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Jahn Rentmeister
This page dates back from September 1996, and a lot happened since then. Some changes have been made to this text, especially in the section of examples, where I tried to reflect the changes of the example sites. From my point of view, the state of the web improved a lot since when this article was written, so you might find the discussion exaggerated or unnecessary (which I think it still is not).
You probably have seen it hundreds of times: You follow a link and and arrive at the opening page of the site. The people who have designed that page are probably paid for doing so, and one should expect that they try to raise your interest in their site and to have as wide a readership as possible.
And the first thing that renders on your screen is "Best viewed with Netscape Navigator and 800x600", in big, bright yellow letters on a white background. You can't read it, because you have disabled image loading, so you manually load images to read the message.
The first time this happens, you actually believe it: "There must be a reason why Netscape Navigator on 800x600 pixels is best for this site", you think, resizing your window. Usually, if you know a bit about HTML, the second time you don't believe it anymore.
There are some reasons why you should not optimize your site for a particular setup, let alone demand that your visitors adjust their setup.
There is a saying in marketing (at least in Germany): No one has ever won an argument with a customer. Visitors to your site are your customers, and if you tell them their configuration is not right, you are arguing.
Basically, you are telling people "you are using the wrong
system". This is rude. People are using the systems they
use for a good reason. If you demand the newest Netscape version,
you are telling NextStep users to go play elsewhere. If you demand
certain plug-ins, you are telling all people who are not using
Microsoft Windows to bugger off. If you use extensive graphics
without ALT texts, your site is not a pleasure at
all to people connected via modem. Can you imagine what your boss
will say if you are being rude to customers? Most of the time,
the site owner is the customer of the site designer, and visitors
are customers of the site owner, not of the site designer. Thus,
there is no real need for the site designer to care for the visitors.
He argues with other people's customers. For the customers, however,
it looks like the site owner is arguing. And, as customers usually
do, they will react accordingly.
Most of the time, the whole warning message is not really necessary. It seems as if so-called web designers think they are not being trendy if they don't use the latest extensions, and to show how cool they are, they put this warning on the front page. Some even put it on every page of the site. On many of these sites, there is nothing that could not be viewed with any other graphical browser. Others could even be viewed with lynx, if only the "designer" had not been too lazy to include ALT texts. To state this clearly: If you say "this site optimized for XYZ", this does not say "I am hip and use the latest in technology", but it says "I am either too lazy or too incompetent to design a proper site, but I think it looks cool with XYZ using my setup". I have seen lots of sites. Probably, you have seen lots of them, too. I have seen not a single site that says "for XYZ browsers only" or "you need XYZ for this site" where this made sense. Did you see such a site? There are sites that say "If you want to hear the audio (or view the video), you need XYZ", which makes sense, but sites that simply claim "you need" either are not worth visiting at all or could quite easily be changed to be enjoyable with other browsers.
Even if a site can only be viewed with a certain browser: The only thing this "XYZ only" warning can accomplish is to keep people off your site. This is not what you want, is it? If so, just shut down your site. Usually, people will not install the software that you demand just to view your site. If I visit your site, I will not even adjust my font size. You can argue that most other people are not like me, but you can't prove that, and, even more important, you are arguing with a potential customer.
Last but not least: If your site can not be viewed with text-only browsers, this means blind people can not read it. There are pages that simply can not be prepared for text-only browsers. There is also information that can not be prepared for text-only browsers. (A city plan, for example.) But I bet your information is not of that type.
If you "optimize" your site for a particular Browser, this really means it is "optimized" for a particular Browser with a particular setup. In order to give you an idea of how diverse users and their setups are out there, I will describe some of my own browser configurations here. If you think you already know that this is a wide world, just skip it.
The configuration that many so-called "Web-Designers" assume is: Latest version Netscape on a 800x600 true-colour screen under Windows 95 with ShockWave, TrueAudio, Video for Windows and Quicktime VR installed, font size 12 for Times New Roman and 10 for Courier New, image loading enabled, accepting cookies, connected via a T1 line. What they usually say is "This site best viewed with Netscape and 800x600". Note that my first configuration fits this description.
My first configuration is: Netscape 2.02 on a Windows 3.1 system on a 256 colour 800x600 screen, with the browser window being about 400x600 pixels because I have it cover only half of the screen. Image loading is disabled, and most of the time, document foreground and background colours are overridden by my default (black on grey with blue links). Java and JavaScript are disabled because they are not secure in this browser. The font size is 16, both for fixed (Courier New) and proportional (Times New Roman) font. The browser accepts cookies. There are no plug-ins installed, and I won't install any. The computer is connected to the Internet via a LAN, which is connected via a laser line to a machine that is connected to the Internet. Thus, available bandwidth depends on the weather: With fog or a dove sitting at the wrong place, there might be no bandwidth at all. (I still can send E-mail, though.)
My second configuration is: Lynx 2.4.2 on an AIX rs/6000 system, connected via a vt220 emulation, black text on white background, vi keys enabled.
My third configuration is: Netscape 3.0 on a Sun Solaris system, connected via a low-memory X-terminal (will have to boot if things get too colour intensive), Java enabled, JavaScript disabled. I do not know the resolution, and the browser window covers the right half of the screen. Font size is 18, image loading is usually on.
I do not install browser software myself on any of those systems, so I simply can not "download a REAL browser [tm]". There are sites where I do load images and accept their colour settings, but I have seen sites where you'd better not do that (see examples section).
Like me, many people customize their font sizes to fit their needs. Usually, the standard font sizes are just too small. Therefore, saying a page is "optimized for 800x600" is absolutely pointless if the page consists mostly of text or if image loading is disabled.
People either change their font size to be well readable in a fully maximized window, or they change it to be well readable in their normal window size, which is 400x600 for me. Your page can look totally different with different font sizes and different window sizes. Your information can become unreadable.
The customized font size will especially lead to problems if you use frames or tables with absolute width or height: If these contain text, it will not be readable. There are sites that have frames with absolute dimensions that are not scrollable and contain text. Now, if my standard text size is bigger than assumed, I will not be able to read that text. This leads to the conclusion that you should at most specify one dimension in terms of pixels if the table or the frame contain text. Every frame that contains text should be scrollable. Even then, long words lead to problems.
Also, not knowing the font size of your target system leads to problems with images that consist of text. Many "web designers" seem to think that text has to look exactly as they think it should. Of course, on a high-end system with screen resolutions beyond 1600x1200, the text inside of the images is unreadable. This can become a real problem for people who browse on X-Window terminals. To cite a victim:
"Many sites will provide buttons and other simple text 'widgets' as images. So while I can scale up my fonts if I have trouble reading the text, I'm still stuck with the small text in the images. It's really annoying since they're always text, just dressed up to look more 'professional'."
-- Ian Tester (iteste01@postoffice.csu.edu.au, 94024831@postoffice.csu.edu.au before 2. Feb. 97), who browses using a 1600x1200 screen.
Images take time to load. Most images on the WWW are not worth
it. Therefore, many users disable image autoloading. (If they
want to wait, they'll go to the bus stop, not to your site, because
waiting for the bus does not cost them money.) Your wonderfully
looking site may look like crap then. Or it may still look good.
It depends on you, and there is no reason to stick with the crap.
To start with, it is usually a bad idea to put text into images.
"index page" are only a few bytes, but if you put it
into an image, it's a few KB, and the IMG tag is
a few bytes. If you choose to do it in spite of my advise, at
least include an ALT attribute. It's easy, and maybe
you make some of your potential customers happy by doing so.
If you provide no ALT attributes for images, you
are not only hurting lynx users who can not display inline images.
You are hurting yourself: Those who have image loading disabled
will now need to load the image, because there is no ALT
attribute. The time they spend waiting could be spent better looking
at the information that you provide. This is OK if the image is
part of that information. But if the image is only your logo or
some text put into GIF, an ALT attribute would have
made better use of customer time.
Additional to the ALT text, for users that have image
loading disabled, you should also provide a background colour
in your body tag that is close to the colour of your background
image (if any).
Yes, there are users out there that stick to their own colours for viewing your page. And yes, they do have good reasons to do so: They might be using a B/W screen, or they might be frequently visiting sites that use blue colour for normal text (you don't, do you?), or they might be colour blind, e.g. they can not distinguish green from red, or they are tired of background images that make the text hard to read (like I am). They are still your visitors, your customers, and you should make your pages delightful for them, because you want their attention, their money, their feedback. This means:
<FONT COLOR=...> tags,
because this might accidentally be their background colour, or
may not be distinguishable from that on a B/W screen or to a colour
blind eye.
BODY tag, you have
to provide all colours: Background, link, followed link, active
link, foreground text. You also have to provide all colours if
you mention a background image in your BODY tag.
Your background colour should be close to the colour of your background
image. You have to specify both in case the user has disabled
image autoloading.
If your site relies on Java or JavaScript for essential purposes, you have to be aware that many users disable Java and JavaScript for security reasons. By now, there are no security risks known in the newest Java implementations, but many people use older browsers, don't trust their up-to-date browser or don't want to spend valuable processing time for scrolling tickers and animated advertising.
As an additional note, if you use JavaScript, make sure your code is hidden in comments and does not contain "--" or ">", so older browsers will not display the code. It is not a good idea to make your page unreadable for some users just so that other users can have a "cool" scrolling ticker in their status bar that they don't want. Most JavaScript that you find on the Web is not worth the time it takes to download.
This is not a matter of display, but of functionality: There are
not only browsers that don't support cookies, there are also users
with browsers that support cookies who disable them. There are
several ways to do so. One way is (for Netscape under UNIX) to
link the cookies file to /dev/null. Users might also
configure their Proxy server to strip all cookies. So if your
shopping cart application depends on cookies, perhaps I should
switch to your competitor who uses CGI with GET methods, validates
his HTML according to the HTML 3.2 DTD and supports even lynx.
[Note: as of 1998-04-24, there's HTML 4.0. The argument still holds.
-jr]
OK, so you have listened to me, and you are nearly convinced, but the people who have designed that site (or your site) keep telling you it really should be that way, because:
Are they? Let's for the moment assume that server logs indicate this.
Now, of these "hits", how many did have image loading turned on? Those users that do not turn it on will generate less hits, because they do not "hit" your server for the images. To have valuable numbers, you need numbers about users, not hits. You are not trying to sell your products to hits, are you?
Of those users, how many are using Netscape Navigator, and how many are using Microsoft Internet Explorer (which claims to be "Mozilla", too, just as Netscape does)?
Even if you count users, and even if you carefully distinguish browsers, you can not trust your stats: Of all your users, how many are using Proxy servers? If hundred people using the old AOL-Browser (no table support) look at your page at one day, you will only have one hit for all of them. If every single one of 4.000 students with Internet Access at the University of Münster visits your site, there will be only one hit, too. You have no chance to reliably count your users, except if you fiddle with HTTP headers to "prohibit" caching. If you do so, your pages will take a lot longer to load, and you can be absolutely sure that not all of those 4.000 students will visit your site.
Now, let's assume you took all of this into account, and still, 95% of your users are using Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer. Therefore, you are told, it is perfectly OK to optimize the page. Let's for the moment assume that you can afford to lose 5% of your potential customers - after all there are about 40 million of them out there, so who cares about a few more or less?
These 95% are not a homogeneous class of users: About 30% of them (this share is indicated by server stats as stated by several people on comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html for different sites) will disable image loading. You can't understand why they do that, because you paid a lot of money for the images. But people are diverse: I can't understand why the other 70% don't do the same. Actually, some people hit the STOP button on every page to stop image loading because they don't want to wait that long. So, if you do not want to lose those 30%, you have to make your site readable for Netscape and Internet Explorer even without images. Knowing this, have you ever looked at your site with image autoloading disabled? Or did you only see it on a demo system, where the pages were read from local disk?
In the following paragraphs, I will give some numbers that are rough estimates by me ("wild guesses"). If you think they are not accurate, I agree. If you can provide more accurate numbers, I will be happy to correct mine. I am sure that the argument formed will still hold. Don't quote me on the numbers, quote me on the fact that there are significant shares of users with systems of the various kinds:
Of the 95% you decided to aim at, at least 10% do not have a screen resolution of 800x600 or bigger. Another 5% do have that screen resolution, but do not usually have their browser window cover the whole screen. Another ~30% do have more than 800x600, and another share has set their font size so they can read it conveniently, so optimizing for their screen size does not work, either. This leaves you with far less than 50% of your "Netscape and compatible"-users if you optimize for 800x600 screen resolution. You probably can not afford that.
You are told that you need some nifty graphics and scripting. As we have decided, 95% of people use Netscape and MSIE anyway, and they both support this cool plug-in for realtime audio and video. You have tested this from a local disk file and you were quite impressed. But, being suspicious, you want to know how many of your users can actually benefit from this. "No problem, just include a link to the download site for the software, and all will be able to use it."
Well, all that run MS Windows, because it is not available for other systems yet. But hey, that's about 90% of the people, so you still have about 80% left. Unfortunately, many of them use modems at speeds of 28.800 baud or even (gasp!) 14.400 baud to connect to the internet. And no, it does not help if you are connected with 45 MBit - the whole audio and video has be sent over the modem connection. Naturally, not all of your potential customers want to hear your company jingle, so many just won't bother and simply ignore your pricey site flavoring. I will be among them, because I have no sound card on one computer, no windows drivers for the card on another, and the speakers connected to the sun station I occasionally use are located in an entirely different building than my X-terminal, so I won't hear your company jingle except over the PC speaker - I better sing it myself. Maybe some of your customers will actually download your multimedia enhancements. After all, it is essential information - isn't it? It is probably exactly what you wanted to provide to your customers, and if the Internet did not exist, you would have to send it to them via normal mail, like you did with your catalogs in the past.
Of "your" 95%, some are tired of watching those "get a REAL browser" messages whenever a new megabyte-munching killer application is released, and they therefore only use the latest in technology. Unfortunately, if your pages were optimized to a particular version of a particular browser, they might not be able to view it, because browsers change. Your pages that looked so nice may fail to work on a new release. And your JavaScript for Netscape 2.02 that contained the frame hack gives an error Message on Netscape 3.0.
Fortunately, the same people whom you have paid to build these pages will gladly fix them if you provide the necessary funds. They will even re-optimize your site for the new browser "generation" (they prefer to call it "generation", where others simply say "release"), and they will do so with almost no additional charge. Of course, having this much to do writing HTML, they do not find the time to view it with other browsers or setups than their own, let alone validate it against a DTD. But hey, 95% of all people are using that browser, anyway.
Note that we have not yet discussed the possibility that some of your customers might use an outdated Browser version. I for one use Netscape 2.02 (or lynx 2.4.2, which is equally outdated - get lynx 2.6 NOW!). [Note: as of 1998-04-24, lynx 2.8 is out. -jr]
This is not true. There are ALT-attributes to the IMG tag, and there are ALT-attributes to client-side image maps. I see only two reasons why someone would want to maintain two versions:
If you do not know how to write correct, scalable, working HTML, maybe it is time for you to download a REAL HTML reference, if not for yourself, then for your WWW-designers.
There are two kinds of examples:
There are examples of sites that provide useful information, but this information is not as accessible as it could be. To each of those sites, I have sent E-mail messages stating the problems I see. This is not a "Netscape hall of shame" or something like that. It is a list of sites that I wish had used proper techniques to produce customer delight, because I as a customer would like to be delighted.
There are also examples in here of sites that really need to demand a certain browser characteristic to provide their information. This is no extensive list. It is only a list of examples that I use to prove my point.
There are no examples in here that demand a special browser in order to be "cool" without the information requiring it. I.e., there are no typical "Netscape hall of shame" entries here.
With some simple changes, it could become a wonderful site for all graphical browsers, even if image-loading was off, and even for lynx. These changes are to include ALT-attributes and to provide decent link and background colours, and some minor other things on some pages. This site provides real, interesting information. It is http://www.earlyamerica.com/. I do not know whether they now use ALT attributes. If they do, feel free to view it with lynx, the information is worth it (Imagine: I even enabled image loading for it!), and there is no reason to exclude lynx users from it. You will miss out the audio if you lack the appropriate software.
This warning was the first thing that rendered of the page. The
site used blue for normal text and dark grey for links. On a light
grey background. Thank god I have 256 colours, because on a 16
colour screen I would not have been able to read the text. That
would have been a pity, because it was a good laugh. This site
was designed by so-called "professionals". That was
a good laugh, too. (Note to protect the innocent: Both design and designer
changed since this was written) From my point of view, it was best viewed with
"lynx -dump > /dev/null", but that's
just my personal opinion.
They reacted quite fast after they were notified of the problem. The grey text on grey background was removed. Other things stayed, but it is the site owner's decision, not mine. Well, maybe you will like to visit http://www.eisenbahn.com/. To be honest, I had hoped this site stays like it was when I first visited it, because it was such a wonderful example. It didn't, so you will not see what I saw. This is an example that site designers listen to complaints and act on them. So if there is something that you dislike about a site, tell the people who make it. If they want their information to come through, they will listen, because you are their target. If you don't tell people what's wrong, they won't be able to fix it.
This page does not bear a big red warning message "you need Java to view this page". It only does so if your browser does not have Java support. This is an interactive city plan. It is real useful information, and it can not be provided in HTML in a proper fashion. Though it could be provided using image maps, the performance of this would be too bad for it to be usable. It is at http://www.koeln.org/mapview/
OK, if you are not convinced yet: Imagine that I am your customer. I have half an hour of time, and I plan on visiting your site during that. I won't tell you which browser I use and what the preferences are. Are you going to welcome me in a pleasant manner, or are you going to tell me that I am not cool enough to be your customer? Also, I have only 20 $ left. I can spend them on phone and online costs, or I can spend them on your products. Which alternative do you prefer?
Even if you don't need me as a customer: If your Internet presence convinces me of the advantages of your product, I might recommend it to others - but I need to have information for that. I won't recommend your product because your web site looked so nice. Not even if your product is a software for creating websites.
rentmei@uni-muenster.de © Jahn Rentmeister
Copyright © 1996-2003. GoodPractices. All rights reserved. Custom Website Design.