[Gllug] Role of webmasters (was: Sainsbury's Bank with Linux: online banking followup)

[Ryan Cartwright]

Started a new thread as this one seemed to have strayed a little from
the original topic. That said not sure if this in entirely OT now ;)

Justin Perreault wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-09-03 at 10:11 +0100, Jose Luis Martinez wrote:
>> I hope you jest, the role of a webmaster is not to lecture and
>> patronize his website's visitors, if anything a small footer link to a
>> page explaining the dangers of JavaScript is the most I would put, if
>> anything at all.
>
> Your choice to provide a passive explanation is one route and those
> visiting your site then have the option to ignore or adhere to your
> suggestion. Regrettably the same does not tend to hold true for the
> abusers of JS.
<snip>
> The role of a webmaster may not be to lecture and patronize the visitors
> however, it is already the norm. It seems reasonable to me that
> 'features' of the internet have their good and bad points highlighted
> using the same advertising method.

Interesting. This should-a-webmaster-be-a-dicator discussion goes way
back. Anyone who remembers the days when "best viewed with <browser>"
images appeared all over the web will know how bad an idea it is for a
website to dictate what a visitor should (and therefore shouldn't) use.
If we complain that a website won't let us use our preferred setup then
is it the wisest course of action to employ the same tactic wrt
disabling JavaScript?

However, having been frustrated many times by IE CSS hacks, I must say I
have been sorely tempted to insert browser detection into some of my
sites and reject any browser that doesn't properly adhere to W3C
standards. I've never succumbed of course (mostly because browser
detection is so hard to do properly and it's just a bad idea) but it was
very tempting to insist on one browser when trying to code a
multi-lingual site with nested rtl elements!

I've often used a similar argument to Jose's regarding accessibility. Is
it better to provide some kind of (usually JS) feature which will
enlarge the text on your site or is it better to educate the visitor
into changing their browser settings properly. Personally I prefer the
latter because I feel it provides a better service to my visitors. The
feedback we've had suggests that most of our visitors prefer it (or at
least most of those who fed back).  But we have sometimes received
complaints (from those who have seen text enlargement buttons elsewhere)
that we don't provide "such a useful service".

cheers
Ryan
-- 
Ryan Cartwright
http://www.cafamily.org.uk/oss
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/poster/8833
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