Define “stupid” on the web

I once had a conversation in an Opera forum with another user about document standards, validating web sites and browser support/detection. His opening salvo was as follows:

“Coding to make your site break for 8% of your visitors is definitely stupid, whether you do it because of ignorance or evil is irrelevant. Sites that require MSIE pretty much never validate, and obviously you can’t even start thinking of incompatibilities between IE6 and IE5 before you have checked that your code is valid.

“And non-standard is definitely synonymous with stupid on the web. It’s like making a lamp which only works with special 63,5 watt lightbulbs instead of the standard 60W. Whatever advantages you can come up with for that, most of them are likely to be stupid.

“And finally, regarding the percentage, I have 75% of visitors using IE5/6 on Windows on my website, which gets 10 000 visits per month. The subject of the site is trains and rail news, so those people are not browser snobs. So I would break the site for 2500 visits by breaking the site for non IE users!”

This was enough to pique my interest, for several reasons (marked in bold above). Mostly, I thought he was too free with the word “stupid”, especially for someone who purports to be an advocate/evangelist of standards and Opera. “You’re an idiot” is not one of the better arguments I can think of for convincing people to do it your way. I wrote him* back, addressing each of the points in turn.

*I’m assuming it’s a “him” … the site is Erik’s Rail News

I’ve repeated the interesting (read: debatable) points below, with my responses below.

“It’s like making a lamp which only works with special 63,5 watt lightbulbs instead of the standard 60W. Whatever advantages you can come up with for that, most of them are likely to be stupid.”

No, it’s like making a lamp that only works with the standard 60W bulb, even though 10% (or 25% for your site) of your customers *also* own 63.5W bulbs. The advantage lies entirely with the site builder and maintainer when using standards if 90% (again, 75% in your case) of the browsers will not display it correctly. If you use standards, you are using the 63,5W light bulb (I do it too, by the way, but I have no illusions about it conferring any degree of genius).

“Coding to make your site break for 8% of your visitors is definitely stupid…”

If you’re coding your site for fun, what incentive do you have to code to standards? If your coding tool, say FrontPage, doesn’t code to standards, what chance do you have? Is everyone using FrontPage really stupid?

If you come to the conclusion that a good majority of a particular group of people is stupid for doing something, then you’ve almost certainly missed at least some of the reasons why they do what they do. In addition, since you’ve already passed judgement, you aren’t likely to come any closer to understanding those reasons any better and you’re certainly never going to figure out how to address those reasons so they aren’t stupid anymore.

“And non-standard is definitely synonymous with stupid on the web.”

If you’re going to pass judgement, you should at least define what “not stupid” means. Do you mean “non-standard” stupid, or “not-profitable” stupid or “not-visited” stupid? Go validate SlashDot, arguably one of the more successful sites on the web. They don’t validate. Pity they’re so stupid. IBM is stupid. Amazon is stupid. If it weren’t for Opera’s quirks mode, we probably wouldn’t see their sites at all. Most of the web would just be invisible to us Opera-browsing geniuses and good riddance.

There is a standard for the Web … it’s called IE. It’s a crappy, proprietary, untenable standard, but 90% of the market = standard. What Opera, the W3C, Firefox, etc. are trying to do is to change the standard. This is something that I wholeheartedly support, but it’s a change from an existing standard nonetheless. XTML is the 63.5W lightbulb, not IEHTML.

“So I would break the site for 2500 visits by breaking the site for non IE users!”

As long as you can afford to offer support for them, I totally agree that you should do so. The key words there are “afford to do so”. Many sites may not even be aware they don’t support some browsers. That’s not their business. If you’ve got a car that runs like crap, you’re not stupid — you just chose a bad mechanic. Is the mechanic stupid? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you don’t pay him enough to take care of every last little detail.

If a site uses an old browser-detector script that kicks people off of their site for using Opera, then they may be stupid. They may also just not be able to change it, or can’t afford it, or whatever.

On the other hand, I like to code to standards, but I always have to hack my CSS in order to get it to render in a halfway-decent manner on IE … because about 90% of the people visiting my site still use it. Am I stupid for adding IE-specific hacks? Or are they stupid for browsing with IE because that’s the only thing they know? Should we all just get the hell off of the web until we learn to behave?

He said “Yes” and the conversation ended there.

No, he didn’t.

The entire discussion devolved into an online shouting match.

No, it didn’t.