03.26.99
Redirected Anger
Mar 26 Fri (05 PM)
It’s really been bugging me lately.
I’ve recently been subscribing to a bunch of mailing lists and news groups for some more advanced web design tools and techniques. Now that I have them at my disposal and I have clients that want to use them, I figured I’d better learn them.
Anyway, I’m constantly seeing posts along the lines of “Some of my visitors can’t see my superbo plug-in active-x dynamic HTML enhanced page. How can I redirect these people to another page?”
ARRRGGG!
YOU DON’T REDIRECT THE OLD BROWSERS! YOU REDIRECT THE *NEW* ONES!
Breathe In.
Hold.
Breathe Out.
As I was trying to say, the older browsers are the ones you can’t control. Old versions of Netscape, Lynx, Mosaic, etc. won’t recognize your fancy JavaScript redirect, or your plug-in’s NOEMBED tag, and might not even recognize the META REFRESH tag. So leave them there, on that front page. Let them get to the low-brow version of your site.
The new browsers are the ones you can control! These are the ones that you can be sure will be moved to a new page. Have a meta-refesh, a javascript write.location, or a small Flash movie that moves the browser ahead. Redirect the new browsers, not the old ones.
Just needed to get that off my chest.
(I’m just nutz. No one ought to get this worked up about this stuff. Is there a 12 step around?)