I have a question about computers. You keep posting on your website that your browser is not supported by places on the internet. Why is it? I know you have the most recent stuff. Is it because you have Apple and everybody else has PC? Or what? Sorry, I don’t understand.
Here’s how the web works, to a first approximation.
* My computer says to a server somewhere in the world: “Hello, I’m a somthing-computer, running some-program. I would like this-web-page.”
* The server sends back a document based on those three pieces of information.
In the early days, the first two pieces of information (type of computer, type of program) were totally ignored. Authors created single web pages that they tested as best they could, and shipped the pages off to whoever asked for them.
I think that the first real break point was with “frames.” Some versions of web browsers started to support having various “panes” in a single page, each pane containing a different document. The old browser versions, obviously, had never supported this and still didn’t. Page authors wanted to use frames, but their pages would not look right at all on browsers that didn’t support this new format.
At this point authors started to test that “type of web browser” field to see if the person on the other end would get content or garbage when they sent the “frame-enabled” version of their page. Some authors took the time to make a non-frames version in addition to the frames one. Most simply put up a message saying “sorry, this page won’t work for you, you can’t see the frames content.”
At this point it’s evolved into a quality control issue: Web designers get paid to make their customer’s sites look good. Therefore, they test out the site on as many browsers as they can find. They then explicitly program in “okay” for the browsers that they tested, and provide a message to the others saying (in effect) “I don’t know whether or not your browser is going to work with my page, so I’m not going to take the chance that it’ll work-halfway and look like crap.” That’s fine. It’s when they assume that it’s my fault for having an *old* browser (rather than a new one that’s so cool that they couldn’t get their hands on it) that I hit the ceiling.
Some authors deliberately close off access to all except their favorite browser (AOL owns Netscape. AOL’s “you’ve got pictures” only works with Netscape). That irks me even more.
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