Design

Ahem.

Dear freakin’ stupid “web design” morons and your freakish little sycophant buddies,

Please make your pages fail gracefully. Please.

The glorious beauty of the web, the one single cool thing that has enabled all the other cool web things that have happened in the last decade is that it’s based on open protocols and graceful failure. The rule is that if a browser doesn’t understand a certain tag or directive, the browser will quietly ignore that tag or directive. It is therefore the job of the page author to ensure that their content is written in one of those open protocols.

Let me repeat. It is the author’s job to publish the content on the web, and since every single web client out there fails gracefully in the face of unknown tags, it is not my fault that I can’t access your stupid idiotic page because I’m using an Apple, because I don’t use Netscape, or because I don’t update my software. This is not my fault and your stupid please upgrade to a modern browser message has offended me.

If you find yourself writing a server side message blaming me for not being able to read your page, then your page sucks. It is not my job to update to your fancy non-standard screwy content-hiding weirdness. It is your job to make your content available to me.

Do not design by explicit inclusion. Do not start off with Netscape 7 for Windows ME and make it work if and only if the browser calls itself “Netscape 7 for Windows ME.” Do not provide a “you suck” message to any browser that does not identify itself as Netscape 7 for Windows ME.

If you have some sort of content, start off by writing a page containing your content using stock HTML. If you don’t recognize the browser id, then send this stock HTML. You may, at this point, include a small mention that people with your very favorite widget will get a more colorful spray of crap. If you do it this way, then everyone in the goddamn world will be able to read your content. If, having done this, you wish to use some sort of non-standard weirdness based on the browser-id tag, go for it.

To summarize: Anything that claims that it is the client’s fault for not being able to parse the screwy custom funky spray-of-crap-o-matic is wrong and should be destroyed.

Love, F’dm!ts.