An Open Letter to Allmusic.com
Dear AllMusic.com web staff,
I am extremely disappointed in your decision to redesign your site using technology which works only in Internet Explorer for Windows.
As I’m sure you are well aware, not everybody uses Windows; there are millions of people in the world who are using the Macintosh and Linux platforms. I am surprised you have decided that these millions of potential customers are unimportant to you.
Indeed, there are many of us who, even when using Windows, have chosen to use an alternate browser to IE for security concerns—as discussed in Business Week’s June 29 article “Internet Explorer is Just Too Risky.” There are several excellent, fully-featured alternate browsers: Mozilla, Firefox and Opera being the most popular on Windows. All three of these, as well as Apple’s Safari, are also available for the Mac OS X platform.
Indeed, you’ve missed out on an excellent opportunity to improve your site for all users here. The World Wide Web Consortium has been working to define standards for web development since 1994. Unfortunately, commonly used web browsers did not widely support these standards until 2000. Fortunately, it now being 2004, standards-compliant browsers (Internet Explorer 5.0 and later on all platforms, Netscape 6.0 and later on all platforms, Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox on all platforms, Opera 6.0 and later on all platforms and Safari on Mac OS X) are now in wide use. Indeed, as you have decided to support only IE 5.5 and later, you’re already supporting only standards-compliant browsers. I urge you to spend some time learning about these standards—(x)HTML, Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript/ECMAScript and the Document Object Model—and how they are robustly supported in all modern browsers. The Web Standards Project is an excellent place to start.
I don’t know if the same web development team responsible for Allmusic.com is also responsible for the other sites in the All Media Guide empire. If you are, I hope that you take the time to redesign these other sites correctly; failing that, I hope you leave them as they are now—they work in all browsers. I also urge you to fix your mistakes with Allmusic.com; it’s not too late to support all modern browsers; it’s not too late to add some support for web accessability while you’re at it. Don’t exclude millions of internet users from your previously excellent site.
Sincerely,
John P. Yuda
— Danny 1535 days ago #