Three days ago I attended FOWD.
The funny part was when I signed up. I had to choose what I was: designer or developer. And it got me thinking, what am I really? I know that if anyone would ask me, I’d say UI Engineer, cause that’s the […]
Archive for the 'Web trends' Category
It’s been interesting, to say the least. First of all, it was my first time on a boat. So as expected, I was a bit sea-sick.Fortunately one of my colleagues saved me and after one Dramamine(?) and 20 mins later I was already dancing. Secondly, the feeling of the wind running through your hair is […]
Pouring rain down New York City. For one full day already. Around midday as I was admiring the water running down the empty streets who was also stealing the job of the car washers today, I saw a lady with a hooded rain coat, holding the umbrella for the dog that she was walking. At […]
I’ve been reading a while back an article about the so popular concept of “Web 2.0″, written by J. Zeldman in A List Apart. I loved the irony and as much as I admired him before, my admiration increased as I found him expressing the same thoughts that I never took the time or courage to express in writing. Most of all I liked his “I’m cutting out the middleman and jumping right to Web 3.0. Why wait?”
Today while checking back on that article I took a few moments to read the discussion that followed. To my surprise
Personally, I think I’m a pretty open-minded person and I am interested in new trends - if they are related to something constructive. However, some few months ago a new “trend” seemed to invade the world of css coders. The “too cool for IE” thing. It appeared first on a blog and many designers embraced it by the love of Firefox. I won’t go into a Firefox/IE debate (although maybe it would be needed), but I want to discover the reason why all those designers went along with the idea right away.
Let’s see what this “too cool for IE” does. You basically put a badge on your site, stating that it’s too cool for a certain browser.
Quoting from the original article:
“You can go ahead and make the claim that I’m lazy for not supporting Internet Explorer on this site. But as most web designers know, fixing their sites to work the same in every browser is a giant hassle. It seems like almost every time that I go out of my way to do something new and creative using CSS, the whole thing ends up getting thrown out because it would take too much time to make cross-browser compatible and/or often would end up not working at all. ”
Yes, I claim that it makes you plain lazy. You might claim that IE is wrong all that you want. But guess what? Sites are made to function in browsers and not the other way around. You don’t build the site and then adjust the browser to your liking or laziness. Like it or not, good or bad, IE is still one of the most used browsers in the world. Some need it, some got used to it. If you tell your visitor that his browser is wrong, who are they gonna believe? Since you’re not Microsoft or any other big IT corp, I guess the answer is obvious. The visitor’s logics is simple: “I want information and I want it fast, that’s why I’m on the web”. Be sure that no visitor will “take his time” to study Firefox, Mozilla, Opera etc. unless they got too much time on their hands. Remember that a normal visitor will not have the time and will to experiment on browsers as web designers do. So when seeing the coolness badge, the first thought will be “maybe you’re too cool for me too, let’s move on to another site”.
As much as I’d like to see the web as an ever evolving business, I only see involution in this particular trend. It brings back memories of “best viewed with IE” that annoyed me some years ago.
And talking about business, this is bad business by all means. You’ll lose visitors, potential clients, and that means losing money. Are you that rich to be too cool for IE?
Finally, this trend started for the wrong reasons. I would have probably given it some benefits if it was started because of IE security flaws and out of the main concern for the web surfer’s security. Firefox, Mozilla, opera and such are less targeted by attacks, being less popular, therefore they are somehow more secure for the time being. But this thing started because of the problems that IE causes mainly in positioning. Is it the visitor’s fault that IE causes trouble? No, sir. Does he care about it? Again, no. He just wants to get the information. Does he know you? No. Does he know his browser? Well, better than he knows you. You are the coder, you are supposed to make it work in order to give him a good web experience. Just remember that on the web you’re never designing for yourself, but always for the visitors.