Regarding Me.com
. Updated: .
Me.com is Apple’s new replacement for .Mac. It’s very pretty. That it is implemented with a total disregard with modern web development techniques is as ignorable as any other failed web development effort, but the attitude toward their failure has rather ground my gears.
Users of Internet Explorer 7 visiting Me.com are greeted with this message:
Screenshot by Chris Messina
I’m going to quote my comment from that Flickr screenshot, since, to be honest, it makes me angry:
What utter crap from Apple. A grand, holier-than-thou claim that IE’s failure to fully support web standards is the reason Apple discourage access to their new site.
A new site whose front page uses tables for layout, whose applications contain precisely no content in HTML and are entirely generated by JavaScript, a site which uses browser sniffing rather than progressive enhancement, fails to provide alt text on various images and suffers divitis littered with inline style attributes. A web site which redirects you to a faux 404 Not Found page if you have JavaScript disabled.
Even the fake 404 page, with a single column of content, uses tables and doesn’t validate.
Me.com has about as much in common with modern Web Standards as as a rhino and a quad bike.
Rhino and a quad bike
may in fact be a rather unfair analogy. You could, if you were so inclined, successfully hunt a rhino on a quad bike. You can hunt all you like, but won’t find a trace of web standards best practice on Me.com. To launch yet another POS address book and calendar service on the web is one (bad) thing, but to cite web standards in their anti-IE rhetoric is taking the piss and outright harmful to developers who use Web Standards to support building websites properly.
Small Update: I’d like to emphasise that my anger here is entirely fuelled by the false attribution, the outright lie, that ‘web standards support’ is the reason for Me.com blocking browsers. I’d not be so wound up just because the site is so badly built; the quality is just a bitter disappointment.
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me.com does the permanent redirect thingy on Firefox 3 in Ubuntu, recommending I upgrade to Firefox 2 on a Mac or PC, or Safari on a Mac or PC. So clearly this has nothing to do with web standards.
And Mark Pilgrim is still right , even over two years later: Apple is no adherent of open standards, it’s not in the interests of their business.
You know what’s worse? I’m running Firefox 3 on Linux, on a PC, and it tells me to install Firefox 2 or newer on a PC. Right.
This is indeed a sad state of affairs. I’ve finally finished my critiqué on SproutCore, the underlying framework behind Me.com.
I couldn’t agree more. More over they also block Opera (my companies browser). This is something we’ve been fighting against, and something that big companies like Apple have no excuse to do, especially when they have a standards compliant browser of their own that suffers from the same problems (Google I’m looking at you). It’s not just me.com that Apple plays these tricks too. iWeb did the same thing as one example (not to mention the atrocious mark up that that application spit out ).
Seems like Apple has thrown a brick into its own glass house.