October 5, 2002
Sniff my browser.
A couple of additional notes regarding the Getty Images Creative site and their laughingly ineffective browser sniffing and compatibility. It’s obvious that the script being used on the site is aiming specifically at Netscape browsers, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to witness the obfuscation using iCab (view screen dump) either. Does this company test with any other browser beside Explorer? I know they’re a Microsoft shop, dedicated to a fault. Servers, workstations, laptops, backoffice, frontoffice, refrigerators, you name it. But for the love of Pete… Their customers are — by their own recognition in the name of the site — creative. The last time I checked, a significant amount of the creative community used other platforms and — I’m going out on a limb here — perhaps even different browsers than those that ship with that other ubiquitous operating system. To show that I’m not alone in this state of agitation, here’s what Michael McCracken passed along:
“Just thought I’d add an image of the Getty site in OmniWeb (view screen dump), a web browser that is just non-CSS compliant enough to expose whether the designers really tried to make it accessible. I’m glad that people are still talking about the web’s basic browser usability issues — it seemed for a while that people thought the problem was solved, and it clearly isn’t. If browsers weren’t so nonstandard and entrenched, we’d have such an opportunity for new web design, instead of rehashing the old stuff…”
Oh, I’ll keep talking about it. And so will others. For additional laughs, Mr Zeldman points out that Microsoft’s latest redesign is completely unintelligible in Netscape 4.x and Dylan Foley performs a quick tidy just to prove that logic and wisdom could prevail if it really wanted to.
“Here’s a demo page I cooked up, showing how easily some of this could be rectified. In the time it took to drink a cup of coffee, I was able to turn their mishmash of wonky html into an xhtml/css compliant page.”
More details here. Crap, I love this kind of stuff.
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