Re: Point of order!

> From:	Scott E. Lee [SMTP:sandman_001@netzero.net]
> 
> Demand creates supply.  That I get.  But thinking that the big guys will
> buy
> into new technologies or code styles that may not be viewable by millions
> is a
> risky proposition at best.  As a designer, you would have to maintain
> backward
> compatible pages for the "Mom and Pops" out there that either don't know
> how, or
> don't want to upgrade for whatever reason.  Does that make it easier on
> the
> designer?
> 
[DJW:] Except for a few well known and venerable sites, most
e-commerce sites are written only to work for people with all
the latest technology gimmicks installed and enabled, although
that's really more for the w3c-wai-ig@w3.org list.  (The 80:20
rules currently tends to dictate extensive scripting work rounds
for NS4.)

Performance doesn't seem to be a significant issues for most
e-commerce sites, otherwise they would be making much heavier
use of style sheets and optimised images.  My impression is that
design is driven by people who want to out gimmick the competition,
but know nothing about the medium other than the results their
competitors achieve with it, in combination with authors who
know what they need to know to sell to that sort of patron and
see no duty to educate.

Client side includes only impact performance, so I can't imagine
much market pressure for them.  Market pressure is for things 
like animation.

For similar reasons I can't believe that commercial web sites
are concerned about bandwidth costs.  Not only do they use bloated
HTML, but they defeat caching mechanisms designed to save 
bandwidth.
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>

Received on Wednesday, 7 February 2001 15:07:16 UTC