Hello, Loyal Readers!
Actually, I’m kidding about that part. Most of you are on vacation! What’s a week at the beach compared to reading “US News and Mary Jane” as soon as it comes out, huh?
Don’t answer that.
Anyway, Unqualified Offerings has not been posting sparsely since the holiday because it was off having fun. No, Unqualified Offerings was busy intensifying its hatred of Netscape 4.x. The Movable Type-driven revision to the the weblog that you see currently took about two hours to set up for Internet Explorer, Netscape 6.x and Opera 6.
It’s taken about four days to make the thing work in Netscape 4, aka the Browser From Hell.
Why do we do it? Because we love you, even though we hate your browser.
Who are we?
Now it can be revealed, arguably loyal reader: This site comes to you thanks to the strenuous efforts of a bellicose woman and a peaceful man. Dave Saia made a personal, on-site visit to Unqualified Headquarters to help UO upgrade highclearing.com’s Movable Type installation from 1.4 to 2.11. He also pitched in on the Netscape 4 problem too - generating a script we ended up not using for now and giving Unqualified Offerings some insight into issues involving nested tags.
The heroine of the conversion is Webmistress Kathy Kinsley, of On the Third Hand fame. It is as if Kathy set out to single-handedly refute Andrew Sullivan’s contention that there’s no such thing as the blogging community.
Kathy brought a hacker-level understanding of Movable Type, a professional’s insight into the ins and outs of the Browser From Hell, and a geek’s refusal to admit defeat. In the end, she helped Unqualified Offerings reach its goal of a readably ugly viewing experience for NS4 users, along the way battling rogue columns and disappearing text. She didn’t even demand that Unqualified Offerings support invading Iraq for a day or anything like that. The previous test messages - which this site has voted to retain - are addressed to her.
A NOTE TO READERS WHO USE NETSCAPE 4: Stop that. NS4 is a bridge to the 20th century. It’s the 8-track player of browsers. They spent an entire dot-release adding a Shop button while web standards passed them by. There are plenty of good, modern browser options out there. Hate Microsoft? No problem. Don’t use Windows? No problem. Love Sun and AOL? No problem. Heck, my NS6 download was half the size of my NS4.7 download this weekend.
This site is sorry for sounding cranky. It should sound more polite, like Patrick Nielsen Hayden does in his NS4-only view of Electrolite.
This site will look much better in a browser that supports web standards, but its raw text is accessible to any browser or Internet device. If you’re using Netscape 4.x, please consider using almost any other modern browser. Recent versions of Internet Explorer (for both Windows and the Macintosh), of Mozilla and its several variants, of Opera, and for that matter Netscape 6.x should work fine. A bas le Netscape 4!
UO should try “please” too. Anyone who reads this site is doing it a kindness, however they choose to read it. But hey, you might miss something. Frex, you lose text at the right side of Kevin Holtsberry’s blog. Moira Breen’s content block gets munged in minor ways and her sidebar gets totally hosed in NS4 - and you don’t want to miss out on Moira Breen. And if you use NS4, you have no idea what I was talking about a few days ago when I was burbling over the snazzy new look of Instapundit.com. More Than Zero Sum? Less than meets the eye in NS4. You have no idea how much more pleasant a layout it is in, well, a real browser. Ones and Zeros‘ design survives better, but you get the same “ransom note effect” through NS4 that you now get here.
Most of all, think of the Unqualified Offerings experience itself. This site is ugly in Netscape 4. In modern browsers it rises to the level of undistinguished. Don’t you want that for yourself? Your family?
