[Gllug] Trademark

Stuart Children stuart at terminus.co.uk
Fri May 10 09:22:39 UTC 2002


On Thu, May 09, 2002 at 11:25:30PM +0000, Dylan Brewis wrote:
> On an obliquely related note, on the front page where is often says:
> 
> this site is best viewd in M$IE<some rediculously high number>
> 
> I intend to say
> 
> This site is not optimised for M$IE blah blah
> 
> anyone know of a recognisable "non-MS" logo/gif thingy?

Not a non-MS one, but when I did this in the past I tended to put an 
"anybrowser" logo and link (see http://www.anybrowser.com/linktous.html or 
similar). There are logos for other browsers, and I've certainly have 
seen anti-MS ones around, but I don't have any references to hand.

I stopped doing that a while back though. Now I desgin purely on 
well-supported (across current browsers) web standards and usually find 
it then displays great in Mozilla/IE/lynx/whatever. I don't like wasting 
space and bandwidth by sticking messages and images on all my pages as I 
try to keep my pages clear and the content relevent. I'm happy knowing 
that my HTML is standards compliant and usable by all. I try to do my 
advocacy where I can actually engage with people: email, IRC, etc; 
talking to people that actually matter - those who design the websites. 
I sometimes email webmasters (normally just when something misconfigured 
or incorrectly coded makes their site unusable for me) and have had some 
positive results. IMO this kind of thing makes more of a difference than 
annoying my viewers.

That said, if you want to put something on your site (and I do on some) 
then I would recommend doing something that is educational to your 
visitors. Show them your code is standards compliant (check with and use 
the logo from http://validator.w3.org/ perhaps). Teach them why this is a 
good thing (rather than just sticking an image up which makes you look 
like you hate MS without any reason - most people sadly don't know or 
understand about these things), and what alternatives there are to IE. 
Perhaps put a logo (just on your frontpage) linking to one of the sites 
I've mentioned above, but also have a separate page on your site that you 
link to explaining why your design is good, why "requires browser X, 
resolution Y, proprietary plugin Z to do anything remotely useful" is bad, 
and some information on web standards and browsers such as Mozilla.

HTH

-- 
Stuart

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