Re: Making pt a non-physical unit

On 1/7/10 3:27 AM, Giuseppe Bilotta wrote:
> By reading further down the list I get the impression that pt is the
> I guess this bogs down to the unwillingness of users to report
> misbehaving sites to the webmaster, as they assume that it's rather
> the UA which is broken, rather.

That's part of it, but the other part is .... have you ever actually 
tried reporting such a site issue to a webmaster?  I do this regularly 
when I run into them (and I typically try to make the webmaster's job 
easier by providing them with a bit more information than just "site is 
broken", which is what a typical user would do).  About 20-30% of the 
time I can't even find a place to report issues.  Another 50-60% seem to 
be black holes: I report the issue, there is no response, and the 
problem isn't fixed.  Another 20% or so I report the issue and they get 
to me with some sort of "please try clearing your browser cache" 
nonsense because the report doesn't actually go to anyone technical. 
After a few more rounds of back and forth involving me telling them 
exactly what rule in their stylesheet is broken they usually claim to 
have sent the report on to their technical department, and then we're 
back to the black hole scenario.

Over the last 3-4 years, I can think of fewer than 10 sites that 
actually fixed issues I reported, out of several hundred reports.

Also, given that in this case the site looks fine in other UAs, the 
assumption that the given UA is broken is not a bad one.  More 
importantly, it doesn't matter to users much _which_ is broken.  They 
just want their content.  If your UA can't show it, they won't use it.

> A one-click "Does this site look broken?" UI feature that allowed the
> user to simultaneously activate 'CSS Quirks' mode _and_ report the
> broken site (to the UA developers which would then forward the request
> over to the web designer) might help.

Firefox has something like this in the Help menu (minus the quirks mode 
thing).  So does Safari (in the "Safari" menu on Mac, at least).  So 
does Opera (Help menu).  It doesn't help much.

> (And no, I don't think that would help one little bit.)

Then what's the point?

> Plus, there's the problem of these sites being most noticeably broken on
> handheld devices, which don't exactly have abundance of UI space for
> this kind of signaling .... *sigh*

Yep.

-Boris

Received on Thursday, 7 January 2010 14:13:53 UTC