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Comment by wtbob | Hacker News Reader

It's not the browser which is breaking the site; it's the site's developers who are using features which are not universally available.

Guess what? If you use simple, clean HTML and progressively enhance with JavaScript, CSS and HTML5 features then everyone can browse your site. Or you can use the absolute bleeding edge of everything, requiring every user to give your code a full VM on his machine (a JavaScript VM, granted — but it's still a VM), requiring that the user be on the absolute latest and greatest smartphone or highest-end desktop.

It's up to you.

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I strongly disagree. If 1 single browser out of 8-9 in common use doesn't support web standards, and represents a fraction of a percent of my target audience, then I'm not going to spend time crafting workarounds to target that browser.

I already make compact web sites compared to my peers -- no jQuery, optimized images, mostly text-driven. No JS is required to navigate and view the site. A hair over 100 kb for most of sites, including blog and header image. I use global CDNs. So my sites are friendly to users in developing countries, as long as they don't use Opera Mini.

There's nothing "bleeding edge" about supporting JS and CSS that IE8 supports. That's as low as I'm going, and no guilt about it.

By the way, have you actually tested any of your sites on Opera Mini? You may be surprised at just how poorly it renders, unless you're still working with tables.

Agreed - and in my day job, too, where my boss needs to present an experience that will have the highest chance of converting customers with a limited resource (my time) it doesn't make sense to spend 4x as long to make it play on IE6 when the return on that investment simply won't materialize.

It's not fair to blame web devs for not trying to support a browser that doesn't try to support any standards. We have clients pushing us for cool things that they have seen on other sites, or some interesting (to them) feature that they must have. If we refuse? They go to someone more accommodating.

Then implement them in a way that allows for graceful fall back to just text, etc.

I am curious, how many people would prefer this fallback overr the actual site. I'd do.

Easier said than done. For a trivial combination, it's easy. For most real world requirements it becomes a combinatorial explosion of various strategies that are mutually exclusive in many parts.

Unless you have some new machine learning approach to work out all the platform quirks and arrive at pure fallback nirvana?

Doesn't GWT have something that does pretty much exactly that ?

Use progressive enhancement, not fallbacks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement

The users don't want a site. They want an app.

It's like expecting the developers of the latest, greatest PC game to write a progressively enhanced game that the same executable will run on DOS 1.0 all the way to the latest Windows version. They will spend time and resources on making sure it works with DOS 1.0, even though there are next to zero users for it, making it completely uneconomical, basically working for free.

Or you can have them click the download Chrome/Firefox link.

The reason many users are using Opera Mini is to use less data and to load pages faster. An app won't scratch that itch.

-posted using Opera Mini

Chrome on Android offers proxy compression too

Which is absolutely uncomparable. Opera Mini's approach is pretty unique.

Clients/designers want apps. Users want information.

The trend today is that sites are crashing my up-to-date Firefox browser[1] because they need a ton of Javascript to get the layout right.

I don't mind a fancy site but just let me get the information I need.

[1] I own a not so new smart phone that does the job well for everything else.

No, sorry, when I visit the Next Web, for example, I don't want 600 kilobytes of CSS and JS just to look at what's basically a list of photos and some text. That is insane by any measure, and I'm not even counting the photos (as they're necessary and there's not much to do about those). It seems to all be there so the site can be a wonder of mystery meat navigation, with clicks randomly bringing elements in and out of focus and taking me to random sites I didn't ask for.

As a moderately seasoned developer, I've seen this in my friends too (you know who you are). They get excited by the latest and greatest technology (which is great and they should) and they apply it to their business without first asking themselves if it's actually beneficial (which is bad and they shouldn't).

Most of them come around to "build it simple at first and optimize later", or YAGNI, but in the mean time, we get things like The Next Web.

$5 TNW's next iteration is plain HTML and simple CSS with a minimal amount of JS and they make a big thing out of how performant their site is now, loading instantly, etc. Good job, you discovered Web 1.0 again, but this time with better designers.

   > TNW's next iteration … loading instantly

e.g. https://www.ampproject.org/

> It's like expecting the developers of the latest, greatest PC game to write a progressively enhanced game that the same executable will run on DOS 1.0 all the way to the latest Windows version. They will spend time and resources on making sure it works with DOS 1.0, even though there are next to zero users for it, making it completely uneconomical, basically working for free.

Games aren't a fair comparison; very few sites are anything like games, and gaming has always been pushing the boundaries of technology.

A more favourable comparison would be shipping a "content reader app", based on Windows Metro APIs, when a plaintext file would do just fine (and would work on MSDOS 1.0, if it were ASCII).

And how many commercial marketing clients from Fortune 500 are in your portfolio?

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