Such a Waste
So while I was looking for something (specific) to quote for an early-morning post on the OSU-Michigan game, I found another “Full Cleveland” programming job at a local TV station’s web site. If you’re on a Mac, you get this screen:
Under the hood, I found a nasty little piece of JavaScript that essentially said this: “if the visitor is not a Mac, and is not IE3 or is not IE4, and the browser is not Netscape or Netscape 6, tell them that ‘This feature is not supported for your system configuration.’ and ‘Please click here to upgrade your browser.’
Let me see here… Outside of the fact that this is a canned script written in 2001…
Now should I use Firefox 2, released October 2006, or use Netscape 6 (released in 2002 and re-released 4 months later as version 6.22, and 4 months after that, again, as version 7)…
A two-week-old browser — or a 4-year-old browser that nobody uses? I’m supposed to make a choice here?
By the way, this page fails in every Mac browser in OS X. Using JavaScript isn’t practical, useful or even warranted in this situation: a far, far better solution would be to use PHP or .ASP scripting to address this situation — and the site is coded in .ASP!
Browser sniffing with JavaScript is just begging for trouble: some people surf with JavaScript turned off. Others use a browser that properly respects the DOM, and they get garbage just like this. Not to mention that there are also far more recent scripts that take advantage of current browser DOM quirks than this freely available all over the net; this is really more about lazy programming than anything else.
It’s about accessibility; it’s also about usability: consider Target.
And I have a hard time believing that WOIO doesn’t get Mac users on their site — at least not enough to warrant coding for them.
Wait a minute, let me rethink that: maybe it means that Mac users are too smart to consider going there in the first place — consider the content.
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