Re: Let's talk strategy

Mike Meyer (mwm@contessa.phone.net)
Mon, 31 Jul 95 19:28:11 PST


> > On Sun, 30 Jul 1995, Mike Meyer wrote:
> > NetScapes broken attribute parsing. The response from the
> > magazine was that 25% (their estimate) of their market wasn't
> > worth spending a few minutes fixing the problem, or even doing it
> > right next time.
> But the Internet can greatly increase your market.....20-30 or so
> million with Web access !! Do you want to make pages look bad for
> 25% of the people (5-7 million) who may be interested in what you do
> and have no other contact with you than through your Web page ??

I think we're in violent agreement here. Not taking a few minutes to
make the page WORK (this wasn't a case of looks right) in conforming
browsers is silly.

The details on the breakage are that NetScape causes newlines in
attributes to vanish. This is wrong. The page in question took
advantage of this to "pretty up" the HTML source by putting newlines
in the middle of URLs. Net result - Anneli could *not* navigate from
those pages on any browser she had available. Note that this is *not*
a case of adding ducks to a page with NetScape extensions. Fixing the
problem - and making the pages usefull to non-NetScape readers - would
not have involved a change in the way the page is displayed in any
browser.

Response from the publisher "Who cares? A 33% increase in readership
isn't worth 5 minutes of our time." They even updated the pages after
that without bothering to fix the problem.

I think they're blowing off 10-25 million readers because they're to
lazy to spend a few minutes deleting newlines. This is idiotic. They
think they're blowing off 5-7 million readers. This is still idiotic.

<mike