It is wrong to support old browsers because it makes wikipedia maintainance more crufty and difficult.
Theres 3 main cases where someone has an old browser:
They are in the first world environment: 1) are completely clueless 2) are part of the digital divide (eg old, and hence somewhat clueless) or 3)They are in the third world.
The majority of people in the first world are not those who we need care about whatsoever, as its very easy for them to seek out help (remember, linux is free, get a live CD; boot it, run wikipedia...)
Third world however, is the most important area to focus on.
Now, the ONLY reason these people are running an old browser is because they are running windows.
Thus, we should tell them to run linux. Its the ONLY viable solution for running an up to date OS on legacy hardware.
Now, if they have internet connection, i dont care where they are, they are within physical distance of someone with more of a brain than they have (namely the ISP staff). Either one of these people will be able to install linux.
You see, these 3rd world herd humans that are not able to figure out how to run something other than NS3/IE2.0 ... were somehow able to figure out how to get a windows box. Thus, we know that they arent incapable of doing ...things.
Thus, if they breath, and are poor we advise them to run linux. its better for us, and it will domino be better for them and then us...and so forth.
this really isnt worth discussion: rectify quietly and efficiently.
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--- Hunter Peress hfastjava@yahoo.com wrote:
It is wrong to support old browsers because it makes wikipedia maintainance more crufty and difficult.
Disagree. We should try to support all browsers, all computer architectures, all people.
It's not good to force people upgrade.
--Optim
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Optim optim81@yahoo.co.uk writes:
Disagree. We should try to support all browsers, all computer architectures, all people.
Sure. But what really important is to serve conforming HTML or XHTML code. If a user claims to use NS 3 we should serve HTML 2.0, if he uses Mozilla 1.3 he can expect HTML 4.01 or XHTML
It's not good to force people upgrade.
It is the user's responsibility to use a browser which can deal with conforming HTML.
Hi,
On Monday 23 February 2004 23:04, Optim wrote:
--- Hunter Peress hfastjava@yahoo.com wrote:
It is wrong to support old browsers because it makes wikipedia maintainance more crufty and difficult.
Disagree. We should try to support all browsers, all computer architectures, all people.
It's not good to force people upgrade.
A line has to be drawn somewhere. It's impossible to support all/all/all. Now, where that line should be drawn is a subject of hot debate :)
(personally, I think a site should conform to current accepted and implemented standards such as xhtml 1.1, css1/2, svg, etc. and not worry too much about browsers that don't render those well (as opposed to not at all, in which case a transformation to plaintext may be needed as an alternative). If trying to stay backwards compatible means making compromises for the majority of users, it's not worth it IMHO.)
Wikipedia runs reasonable well on everything I've tried and use, so the status quo ain't that bad :)
ttyl, Eike
"EF" == Eike Frost wikipedia@kefro.st writes:
EF> A line has to be drawn somewhere. It's impossible to support EF> all/all/all. Now, where that line should be drawn is a subject EF> of hot debate :)
Well, for read-only browsing, MediaWiki uses:
* Paragraphs * Italic * Bold * Links * Images
I think HTML 2.0 or above should handle these. For Wiki participation, and searching, we use:
* HTML forms
Which I think is also in HTML 2.0.
MediaWiki markup can produce tables, so we also need to support tables. Tables come in some time around HTML 3.0, I believe.
We use cookies for authentication. To have a user account, you need cookies. That's an HTTP thing, and I have no clue when Netscape and buddies started the whole shebang. Netscape 3.0, I think? Anyways, HTTP/1.1 supports cookies, but lots of HTTP/1.0 processors also support cookies as a custom extension.
Pretty much none of the Javascript, CSS, or what have you are necessary for using Wikipedia. They make things look nicer, or easier, but they're not mainline crucial.
Anyways, if I was going to do a formula, I'd say:
HTML 2.0 (Base) Tables Cookies
...should be enough to make you a constructive participant in MediaWiki wikis. Yeah, that sets the bar pretty damn low, I know.
~ESP
Eike Frost wrote:
A line has to be drawn somewhere. It's impossible to support all/all/all. Now, where that line should be drawn is a subject of hot debate :)
In a sense you're right. It'd be silly, as someone pointed out, for us to try to support proprietary extensions to HTML from Netscape 3.0 which eventually went away. But if current modern standards-based web pages break an old browser, we can at least try to send those browsers a very simple plaintext page.
(personally, I think a site should conform to current accepted and implemented standards such as xhtml 1.1, css1/2, svg, etc. and not worry too much about browsers that don't render those well (as opposed to not at all, in which case a transformation to plaintext may be needed as an alternative).
What I'd say is that Wikipedia is the sort of site that is 99% usable even in an extremely plaintext layout. Very simple html does a passable job of rendering article text. So if we hear that the site sucks in some frightening old browser, it is a valid option to just serve that browser a very simple plaintext version.
--Jimbo
Hunter Peress wrote:
Theres 3 main cases where someone has an old browser: 3)They are in the third world.
The only reason a country is in the third world is because they are completely clueless. Why waste time on that?
Or is there something wrong with this kind of argument? Perhaps it is the other way around: The only reason some websites fail to support old browsers is because the maintainers are completely clueless.
Poor people have poor ways.
Fred
From: Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se Reply-To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@Wikipedia.org Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2004 00:44:03 +0100 (CET) To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@Wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: User-agent block list & Netscape 3
Hunter Peress wrote:
Theres 3 main cases where someone has an old browser: 3)They are in the third world.
The only reason a country is in the third world is because they are completely clueless. Why waste time on that?
Or is there something wrong with this kind of argument? Perhaps it is the other way around: The only reason some websites fail to support old browsers is because the maintainers are completely clueless.
-- Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se/
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Lars Aronsson wrote:
Hunter Peress wrote:
Theres 3 main cases where someone has an old browser: 3)They are in the third world.
The only reason a country is in the third world is because they are completely clueless. Why waste time on that?
Or is there something wrong with this kind of argument? Perhaps it is the other way around: The only reason some websites fail to support old browsers is because the maintainers are completely clueless.
If I understand Lars remarks here, I agree with him. Contempt towards people with older browsers is completely inconsistent with our mission. There are of course limits to what we can do, but even so...
Certainly the suggestion that if people are on old computers with old software, we should not support them, but instead tell them to upgrade to Linux is a wildly impractical suggestion.
--Jimbo
On Feb 29, 2004, at 07:20, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Lars Aronsson wrote:
Hunter Peress wrote:
Theres 3 main cases where someone has an old browser: 3)They are in the third world.
The only reason a country is in the third world is because they are completely clueless. Why waste time on that?
Or is there something wrong with this kind of argument? Perhaps it is the other way around: The only reason some websites fail to support old browsers is because the maintainers are completely clueless.
If I understand Lars remarks here, I agree with him. Contempt towards people with older browsers is completely inconsistent with our mission. There are of course limits to what we can do, but even so...
FWIW, our actual practice has been to try to avoid *outright breaking* older browsers, although we don't go to great lengths to accommodate their every quirk.
So, Netscape 4.x no longer crashes when visiting http://en.wikipedia.org/, but it doesn't look as pretty as we might like.
Browsers that break edits over 32k aren't blocked from editing, but we do have a warning on long pages.
Browsers that break non-ASCII characters during editing aren't blocked from editing, they just annoy us greatly. :)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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