Gray's Matter - The web site scalability problem (Justice Gray's blog)

Coding Horror talks about Robert Scoble's "irrational" desire for extreme web site portability.

Sure, I think that support for 17,000 different resolutions is a little bit nuts; but being able to have a couple of default "mobile" settings for pages might not be too out of line. This reminds me of when I used to see "This site is optimized to work with Internet Explorer only", which in many cases really meant, "Our web designers are *really* lazy and can't be bothered making this standards-compliant".
This isn't to say that there sometimes aren't reasons for picking IE, particularly if you are delivering a specialized web app for limited sale vs. a content site like IGN or something that will normally be seen
from many browsers. I would say that having a non-functional website in Firefox gives a terrible impression most of the time. Anyone remember the initial Windows Live demo?

I'm not saying that site designers who do not provide a mobile layout for their users are lazy; but I do think it is something that people should take into mind more as mobile Internet picks up speed. Of course, many sites also do a piss-poor job of being accessible for the disabled; I wish Scoble would start carrying that torch.

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Comments [2] Technical |

1/24/2006 9:03:08 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

The worst I think, when Microsoft has a web site that doesn't work with IE, but works with firefox
Do you remember Justice the site I pointed out to you, http://channel9.msdn.com.
They have videos on the website, and they have picture from the video, and underneath the picture there is a button "watch the video"
for a long time, on IE, the picture was overlapping the button, so I couldn't press the button.
I tried it from my home computer, my work computer, your computer, and any computer, and it was the same
but it was working in firefox
it is solved now, but it was dysfunctional for almost 4-5 months

ghassan

1/24/2006 10:00:21 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

I definitely remember that - it was ridiculous! Even worse was the fact it took them 5 months to fix.

Microsoft is a weird egg. I can see why many web designers don't like them very much. Sites work in IE but not in another browser, sites work in Firefox but then crash in IE (which is *insane*)! It's tougher when you've got 100,000 sub-sites like MS does, but even so - surely there are some minimum standards.

Justice

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Justice Gray: a seething cauldron of rampaging masculinity. A fighter! A brother! Your secret lover! He's also a software development consultant and the Vice President of the Edmonton .NET user group. He also greatly enjoys speaking about himself in the 3rd person.

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