pop art

[David Cantrell]

On Wed, Sep 02, 2015 at 04:24:34PM +0100, Jim web wrote:

> The primary point of HTML and webpages has from the start to allow content
> creator to not need to care what browsers/setting/user preferences may be.
> The aim being to provide for the widest range with the least effort.

That certainly used to be the case. It might even still theoretically be
the case according to the w3c, but in practice it isn't.

These days web pages are also a mechanism for delivering applications to
users.

> If you want to go on arguing about this maybe you can say which BBC page
> creators have told you this.

I'm not going to name names because it would be impolite and I can't
remember who said what when in any case, but the job I had before this
one was ... iPlayer.

> > 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.
> Nope.

I see. So you would prefer that Wii users (for example) get ... well,
nothing, because their consoles just crash when they run out of memory.
That is, as Sir Humphrey might say, a brave approach to cross-platform
support. It might be justified if there weren't many of them, but there
are (or at least, there were, my knowledge isn't completely up to date
because I know longer work there). I know there were, because I found
out about just how many complaints we'd got when some of my code broke
iPlayer on the Wii.

> The primary point of HTML markup was

Was. Not is.

-- 
David Cantrell | Bourgeois reactionary pig

  engineer: n. one who, regardless of how much effort he puts in
    to a job, will never satisfy either the suits or the scientists