Flashes of Panic

I probably shouldn’t be writing this before I’ve finished my cup of tea and let the caffeine soak down a little bit, but here I am. Undamped oscillation.

Backdrop: the site I used to run in a previous job, and still write for occasionally, launched another redesign three or four weeks ago, their second since I left. Any structural change in a site as large as that one is bound to have some issues, of course, and their first day with the new design was predictably rough. I know how they tend to work—in fact, I’m probably responsible for the way they work—and their priorities and motivations are different from the ones I work with now.

Which probably explains why I’m finding so many annoyances when I try to do anything on the damn site.

The first one I noticed is the one that has me so frustrated now. When you attempt to follow the link I provided above with Safari as your browser, you will be redirected to http://msn.runnersworld.com:0 and your browser will be stuck in a loop, showing only a blue background. I mentioned this on the first day: “Hey, guys, I know it’s busy down there and you probably know this, but in case you don’t, here’s one for your list…” Then, a week or two later: “Just to let you know, I’m still seeing this problem…”

Yesterday I got email from someone else I know from a mailing list:

I’m sure you hate to be a pointman for people toward whom you no longer have any official responsibility, but in case you are in touch with the RW Online people, would you mind telling them that their new site configuration absolutely fails on Apple’s Safari browser.

So I forwarded that along, with a bit more pointed message this time, along the lines of, “Hey, are you actually paying attention to this?” OK, it was a lot more pointed. As my correspondent noted, I do hate being pointman for people toward whom I no longer have any official responsibility.

The response I got back was similarly pointed, and can be summarized as, “We’ll move it up the priority list when Safari users represent more than 1% of our traffic.”

That’s screwed up on so many levels.

First, there’s the obvious logical difficulty. If Safari users can’t enter the front page of your site, they’re not going to register on your traffic. They’re going to leave. If they’re determined and/or forgiving, like me, they’ll visit with another browser, like Firefox or Camino. (And they’ll see other quirks: for instance, a large chunk of the navigation bar is missing in Firefox, but visible in Camino. And the archives of the Daily News, which I normally would use extensively, are unreachable through any method provided.) The fact that Safari users actually show up can only be attributed to those following links in from other sources directly to pages inside the site. It’s as though they said, why should we try to reach an audience that isn’t buying our product? Well, because they aren’t buying your product, of course.

Second, a small number of disgruntled users can generate a big headache. There are message boards on this site; what if one or two frequent contributors “vanish,” and the remaining community asks, “Whatever happened to Skip?” And it turns out that Skip is unable to reach the boards. Come on over to www.othersite.com, though, because everyone can reach that one. And poof, no more community. There is/was at least one message board on the web which exists primarily because I didn’t address a problem quickly enough. (Apparently, they’ve forgotten and/or forgiven, but they didn’t return.)

Finally, in a case like this, cross-browser compatibility isn’t about any one browser in use now. It’s about the Next Big Browser. If your site works well in all the browsers currently in wide use (say, IE/Firefox/Opera/Safari/Camino) it’s less likely to develop a fatal hiccup when IE 7 (for example) surprises everyone. It’s less likely to present problems for Marla Runyan’s screen reader (sorry, Marla’s less than 1% of your audience, right?) It’s more likely to behave predictably everywhere.

Needless to say, it doesn’t validate.

Anyway, they’re blowing me off, so if you can’t get at it, please don’t complain to me; they don’t listen to whiny crackpots.

Now playing: Trouble from Parachutes by Coldplay