On 12/07/2016 02:52 AM, Richard Hector wrote:
On 07/12/16 14:42, Jape Person wrote:I'll never forget hearing someone trying to prop an early version of Netscape up by saying that it was a good browser *because* it failed on badly written pages.It shouldn't crash, of course, but I think the web would be a much nicer place if browsers just refused to render broken pages, rather than potentially displaying them in a misleading way.
I don't disagree. But it kind of depends on the "message". I have more sympathy for a "cause" site that's having issues because the unpaid, unschooled Web designer just screwed up a table than I have for a commercial site that's causing a browser seizure because the designer tried to put 240 ads on one page.
If the message is important, the browser needs to present it to the user.But commercial Web sites these days are their own worst enemy. I can't tell you how many sites I've blacklisted because they exasperated me enough to cause my (figurative) trigger finger to start itching.
My favorite is the site that's trying to sell me something, but which makes the process so arduous because of all of the popups I have to dismiss or illogical link loops that I have to traverse that I finally just close the browser and buy from someone else. That's happened to me twice lately. I'm looking at you Dell and HP. (And these two are far from the worst offenders.)
If browsers were to be designed to refuse to display junky pages, it would also be nice if they could somehow send data about that failure to the site owner -- perhaps through judicious use of whois(?).
If browsers of that type launched a daily DDoS of sorts on the site owners' mailboxes with complaints about their crappy sites, maybe a few of them would fix their monstrosities. But I've written many sites personally and have received only one or two replies in decades.
That's one of the reason I'm sad xhtml seems to have been at least partly abandoned - the rules of xml say you should just give up if it isn't valid. That would mean web devs would have to fix their mess. Richard
I fear that browsers which refused to display the crapola would simply not be used by the masses. Most people just don't care about (or are oblivious to) the junkiness of our environment.
Every day I see people fiddling with "smartphones" instead of taking care of business (or just staying alive on the road). If you ask those people what they're doing, they'll tell you that they're taking care of business. But what they're really doing is swiping repeatedly with their fingers to try to get a badly designed, recalcitrant user interface to launch their gee-gaw ap.
I spent well over thirty years threatening dismemberment to people who tried to touch my visual interface. Now the single most "important" gadget in the lives of most people is a device which requires the user to smudge that interface. To this curmudgeon, someone who fiddles with one of these gadgets while s/he's missing the ballgame looks like an idiot.
We've always been the same. Far too many of us are easily distracted by irrelevant detritus. Sixty years ago practically every roadside in the country was plastered with billboards. People were dying on occasion because they were turning their heads to read the cute little serial Burma Shave signs. (They were kind of like the road sign equivalent of a popup.)
Lady Bird Johnson made it her mission in life to clean up our "user interface". She did a nice job of it, but we've recently started letting the sign-makers encroach on the environment again. Bless you Lady Bird. I love you for trying.
We'll never learn. ;-)