Light grey screen of mild achiness

February 19th, 2008

Jeff Schiller writes:

It turns out, as Shelley has mentioned, that the best developer experience to work on XHTML is also (by far) Opera. Instead of Firefox’s “yellow screen of death” we’re greeted with Opera’s “light grey screen of mild achiness”. Instead of cryptic messages about unexpected tags, the element which failed to be terminated and the tag that broke the XML parsing are highlighted for you.

Jeff just finished creating a new site design that incorporates XHML+SVG. He also did something I didn't think to do, which was submit a bug to Mozilla for the poor way Firefox manages bad XHTML. Opera really does provide a beautifully graceful way of dealing with bad XML, including an option to re-parse the page as HTML. Even Safari does a better job than Firefox.

Jeff is also using content negotiation with his site, which I don't use with this site. Because of this decision, my stats show that only 3.9% of page accesses are from IE. I do support content negotiation for my topmost site, which is accessed about 39% of the time with IE. However, I have been recently rethinking my decision to use content negotiation.

I run the risk of losing page views by serving pages up as XHTML. At the same time, though, if more of us did this, I wonder how much this would hasten the demise of browsers that don't support what is now a fairly mature standard specification?

Sometimes you have to "break the web" in order to save it.

Comments
1
Bud Gibson - 9:00 am February 19, 2008

Timely note given the latest in "a list apart". My cut is this. You're really choosing your audience by limiting browser support. That's probably appropriate given what seem to be your intentions with at least this blog: speak to a crowd interested in the cutting edge of web standards (I know a 10 year old standard may not seem cutting edge, but still; svg probably is more so).

My use cases for standards tend to be rather different. I'm trying to broaden my audience. Adhering to the widely subset of a standard helps me do that at less cost. Standards also help me make the site more easily processed by machines and search engines.

If you were to switch to that focus, I might read your site more avidly than I do now, and I'm already a pretty avid reader.

2
Shelley - 9:08 am February 19, 2008

Bud, my previous post was on the ALA articles.

My other web sites won't be focused at techs only. That's not the issue, the issue is taking a stand on how far Microsoft can continue to push the web around.

You argue for standards, but the use of the meta tag from Microsoft is contrary to standards.

As for switching my focus so that more people read my site, if I wanted to play that game, I'd follow Scoble and Arrington's leads, and parrot the party line.

I won't be held hostage to a desperate need for eyeballs. Either people like me because of what I write, and who I am, or they don't, in which case they can save their time and toddle off to Techcrunch.

3
Bud Gibson - 9:30 am February 19, 2008

I do now see your previous post, just not in my feed reader, as though it did not exist :).

Shelley, people can want bigger audiences without desiring to become techcrunch. For instance, my audience for one of my outlets is people interested in innovation in Michigan's economy. Those people use a mix of IE and firefox, mostly IE. Can't cut them out.

Whatever happens with IE, I'll probably just have to live with. To be honest though, I expect my bigger concern will eventually be to become mobile enabled.

4
Jeff Schiller - 1:10 pm February 19, 2008

My philosophy is that by making pages prettier/fancier in XHTML+SVG I might be able to convince someone to check it out using a modern browser. The more people that download and try it - the better.

On the other hand, I spent less than an hour making my site render reasonably in IE - not pretty, but at least functional and accessible. And of course I leave that annoying NOTE in there that lets users know of the better alternatives.

Thanks to all those who have contributed to the discussion. Comments are now closed, but you can contact the author of the post directly.

Prev: Microsoft to World: Do as we say.
Next: Shiny, Happy People going to Congress