Archive for January, 2004

Wine merchants

I wanted to buy wine, I have bought wine before from Virgin Wines and so went to their site and tried to log in, and failed to log in, so I assumed I had forgotten my password and requested that it was emailed to me. This action resulted in them deleting my card details from my account in case the password fell into the wrong hands, which is fair enough – I shouldn’t have forgotten the password! However, new password in hand, I still couldn’t log in. It is then that it dawns on me that I’m not getting any error message, it just fails … so I click on the blue e and fire up Internet Explorer, and log in.

Gah! In a strop with Virgin Wines, I refuse to even look at their collection of tasty reds and head off to Laithwaites, which looks most peculiar in Firebird because the stylesheet doesn’t appear to load. Did their design agency not think to look at the site in a few browsers before launching it? The entire stylesheet not loading is hardly a minor problem. 10 points to the poster who can spot the connection between this marvellous example and the one in my previous rant.

So I still haven’t bought any wine

Is it just me …

… or can other Firebird/Mozilla users access the Marks & Spencers site without getting the disallowed message today?

You are not allowed into our site because we don’t like your browser

So, this morning I wanted to check whether a certain item was available from Marks & Spencer, so I visited their web site. I’m watching the page load when Bam! I’m redirected to the following friendly message.

“To protect you from certain usability and/or security issues we currently do not support Opera, Mozilla, earlier versions of Netscape or IE. If your preferred browser is not supported, we recommend that you consider co-installing a supported version.”

Well, thank you so much, Marks & Spencer from protecting me from the evil that is an alternative browser. I’m very glad to see that you are “working to support speech browsers”, has no-one informed you that it’s possible to create a site that works in all browsers, including “speech browsers”, and that redirecting potential customers to an error page because you don’t recognise their browser is just a tad old hat?

I fired up Internet Explorer just long enough to send them a message asking exactly what these security issues were with Mozilla, but I didn’t bother to look for the item I wanted to order. I’ll get that at a retailer that supports my browser of choice.

UPDATE:

I heard back from Marks & Spencer Customer Services …

“Dear Ms Andrew,

Thank you for contacting us.

I was concerned to hear that you can’t log on to www.marksandspencer.com. I’m sorry for the inconvenience this has caused you.

I’m afraid that you can’t access our site at the moment because we do not support the browser you’re using. We do not support Opera, Mozilla, certain versions of Netscape or versions of Internet Explorer earlier than IE 5 because of usability and security issues.

However, we are aiming for all major browsers to be able to access our site in the near future. We are also currently working to provide a wider range of client side applications to make the browser experience more enjoyable, so we recommend co-installing a later version of the IE browser family.

I do hope that you will be able to log onto our website soon. Thank you again for getting in touch.”

… I’m really looking forward to those client side applications that will make the browser experience more enjoyable, I’m sure they are really worth switching browser for.

Interview with Dave Shea

Craig Saila interviews Dave Shea (of CSS Zen Garden fame) in the latest issue of Digital Web Magazine.

It’s a good read, Dave does fantastic work in pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved with CSS, and I really liked his comments when asked what his advice would be to those launching public sites,

“Develop a thick skin. We’re still at a point where a lot of fanfare greets each new standards-based launch, which means each new site is still under a lot of scrutiny. With that comes praise and criticism. It’s easy to focus on the negative comments, and miss the long list of positives. Don’t get too wrapped up in defending your work to people who feel contentious. I’ve been noticing that a lot of critics have pet causes, and unless you meet their entire list, you’ll have done something wrong. Some can be quick to find fault, and slow to accept that there may be more reasons for something than they see.”