Crappy websites

[Ardesco]

a serious question

we are about to go into some web development and the issue of which browsers to support is coming up.

firstly what are the most common broswers

secondly why don't people who create new browsers make sure they work with existing websites?

I am not overly techy so a few general ideas would be useful

Ta!

IE
Firefox
Safari
Opera
Google Chrome (which uses webkit so is very very similar to Safari)

New browsers should be written to render HTML as per W3C's recommendations and all should be fine. The problem is half arsed developers who kludge something non-compliant together, hash it to work with IE and then not bother about all other browsers.

[xoggoth]

Basically there is IE and the others. Differences between the others are pretty small.

[DaveB]

Escalate it then. As high as you can go. They should not be taking the pi55 out of a captive market.

Been there, done that. Not going to get it fixed overnight though, or at least in time for me to do what I needed to do this week. In the end it's their loss as we havn't placed business with them and I am now looking for ways around the purchasing agreement so I can order from somewhere else.

[jmo21]

Try these statistics - Firefox 46.6%.

that's the stats for people browsing to the W3 site, which might be a little skewed. Why not find the slashdot stats as well?

[NickFitz]

that's the stats for people browsing to the W3 site, which might be a little skewed. Why not find the slashdot stats as well?

w3schools.com is not "the W3 site" - that's at w3.org. w3schools is a commercial site having no connection with the W3C, full of wretchedly bad "tutorials" that mainly demonstrate the worst way of doing anything. Much of their material is either flawed or downright wrong, except when they copy-and-paste from freely available specifications. They should be avoided like the plague.

I can never understand why people turn to a site like that for information - it's not as if it's hard to find the authoritative sources on things like (X)HTML, CSS, XSLT, PHP, mySQL, ASP.NET, etc. etc.

[AtW]

I can never understand why people turn to a site like that for information - it's not as if it's hard to find the authoritative sources on things like (X)HTML, CSS, XSLT, [/URL]

Those "authoritative sources" write specs in a language that mere mortals have no chance of understanding.

HTH

[Platypus]

that's the stats for people browsing to the W3 site, which might be a little skewed. Why not find the slashdot stats as well?

I've long suspected that the stats for sites which attract "technically savvy" people will have many more FF users than sites which attract Joe Public (where the percentage of IE will be very high).

[jmo21]

I've long suspected that the stats for sites which attract "technically savvy" people will have many more FF users than sites which attract Joe Public (where the percentage of IE will be very high).

this was the only point I was making.

I was referring to the W3 schools site that was linked to and shortened it for the sake of typing.

The point being, a site with techy material, however bad, will have stats skewed more towards FF etc.

[NickFitz]

Those "authoritative sources" write specs in a language that mere mortals have no chance of understanding.

HTH

Hint: if you ask somebody to build you a machine, and they can't understand a technical specification intended for mechanical engineers, you've probably asked the wrong person.

Funnily enough, the same principle applies in many fields. For example, a copywriter who complains that dictionaries are "too hard to understand" may well be able to knock out some copy that appears OK, but one would be entitled to have suspicions concerning its fundamental quality.