Best Viewed With

http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/08/08/the-veterans-charge/

“This page best viewed in…”

If that phrase doesn’t provoke a shudder of horror and loathing, it should. It’s the battle cry of the Browser Wars, those terrible and ultimately futile years at the end of the last milennium. It’s the rallying cry of those who would take the open ubiquity of the web and fragment it into a collection of gated communities, where entrance to each is predicated on running a specific browser.

of the "web programmers" and the inability of their For a decade now it's been the trend that every business needs to have a website. At first it was really just the biggest companies. These days it's small businesses and single proprietorships (yes, many businesses are today creating their first websites). When business websites first appeared in the '90s, many of them were browser specific. There was no technical reason for this other than the incompetence of "web programmers" and the inability of their management to evaluate their work.

Amazingly, it's still going on today among new business websites and those of small business in particular. People, please, listen, there is no reason at all that a website can not look nice and function well with all major browsers. Just stay within the widely recognized and very solid and robust standards and you'll be fine.

Managers and business owners, please ask yourself the following questions when your "web programmer" tells you a particular browser is needed. 1) What business are you in? 2) Is the type of computer, browser or operating system someone uses a reason that you'd turn away a customer? Then tell your "web programmer" to get back to work and fix it. Or get someone how can.

PS. I put "web programmer" in quotes because when talking of building websites, there's no such thing.

PPS. Microsoft produces web products, like SharePoint, that need IE. They do not adhere to HTML and related standards. Those products are broken. But it's easy to understand why they do that - they are in the web browser business. Are you?