[Gllug] Marks and Sparks

[Jonathan Harker]

On Friday February 21 2003 14:04, Roger Whittaker wrote:
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Fri, 21 Feb 2003 13:53:39 -0000
> From: E-Commerce at marks-and-spencer.com
> To: roger at suse.co.uk
> Subject: RE: Web site
>
> Dear Mr Whittaker
>
> I regret that the website, www.marksandspencer.com, does not currently
> allow access from Mozilla and Opera browsers.  We continue to work with our
> development teams to offer a wider range of browser support and are pleased
> to announce that Netscape 6 and 7 have been unblocked and may be used to
> access the site.

Well that means Mozilla 1.0 - 1.2 will work too, since the underlying browser 
engine is IDENTICAL, and like someone else said, Opera 6 and 7 also work when 
spoofing, so they're talking out a hole in their arse.

Here's what I wrote to them yesterday (I think I may have BCCed it here by 
mistake... oops sorry), so far I haven't had a response (perhaps its a bit 
rude on second reading):

Dear Marks & Spencer's web designer,

Please can you remove your unnecessary "unsupported browser" check from your 
website.

By using some proxy trickery that fools your site into always seeing IE as the 
user agent, the following browsers display your site perfectly (including the 
mostly unnecessary Javascript):

Mozilla 1.0, 1.1, 1.2
Opera 6, 7
Netscape 7
Konqueror
Galeon

Which leaves no reason to block them out, except some daft belief in, and 
adherence to, an ancient browser-checking technique from the early 90s.

If you have another read through the freely available W3C recommendations, you 
will find that the web has come a long way since 1993, and you may find the 
terms "XHTML/CSS" and "graceful degradation" mentioned.

This allows your site to be viewed even in simple text browsers, which are 
used by the blind attached to speech readers or braille consoles, while still 
allowing flashy animated purple dancing bears to pirrouette across the screen 
and annoy the hell out of people using browsers capable of displaying such 
unnecessary ursine brou-haha.

Currently, your site goes down with the likes of Argos and Royal Bank of 
Scotland as most browser-unfriendly sites of all time. Believe it, there are 
such comparison pages out there with your name on it!

Great socks and pants, but please get with the 21st Century.

Cheers,
Jonathan Harker.

-- 
Jonathan Harker
www.jonathanharker.co.uk

Conformity is the refuge of the unimaginative.


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