ara: No, Firefox worked just fine. It was my “old browser” Safari that caused the kaffufle.
I have to say from a programmers perspective it’s an easy trap to fall into. And on top of that, they were trying to be helpful. For example: They wanted to make sure you didn’t use IE 5.5 because it actually wouldn’t work, and they just wanted to be up front about it. So they added a browser check for greater than IE 5.5. Not to slight Netscape and Mozilla they added a check for that as well.
The problem is that they checked for what they thought was ok, instead of checking for what they new was not ok. A simple check for IE 5.5 or below would have been sufficient. Assume the browser is ok, not that it’ll break.
So razz away, just don’t give them to hard a time beyond pointing it out as an example to learn from.
We all know what they say about assuming; it makes an ass out of you and me!
Some people don’t even know Safari exists. No lie. I’ve heard people who got their first Mac with OSX and were totally surprised to discover Safari.
[quote]Some people don’t even know Safari exists[/quote]
Yeah, Chris – but people like that shouldn’t be developing professional websites.
Think of it as another aspect of being a professional. If you don’t know what the standard tools are in the industry – get out, or get learning.
Try St. Martin’s Lane instead. Best hotel ever.
Jehiah, you realize of course that even “a simple check for IE 5.5 or below” is still a step down the wrong path. Object detection is a far sounder and more reliable method.
Hopefully whoever designed their webpage will attend the conference too (maybe learn something about graceful degradation).
At the firm where i am working we have a girl who is a graphical designer using a mac, [me too sometimes for testing the sites], and every day i hear her “screams” about the websites ignoring her browser, her osX and her personally… =O)
I mean i feel her pain and do understand her perfectly – its a shame that people are ignoring the needs of the users, but i do understand that its much easier to do their job like 1-2 ready or not but its allread done… =O(
We have several internal applications which are ignoring the safari, so i think it should be relatively common … But with all that buzz that apple is making lately i think they have got good chances on making difirence in the nearest future.
Assuming they’re testing the user agent string, Safari is capable of spoofing it if you enable the debug menu. You can do this with the Terminal, or just use Safari Enhancer. You then have the option of pretending to be a number of browsers.
On a totally un-related matter i’m really curious about this and maybe someone here knows , whats up with douglas bowman and stopdesign there has’nt been a post since october ??, total Apologies
if this isnt the place post this query and no offence to anybody i love reading all web design blogs and have been missing this one ….
Hey cool – they gave you a great what-not-to-do example for your session! Invite the manager.
Molly,
Are you going to the Carson Summit?
I’ll be in London for a few days then (because of Carson Summit), I cannot attend the AJAX Workshop unfortunatly which is a great shame, Jeremy is a great teacher.
“I’m trying to make a reservation at the hotel where a training on Ajax is being conducted and I can’t use the site to make said reservation at all, in this assumed-to-be-outdated browser.” So what? The hotel is just renting space. Why should they be liable for the correlation between the class (next week it’s probably a workshop on how to sell auto parts) and their website’s compatibility with a browser or much less the browser’s Ajax capabilities?
Molly, I had this exact same argument on a browser sniffin’ script on our UT home page. I can’t for the life of me convince the analyst to switch the logic (so that only Netscape versions prior to 7.1, Opera versions prior to 8.0, Mac versions of IE prior to 5.22 & PC versions of IE prior to 5.5 get the css stripped). So as it stands now. The following browsers get the CSS (and browsers not listed do not get the CSS):
* Firefox (all versions)
* Internet Explorer on the Mac (version 5.22 and higher)
* Internet Explorer on the PC (version 5.5 and higher)
* Konqueror (all versions)
* Mozilla (all versions)
* Netscape (version 7.1 and higher)
* Opera (version 8.0 and higher)
* Safari (all versions)
Our Urchin browser stats indicate that only 1.3% of my viewers would see the page without styles.
Is what we are doing “wrong” in your opinion?
I’m a little bit confused about the status of Ajax from a web standards perspective. If Ajax is built on JavaScript, and if folks can turn JavaScript off and JS’s implementation is irregular across browsers, how can it be considered “standard” or to be “a standard”?