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More Tired Than Wired: Browser Redirects Shown The DoorThe corporate executive on the other end of the phone emitted a vaguely strangled sound. Her company had just commissioned an expensive new Web site - but when she asked me to take a look at it, I couldn't see a thing. The site I visited that day was demonstrating the latest in Web design techniques. In truth, though, it also taught another site- design lesson: stand at the cutting edge and you may end up bleeding. The site's designers had spent countless tiresome hours handcrafting a solution designed to show off the latest Web special-effects technologies on a swag of different browsers - and it still didn't work. The multi-browser strategy is seductive ...Our disappointed designers ran into trouble because they wanted to make their site more visually "interactive", to include images that would flash or change shape when you moved your mouse over them or clicked them. The technique is sometimes called a "rollover". All sorts of techniques can produce rollovers - Java, Dynamic HTML, - Macromedia's Shockwave or flash plug-ins, Netscape's JavaScript, - Microsoft's ActiveX. Trouble is, none will work on all browsers. Our site designers got around this problem by using a technique known as "browser redirection", inserted into their pages using the neat little JavaScript scripting language popularised by Netscape. You can use JavaScript to provide different pages for users of different browsers and even different plug-ins. These site designers used a browser redirect to take me to a page designed for my office browser, Internet Explorer 3. Unlike Navigator, IE3 understands Microsoft's ActiveX controls, so the site designers no doubt figured it was safe to base their entire IE3 page on ActiveX. Unfortunately, they hadn't realised that many corporate users - the people this site targets - sit behind firewalls that won't admit ActiveX content, or that have browsers con figured to reject such content. So at my office computer, I ended up looking at a blank. Site designers around the world are using this same browser redirection strategy to offer all their visitors visual inter-activity. The Internet analysis and forecasting consultancy Forrester Research reported in July that the way-hip Hotwired site was now supporting different pages for Netscape's versions 2, 3 and 4, Internet Explorer 2, 3 and 4 and AOL's proprietary browser. ... But the multi-browser workload is destructiveIf you think this sounds like too much work, the good news is that cutting-edge Web strategists are starting to agree with you. Redirection for multiple browsers, many now believe, costs way too much and brings far too little benefit. It adds a new dimension of complication to the already labor-intensive task of creating a Web site. Top Web sites are littered with the inevitable errors that arise when Web designers try to be too clever by half. And all to let visitors see buttons that flash and other effects. Quipped Forrester's analyst of Hotwired's attempts to cater to seven browsers: "Sounds more Tired than Wired to us". Let's be clear: no matter what your site, your time is better spent doing something other than creating duplicate sites for various browsers. A Forrester survey earlier this year found that 30 per cent of Web staff at large US companies saw differing browser capabilities as a major challenge. And the Seybold Report on Internet Publishing recently explained that many US designers are ditching shallow interactivity precisely because of its poor cost/benefit ratio. They've rightly decided there are better ways to spend their time. According to Seybold, top sites like Cnet, Yahoo and Mercury Centre are aiming for "very basic pages", and are actually cutting out "gratuitous" interactivity. Multi-browser rollovers: the simples solutionsIf you must provide flashing-button rollover effects, you should use Nick Heinle's Definitive Rollover script (see link below). Visitors with Netscape 3 and Internet Explorer 4 will see it; everyone else will get standard but tons. It's fast and unobtrusive, and it doesn't require a browser redirect. Or you could just give flashing buttons a miss. Technically fascinating they may be, but there's no evidence that this sort of visual effect justifies the time and worry now being devoted to it. Visitors may like flashing buttons, but they can certainly live without them. On most sites, you'll get better returns by working on content, basic visual design and site publicity. Look at the Web pages of Canberra scientist David Nicholls, a reader of this column, at http://www.home.aone.net.au/byzantium/. His Oysterman's Track sub-site has no buttons, no superficial interactivity of any sort. It simply tells a story in words and pictures.
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