Posted on Sunday 17 July 2005 - Popularity: unranked
If you’re writing a new version of an application, then one of the most important things you implement into the new version of the app is compatibility to the old apps files, at least for the main files. If you had a miss-conception in the old file structure, for example a security issue or just that your old concept reached a limit that can only be overcome with a change that makes the old files incompatible, than you can’t just go out and tell your current users that the new version is’nt compatible with most of the old files anymore, you have to create a solution, a solution that makes it possible to load the old files in a way that they still are of as much use to the users of the app as possible. If you do that with an internal file conversion or a new file structure that takes care of the old files is’nt what I’m up to in this post, what I will show you now is an example where a company decided to tell the users to change their files, millions of them, to be compatible with the new version of their app. Trust me, I’m not fantasizing, it’s not even a small company or an unpopular app I’m talking about, it’s actualy a market leader in it’s segment.
Now before you get nervous, it’s not an OS X (or OS 9) application, but it will still indirectly effect some of us Mac users that work as wedesigners. The application I’m talking about is the Internet Explorer 7 from Microsoft and the files they break compatibility with are nothing else than HTML files optimized for the Internet Explorer 6, not all, but a big enough percentage, those that strictly redirect non-IE browsers to an error page, enough to create a lot of trouble. More precisely it’s the UA (user agent) string the browser sends to the web-server that will change in a way that will break compatibility of websites. Many sites that are incompatible with the official web-standards and only work in IE are using this string to redirect anyone that trys to access the site with a non-IE browser like Safari, Firefox or Opera. Something that is a really bad thing in itself, but sadly not that unusual to a big group of lazy web developers that only code for the current market leader. To be fair, not all those millions of HTML files have to be changed, just those that use the string to detect non-IE browsers from accessing all the other pages or certain features, but that doesent change anything from the fact that this is’nt something any company should do and from all the companies I know, I’m pretty sure only Microsoft would even think about doing it, actualy it’s their past ignoration of standards that got them into all this trouble in the first place.
You can read about this absurd case in this article and some heated comments here at slashdot.
Fredi
