16 Aug
2004
16 Aug
'04
11:48 a.m.
It was thus said that the Great Jerome H. Fine once stated:
I have 2 questions:
Based on the information on the error page, would a normal user
be ALSO expected to look at the "required browsers" link when
the specific naming of Netscape 4.x was (and still was when this
post was made) displayed as an acceptable browser when I
forgot to turn cookies ON?
Sounds like they didn't keep all the pages up in sync, which is all too
easy to happen (happened with my site [1] and it's a relatively small site
of only a few hundred pages [2]); with larger sites it wouldn't surprise me
at all if there are whole sections "forgotten about" sitting there, for the
most part dorment except for the stray user or two. You'd think going
through the logs files would show them this, but that may be too much data
to process for such things [3].
Could the company have continued to allow users access
to the
web site under Netscape 4.78 by the expedient of NOT
providing those users the additional features that users of
Netscape 7.0 and later are provided? NAMELY, do the
fellows setting up the program have the ability to check as to
which version of Netscape is being used and could the program
have retained the old code for those users who stayed with
Netscape 4.78 and used to new code for those users who
shifted to Netscape 7.0 and later?
As mentioned elsewhere, this gets expensive. I know that I myself decided
not to support Netscape 4x anymore. Granted, I went out of my way to keep
Netscape 4x from crashing when visiting my site [5] but a Netscape 4x user
is going to have an experience right out of 1993 viewing my site [6]. If
Netscape 4 just had better support for CSS (or just plain wouldn't crash in
the presense of CSS) ...
-spc (Basically, the only thing claiming to be Netscape 4x are mostly web
crawlers ... )
[1] http://www.conman.org/
[2] Except for http://boston.conman.org/ and
http://literature.conman.org/bible/ which consist of several million
pages (theoretical) but they are dynamically generated from
templates so it's not that much of an issue.
[3] A friend of mine worked at a site (the second largest sports
oriented site behind ESPN) where it took over 20 hours to process
the web logs for the previous day. Not month; not week; *DAY!* I'm
sure cleaning up 404s [4] is not high on their priority list,
especially given the number of virii, worms and hack attempts that
inflate such figures.
[4] Page not found.
[5] Netscape 4x is notorious for its hideous support of CSS.
[6] http://www.flummux.org/screenshots/old.school.gif for Netscape 4x
http://www.flummux.org/screenshots/new.school.gif for Mozilla
