10/09/08
13Capability, not Popularity
Bruce Lawson recently brought to our attention the UK government’s Browser Standards Draft 0.13. Basically, the draft recommends using browser popularity (2% or more usage), rather than capability, as the criteria for choosing which one to support. I really hope they rethink this for future drafts. As a user of ‘minority’ browsers (definitely plural) I hate being dictated to about what I should use – if my browser is capable, that should be enough.
It isn’t clear how the supported browser list would be enforced, but I’m concerned that this approach will encourage browser sniffing, a move that will exclude browsers like Omniweb, Shiira and iCab, simply because their name isn’t ‘Safari’. They share the exact same rendering engine, and therefore require no further testing. You can be more inclusive without spending any extra resources, just by taking a different approach – one that isn’t based on statistics. Inclusivity is very important for the public sector, the draft itself says so!
To me, Yahoo got it spot on with their Graded Browser Support guidelines. The draft links to that article, but seems to ignore it for the most part.
If you only support certain browsers, then your website statistics will only enforce that, and not tell the true story of people trying to use the sites concerned. After all if a site only supports IE for example, then the ‘statistics’ are bound to show that to be the dominant browser.
If you feel the same way, please send polite feedback. After all, we are being consulted on this, and hopefully will be listened to.
Tags: browsers, webstandards
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Stephen Hill said 119 days ago:
I couldn’t agree more with your conclusion.
Also, who’s browser usage statistics would you use as a basis for browser discrimination?
Paul D. Waite said 119 days ago:
I’m a bit iffy about the idea of browser support. I don’t think it works at the scale of the web.
Hence web standards. Support standards, because they change much more slowly than browsers.
Alex Young said 119 days ago:
This seems like one of those ideas that seems logical on the surface but hasn’t really been explored properly.
Even though they should change this recommendation it’s probably worth noting that many (recent) public service websites are relatively simple and have some efforts toward accessibility.
Paul D. Waite said 118 days ago:
And in support of my idea that supporting browsers doesn’t scale for the web, I cite the endless ballet of user-agent string versus web developers:
History of the browser user-agent string
Uncle Asad said 117 days ago:
The really unfortunate thing about Yahoo’s Graded Browser Support is that it’s just that: still hung up on particular browsers. That fixation, in turn, allows (and even encourages) Yahoo properties and others who follow those guidelines to continue sniffing browsers rather than looking at rendering engines and versions or even testing for features. bugzilla.mozilla.org is full of problems with Yahoo properties sniffing for specific browser names and denying entry to other Gecko browsers with the same Gecko version, which makes it pretty clear that Yahoo is still thinking in terms of browsers.
Until places like Yahoo that are held up as shining examples of “doing the right thing” are actually doing the right thing, the web will continue to be plagued by broken copycat guidelines like your UK government’s and by ridiculous browser user-agent strings that will only become worse than those illustrated by Mr Waite in comment 4.
To pervert a phrase from a notable American politician, “It’s the rendering engine, stupid.”
Tim Wright said 116 days ago:
“if my browser is capable, that should be enough”
IE6 is a perfectly capable browser. In that same theme, what isn’t a capable browser? Does that mean it crashes all the time?
Jon Hicks said 116 days ago:
That’s where we differ! IE6 is a not very capable browser that sadly we have to support.
“what isn’t a capable browser” – one that doesn’t support standards…
Brad said 115 days ago:
In this era of safari, chrome, Opera, IE 6-8, firefox, ECMA Script Harmony, Adobe Air, SWF-indexing, Android, Symbian, and Wii, who among us really thinks that we are really moving away from browser-sniffing? We all smell it, but ever since WASP (c. 2003) we’ve been ignoring it. “To hell with bad browsers” and all that, y’know.
Unfortunately, that’s never been a realistic mantra. I can still remember the front page of ala.com from ’05 (http://alistapart.com/issues/198/). The sad truth is that the big browser/web companies have only ever paused their covert ops when business was bad and they could no longer afford it. In these high times, we are looking at olefactory overload when it comes to browser sniffing.
I still think the best route is capability-sniffing. Draw a circle around the features that you can find in common and only build your apps within that circle. IE6-proofing may be a horribly specialized and arcane bit of wizardry, but I’m sure that it won’t be the only cottage industry spun out of the explosion of browsers and platforms that we are lucky(?) enough to be experiencing. Any of the capability outliers such as safari-iphone-make-hidden-apple-system-call() will have to be relegated to the barbarians. Rah!
pbhj said 114 days ago:
@Brad: “Draw a circle around the features that you can find in common and only build your apps within that circle.”
Not heard of progressive enhancement / graceful degradation?
@Tim: “IE6 …”
Seriously? Capable of what, taking the standards compliant rendering and screwing it up?!
@Alex : “ … many (recent) public service websites are relatively simple and have some efforts toward accessibility.”
This was what I intended to comment on. They should have a UK Gov. website standard CMS, like a hardened Wordpress. The websites by definition are just informational sites, they have largely the same needs, etc.. They could have a kick-ass CMS for all the money that is spent in the thousands of different councils/governmental groups/&c. with built in standards compliance a wide testing base, greater focus on accessibility. Also there’d could be a uniformity of style to give a properly branded network of gov sites.
Assuming the security is done right, bad idea?
Mustafa said 114 days ago:
Id be up for a GOV’T CMS would help out third sector designers a hell-of-a-lot
Brad said 113 days ago:
@pbhj: “Not heard of progressive enhancement / graceful degradation?”
Yeah, but in this brave new world, we have enhancements like css-transforms and <video> tags. How do you gracefully degrade a spinning, revolving video, if for some unfathomable reason your website requires one? And how do you maintain that graceful degradation over time? Its one thing to build a movie site and hand it over to the studios. Its another thing entirely when you have keep streaming government CCTV accessible and reliable.
Derek Nelson said 111 days ago:
My major concern with this proposal isn’t the percentage game it’s playing, its more the perspective it takes to address the issue. In particular, the throw away paragraph of:
“However, it is widely accepted that sites conforming to open web standards such as XHTML and CSS are more likely to work well across a wide range of browsers.”
Imho, this should be the key message of a browser support document. As Jon rightly points out, websites written to current web standards will work across almost all of the modern, compliant browsers regardless of their usage percent.
As a public-sector employee and a freelance designer, this is the approach I take. I have recently blogged a browser support policy on my own site where I state that I’ll support the last two releases of the major browsers when designing a site. The exception, as always, being IE6. As much as I want this to go away it won’t for a while yet. However, I do state:
“I should point out that there are a great number of browsers out there that support web standards-based design. While not specifically listed in the support agreement, there will be no extra charge for these browsers as my websites should render properly on them.”
http://www.rednests.com/2008/08/supported-browsers-policy.html
I see this also being the case for the new North Lanarkshire website. While, we will be testing on the last two versions of the major browsers on the most used operating systems, we will make sure the website is written to web standards where it is within our control to do so. We have just went through the process of acquiring a new CMS. The key factor of this process was to make sure it fully supported web standards.
We all have our favourite browsers for many different reasons, web standards are the lowest common denominator that celebrates this diversity. If we push them then there may come a day when browser support issues are a thing of the past. Hey, I can dream…
Brad said 105 days ago:
Check out the latest from ALA on capabilities sniffing.
http://alistapart.com/articles/testdriven