ESPN Moves Forward with Standards

Safari. :)

Well, duh, you wouldn't have mentioned it if it wasn't related to Apple.

Not Apple Woody - Safari. I mention it because it is quite remarkable that a browser - still in beta form - beats competitors that have been in development for years. I say that's pretty amazing.

Safari being in beta is probably what makes it faster than most(or all). Wait until it's final and all the added bloatware features are tacked on. We'll see if it's as fast anymore. ;-)

Look ... Safari could be the fatest, coolest standards-based browser in the world. Who really cares? Sure the "Mac Faithful" cares, and I admit I like some of the unique featres, but in reality who in their right mind will spend the money to QA this thing on their site. Even if every Mac user in the world used it, the most it could possibly muster up is 3% of the browser market. If I was using this thing I would be concerned about what I was missing out on because I am trying to view a site on a non-tested browser. I do agree that in a perfect world all developers would use standards-based code so this issue would be moot, but this isn't a perfect world. This is a world driven by business decisions, not by emotional ones. Something Apple users need to understand.

Woody, if you don't care about Safari, then why are you even bothering to come here and comment? You may not care, and that's fine - but there are plenty of people - including myself - that are excited about the application and the many fruits it will bring (namely the sharing of its open source WebCore enginge with other application developers - including competing browsers).

As for your "business decisions" point, you don't have to be an Apple user to acknowledge the fact that there are plenty of designers that markup their content for IE / Win only, and if it happens to work in something else, that's gravy. But you're missing the bigger point - by publishing content that adheres to standards, you can use any compliant desktop browser or portable device to view the content. The same cannot be said for those who choose to use proprietary markup.

Apple users are hardly unaware of the "business decisions" you spoke of. Come to think of it, we (and every other non-Windows user) are all too aware.

Did you read my comments? I'll post them again.

"I do agree that in a perfect world all developers would use standards-based code so this issue would be moot, but this isn’t a perfect world. "

Even if every Mac user in the world used it, the most it could possibly muster up is 3% of the browser market

With this kind of argument, no one should even bother for the disabled. It's also a big mistake to consider that 3% (seen as an absolute figure) is nothing, if you have no clue about the socio-economics that they may represent in each case. It's not uncommon that among those 3%, categories that you are targeting are over-represented. Decisions made on lame statistics are bad business decisions.

Hi Woody. Mike from ESPN here. Care to guess how much money we spent for QA to make sure our site worked in Safari?

If you guessed $0.00, you are correct.

How about our QA budget to make sure it worked great in Mozilla, Chimera, and Netscape 7?

Also $0.00.

I think you're missing the reason why people are so excited about Safari. *It just works*. It really does. When you write standards-compliant code, you have a pretty good idea what your pages will look like in every standards-compliant browser before you even test them. Safari just plain works, and there's nothing on our site which you are missing because you decide to use it.

The first time we pulled our still-in-development site up on the first build of Safari, everything looked perfect except some artifacting around the radio buttons and some DHTML rollout nav weirdness. That was all quickly fixed by Apple's team and the following build rendered our site flawlessly.

So I guess what I'm trying to say here is, yes, everyone realizes that Safari is not a browser you should "build to". If anything, the market dictates that you favor IE/PC (over 90% of ESPN.com users use IE/PC). But if you write standards-based code, you can please nearly everybody and you don't have to fork your code at all. I don't care if people use 1000 different types of browsers when they come to ESPN.com... as long as these browsers are standards-compliant and render pages the way standards-compliant browsers are supposed to.

OK, do I have to post this again, one more time:

“I do agree that in a perfect world all developers should use standards-based code so this issue would be moot, but this isn’t a perfect world. “

Woody. Your quote is received loud and clear. I guess we're just not really concerned with the world being perfect.

If we can use our resources to produce twice the amount of content for 98% of our audience to enjoy, rather than use those resources to create 3 or 4 different versions of our code to satisfy the other 2%, we're happy to do so.

ESPN, much like the rest of the web, is not for everybody. I know people like to say things like "the web is for everybody" because it sounds great, but it doesn't excuse you from the fact that you must have certain basic tools to fully enjoy it. The more sites that adopt standards policies like ours, the more people will realize that their 6-year old version of Netscape 4 just doesn't cut it anymore.

Listen ... I am all for web standards, I am just trying to add a little reality to the discussion. Maybe I don't get to work on such cool projects, but in my world whenever I discuss web standards (and usability testing) to business managers their eyes just gloss over, and all the care about is does it work in IE. Explaining you have to rip and replace the current site and start over doesn't cut it, even if the benefits down the line are tremendous in both standard HTML and usability testing. Maybe I don't do enough to sell standards, but when it comes to time and money IE is all they care about. It's business decision that I can't control. And in the world of business nobody cares about Apple's new browser.

in my world whenever I discuss web standards (and usability testing) to business managers their eyes just gloss over

In my world, when I have trouble selling a cheaper, faster, better way of reaching a larger audience to my clients, I don't blame the message.

Woody, I feel you buddy, selling the benefits of standards to a manager who has never had to muddle through nested tables and browser inconsistencies is almost impossible.

However, I think I have a solution... I am going to build a PowerPoint presentation with many, many, bullet points like "standards are good" "it works in IE" and "Synergistic Return On Investment". Bullet point overload and some animated Comic Sans headlines should stun the biz people into submission.

;)

I just dig the pie chart: it makes non-compliance appear almost heretical.

Darn, I thought the answer was lynx ;)

Woody… I know it’s tough to convince the suits about the importance of web standards and what they really are, but if all they care about is the site working in IE for PC, then just make sure that when your next redesign happens, that condition is satisfied. Give them what they want. They don’t even really need to understand that what you’re doing under the hood will support a lot more than IE. Just do it and smile about how lucky they are to have you.

In my discussions with the executive staff at ESPN, the terms Mozilla and Safari never really even came up. That’s not their language. Their language is things like “cutting-edge”, “forward-looking”, “popular”, and “more bang for our buck”.

Just know your audience and you will be fine…

For the exact reasons you state, we pulled the upgrade warnings on most of our sites and now support older browsers in the style sheet.

/*regular styles*/
@import url(“style_screen.css”);
/*netscape 4.x styles*/
body{
margin: 1em 1em 2em 1em;
padding: 0;
font-size: 75%; /*establishes the base font for the proportional ems */
}
div, p, td, ul, ol, li, dl, dt, dd, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
}

That’ll look nothing like the layout, but avoids the warning. And, when using a PDA or phone, that’s not the first thing you’ll see on the page everytime.

Not to nit-pick, but if we talk in terms of actual users here, if “every Mac user in the world used Safari” it wouldn’t be 3% of your traffic. Your market projections include the millions of PCs used for things like cash registers, etc. Of people, total, on the net who Mac users, the % would be like 20%. Visitors to some business websites might be 3%, but if I were checking those logs, that’d be the intellegent 3% I’d want to pay attention to. At ESPN, millions of people surf that site at work, hence the 90% billing for IE-PC. Anyhow, I like Mike and Anil’s take on it, “it just works” and “don’t blame the message.”

"I know this is irrelavant to the standards disucssion but since someone was calling me on my stats?

"Microsoft continues to dominate the PC operating-system business -- overwhelmingly. Still, Linux is making inroads. At the end of 2001, Windows owned 94% of the desktop market. Mac OS, which runs on Apple (AAPL ) computers, held 3%, and Linux had 2.5%, according to IDC. The 2002 numbers are still being calculated, but Kuznetsky figures that sometime this year Linux will surpass Mac OS as No. 2 -- thanks in large part to its use in specialized corporate jobs."

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_09/b3822618_tc102.htm

The "ESPN Motion" video feature requires Internet Explorer though. Boo!

The "ESPN Motion" video feature requires Internet Explorer though. Boo!

awww... you mean it wasn't NN4.. shucks... ;)

Woody, darling, you're missing the point(s) completely. Yes, selling anything techie-exciting to non-techie, single-minded business types is at best a pain in the butt, and at worst (which it seems to have been for you) an embittering, disillusioning, cynic-making experience.

I've been fortunate enough that in my personal experience, the business-types I've spoken to are receptive to the concepts of usability and compliance. In fact, I work for a non-tech corporation that handles communication of all types, and we do a roaring trade in compliance and usability.

However, here's the thing: it's not Safari vs. IE. It's definitely not Mac vs. PC. It's standards-compliants browsers vs. non-standards-compliant browsers. That's why people get excited about Safari. Because its development team seems amazingly committed to making a standards-compliant browser, and for designers and developers, it's a light at the end of a very long non-compliant tunnel.

It's true that in terms of sheer numbers, Mac users are rather overwhelmingly outnumbered. However, when one stacks IE against Safari, Mozilla, Chimera, and Netscape 7, we're probably not talking about a mere 3% anymore. In the business world, it's true, no one's going to mention Safari by name. But the point here is that they won't have to. By virtue of being a standards-compliant browser, designing / programming / testing for Safari might as well be synonymous with designing / programming / testing for any other standards-compliant browser.

Woody, selling the compliant browser is not that hard, you just don't tell your boss your doing it... They don't care about how you do it, you said yourself they only care if it work in Explorer, just write standard compliant code and 90% of the time it will look ok in Explorer. You might have to do a little tinkering but you will save time doing the compliant code as it is simpler than all the table/spacer hack that we use to do.

Just do a count of the number of nested tables, number of transparent spacers, character count, lines of code, and page size. Give them to the manager.

I was tired of the other developers calling to ask me if the page looked okay on the Mac. The other developers kept tossing in more tables and spacers to 'fix' it for the Mac....So I was driven to tell a manager last week that his home page currently has 800 lines of code, 160 transparent spacers, 21 nested tables, over 36,000 characters and a page size of 65K. (Total copy on the page was less than 1500 characters!)

65K isn't too awful, but a CSS redesign brought it down to under 12K and it looks almost identical in modern browsers.

I switched to standards mode all on my own :-) My boss only noticed about a month later when he went to edit something in dreamweaver and it wasnt in a table. He got scared and confused and I had to calm him down with the very facts and figures that Jeff came up with above - indeed upgrading a (high traffic) site to CSS recently brought the home page down from 50ish-k to around 9k. If you're paying for bandwidth thats a BIG step forward.