One of the enduring annoyances over many years of browsing the web is sites that try to do flashy stuff that only works on one particular browser. In the past it used to be that my PC didn’t have the latest version of a particular bit of software, now with using a Mac as my main machine, it is the ‘You’re not using a PC’ routine.

Many companies have now realised that by doing this, you exclude a number of groups of users, whether those are non-Windows users like me, or more especially many of the people who are still using Windows 98 on ageing PC’s, and don’t feel the need to spend money to upgrade to the latest and greatest versions when their existing system serves their needs. A look at the browser stats sites such as the overview at Browser News shows that at least 20% of browsers are not the latest version of Internet Explorer.

As more and more people are encouraged to go online, this becomes more and more of a problem. As a result companies are now encouraged produce sites against established standards or that degrade gracefully. In most cases sites that insist on Windows XP and Internet Explorer will work quite happily on the Mac using Safari or Firefox. However every so often I come across a site that use a browser detection script, and lock me out if I’m not using Internet Explorer. What is interesting, is that in a lot of cases these sites will work perfectly well in my supposedly incompatible browser. It is not that the site developers have tried the site on a browser and it has failed, it is more that they haven’t even bothered to check!

As an example, take the National Lottery site. When I attempt to log in using either Safari or Firefox, it comes up with an error insisting that I have to be using a PC or Mac with Internet Explorer or Netscape 7. As you may know, Microsoft have stopped supporting IE on the Mac, so I have Safari or Firefox, Firefox being based on the same browser engine as Netscape 7. However I played ball and as instructed downloaded the latest Netscape 7, Netscape 7.2, and navigated around the attempts to sign me up for a free e-mail account and the like, and then tried the site again. I got the following, identical response:

So it seems that what was said on the page, wasn’t strictly true – it didn’t like Netscape 7.2 on the Mac, so saying I could use the site on that was wrong.

Anyway, at this point I was just getting annoyed, so I grabbed a little tool called the User Agent Switcher for Firefox and used that to persuade the website that I was using Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP, and had no problems at all navigating the site. Not unsuprising really as the site was supposed to be Netscape compatible, the problem appeared to be in the browser detection script.

With users being advised by groups such as the Internet Storm Center recommending back in June that users should avoid using Internet Explorer and evidence that users are starting to take the advice, maybe the days of sites targeting limited browsers rather than producing standards based sites are numbered. Having said that there is still no excuse for things like National Lottery site where a compatible browser is locked out due to a bit of sloppy programming in the browser detection!

Thanks to a posting on the Channel9 website about the use of Apple machines within Microsoft, I came across a discussion about how smart Microsoft Word has become, and whether this is a good or bad thing. The start point is an article on the O’Reilly Network by Marc Hedlund who ran LucasOnline, Lucasfilm’s internet division. You can find his original article at Microsoft Word and “Smarter Than”.

Marc’s point is that in a lot of cases, Word has become too smart for it’s own good. For example, in a recent document I wrote, I wanted to put a letter C in two brackets into the document, following logically on from (A) and (B). The problem was that every time I typed in ‘(‘ ‘C’ ‘)’, the Word auto-correct replaced it with ‘©’. There are many other similar automatic features that Word includes that really bug me if I don’t turn them off.

The argument that the developpers at Microsoft offer, described in this blog entry by Rick Schaut is that Word is primarily trying to take away complexity from the average user leaving the to worry about what to write. As he says

Nearly everything we’ve done with Word, and nearly everything we continue to do with Word, is designed to relieve the user of having to think about the mechanics of writing, thereby allowing her to focus on the content.

However aside from my experiences with the automatics, the fact that Word attempts to be flexible, and second guesses what the user is trying to do tends to mean that it often does things that are unexpected to the average user. As my experience when we put together the Parish Profile for the Church showed, the automatics can produce a nightmare of a document when you try and pull together separate sections from different people. Ultimately I had to go back to a clean document and export everything as plain text. With hindsight this could be avoided by using Word’s templating features, and creating a template that turns off much of the automatics, however that is not usually much help once the bulk of the document is written. Looking later in the Microsoft article, Rick actually concedes the following:

There is no word processor, including Word, that’s perfectly suitable for professional writers.

Whilst I agree that the statment is true, I’d argue that what what we did with the Parish Profile is professional writing, and that what Word did was downright obstructive. It’s also been my experience that even one person with a large document can still get into a hideous mess – try changing the line spacing or font over a twenty page document and it often doesn’t change everything you expect. Thanks to the multitude of good advice on the Microsoft Valued Professional site I sorted it out. There is an article here describing an ideal Word Processor for writers, the conclusion being that there isn’t really one at the moment. The best advice I have found is that to get Word to work with you rather than against you, you need to write documents in a very structured way, working out all the styles in advance. In essence you separate your presentation from your content. A good place to start is this article on bending Word to your will.