pop art

[David Cantrell]

On Tue, Sep 01, 2015 at 06:38:15PM +0100, Jim web wrote:
> In article <20150901164651.GE9945 at bytemark.barnyard.co.uk>, David Cantrell
> <david at cantrell.org.uk> wrote:
> > On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 09:53:49AM +0100, Jim web wrote:
> > > FWIW and IMHO The problem is that the BBC pages are generated by
> > > people who have no clue about using simple basic HTML and take for
> > > granted what browsers. etc, people will use.
> > This is not the case. They have clue, but they think that supporting the
> > 99.9% of people who use something vaguely modern is more important than
> > catering for people who deliberately crippled their own experience.
> Well, this isn't the place to argue about it at length. But in fairness the
> people I know at the BBC simply aren't that deberately arrogant.

There's nothing arrogant about it. They want to provide the best service
they can to the vast majority of users, within the constraints imposed
by their budget and rights ownership etc. That means that they have to
make choices about which platforms get the most attention, which get
some attention, and so on. They might not phrase it like I did when
speaking to the public, but that *is* what they think.

>                                                                  However I
> don't know if the relevant people simply don't realise that many may choose
> to disable JavaScript, etc, for various reasons.

They realise. They just don't think that that tiny handful of people is
worth putting much effort into. There are no good reasons these days to
turn Javascript off globally, as modern browsers allow you to, eg, turn
it off by default but back on for trusted sites such as the BBC.

And if you have deliberately turned it off (either by configuration or
by using some hopelessly crippled browser that doesn't implement it),
then that's your choice. The BBC can't take account of every possible
weird thing that users do. You might as well complain that you can't
watch the TV because you chose to glue some socks to the screen.

> It also fails to deal with factors like sending page layout, etc, designed
> for phones to desktop machines.

I presume you would agree that it is a Good Thing to try to send
appropriate stuff to the various different platforms? Well, that means
that they have to somehow detect what your platform is. That they get it
wrong for some really obscure platforms is to be expected.

The alternative would be to send absolutely everything for every
platform to all devices, and not care that some are bandwidth
constrained and others which have lots of users are severely lacking in
CPU grunt or memory. That would, of course, mean that the site would no
longer work on some fairly mainstream devices, all so that it works for
you.

-- 
David Cantrell | Bourgeois reactionary pig

You don't need to spam good porn