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Alex,
You may be able to expand my knowledge and understanding. Seriously! To me
reasonable convention is how websites are developed to get "the job" done of
serving whatever it is they're supposed to serve. W3's "standards" are a
basis from which to start.
In my not so humble opinion, W3 standards don't address many issues,
particularly application-services, which is probably the fastest growing and
the most dominant segment in business sites. For example, a search engine is
an application, served over the Internet (in this case
www.traders2traders.com). I think that's a reasonable distinction of the
difference between standards and convention. Another example. Amazon.com
serves its visitors with an application service. A search engine. That's
convention, but I don't believe what Amazon does complies with any
particular standard.
Opera cannot claim "better" compliance with standards or conventions anymore
than IE or NS. In fact it's my experience that Opera is the worst at
correctly reading CSS files, a W3 standard I believe. Send me a CSS file
that works with native Opera, and I'd be happy to use it. I can't find one
and I'm not willing to spend more than the few hours I have trying to write
one that's totally compatible with native Opera.
If you read through FAQs at Operas website in respect to scripting, you'll
find that Opera hasn't implemented a number of "features." Yet JavaScript,
VB script, perl, php, etc., are so widely used in websites, one would have
to say that scripting is a convention. It's not a standard.
www.traders2traders.com uses a little rudimentary client-side scripting, but
it seems to be a problem for only one Opera user that I know of. It doesn't
seem sensible (to me at least) to hack vanilla code just to work around a
browser that's out of the mainstream in respect to scripting.
I believe that privacy comes down to the intention of website "keepers" as I
call them. If you browse to a website, at least one port on the user's PC
has to be open. The NIC for example. And that implies lower level machine
address (MAC) or network layer(s) must also be "open." In a nutshell, you're
theoretically vulnerable. There isn't any privacy. However, who wants to
spend the time trying to copy or stealing stuff or vandalizing someone's PC?
Granted there are people, but in he grand scheme of the Internet, malice
strictly in respect to browsers is miniscule. Email clients are another
matter, which is troubling.
Tell me where I've missed the point? I have no allegiance to any vendor. I
just use what works the best for the most people with the least amount of
incompatibility. From the usual web-site stats the server automatically
records, less than 15% of visitors experience any errors or format issues,
most of which are very minor. Almost invariably, those that do experience
any incompatibility are using NS. Far less than 1% of website visits are by
Opera browsers.
Over to you:)
Colin West
BTW, Opera is detected no matter which browser it clones.
-----Original Message-----
From: Alex Matulich [mailto:alex@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2001 4:17 PM
To: omega-list@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Re[2]: PushPOP now for download
cwest wrote:
>www.traders2traders.com isn't configured to "hurt" anyone's browser
>and/or PC. The site assumes that one's browser or the way it's
>configured works or complies with reasonable convention.
Well, "reasonable convention" should be standards set by the World
Wide Web Consortium at www.w3.org.
>I'm surprised you wrote what you did. In your case, as you use
>Opera, all that's necessary is to switch to emulate IE when you
>visit the site and everything will work. At least it did for me and
>one other Opera user I've encountered.
One of Opera's selling points is it's really the only browser in
existence that complies strictly with w3.org's standards. A site
that doesn't work with Opera likely doesn't comply with "reasonable
convention."
Ironically, IE does not comply either, despite Microsoft
being a member of w3. (And I found it amusing that Microsoft
recently blocked Opera browsers from one of its sites because of
"noncompliance" with the standards, when that same Microsoft website
failed all compliance tests itself.)
>As for "your" privacy protection issue, it's an unrealistic myth.
No it's not, but privacy protection doesn't appear to be an issue
with www.traders2traders.com. They have a good privacy policy. Any
browser features that can be used to violate privacy, they don't
use.
-Alex
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