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• Webstandard-Team
  May 28th, 2007 at 12:25

  Or People don’t know that all the difference browsers outhere, don’t work identic. One typical question: Why does the page isn’t 100% identic in IE and Firefox?

• Jules
  May 28th, 2007 at 14:19

  People who don’t know where the any key is.

  (sorry, couldn’t help it)

• Hayo Bethlehem
  May 28th, 2007 at 14:52

  “People not knowing that Safari is a web browser.”

  That’s a bit elitist. In NL, 99% of IT = Microsoft, and lots of IT people have never seen a mac up close. So how would they know about a minor piece of software on a less-then-linux marketshare platform?

  Webdevelopers not knowing about safari would indeed be silly. But generic IT people? i don’t think so.

• Thomas Hansen
  May 28th, 2007 at 15:48

  I’d in general terms be cautious with people who don’t see the bug in this code;

  template struct Int2Type
  {
  T t;
  };

  //

  // .t

• Megan
  May 28th, 2007 at 16:47

  I once had a manager who didn’t know the difference between her “C” drive and the network drives! That has to take the cake.

  Anyone who ever says “everyone just uses Microsoft, don’t they?” or anything to that effect.

  Not knowing how to do anything without official training would be a red flag too.

• eugene
  May 28th, 2007 at 16:49

  Standards? What standards?

• Morgan Roderick
  May 28th, 2007 at 20:21

  Senior Management types that thinks that a team of 4 can give an accurate estimate on a 1000+ hour job, in a matter of a couple of hours.

  Clueless Account managers that spend their time looking for houses, boats, concert tickets, cars, instead of spending their time making sure that our relationship with the clients is the best it can be, and that we’re serving the clients needs, instead of just raking up billable hours building stuff that the client doesn’t need.

  Publishers of Teach Yourself [insert random difficult technology] in 21 days / 21 hours / 21 seconds books, and people that actually believe that what you can read in these books really gives you the same qualifications and skills that others use years of their lives to master.

• Georges Jentgen
  May 28th, 2007 at 21:22

  The last thing that drove me crazy: A coworker from the design department (we sell high quality jewelery, so design department is the place where the jewelery-designs come from) asked me if something is possible to do in HTML. The coworker shoewed me a small drawing/sketch of how it should look like. What disturbed me was that the sketch had a fixed witdh of 905 pixels, and was divided in 2 equal parts. Each part was 452,5 pixels width

  That threw my entire view of the world into pieces… since then I am consulting a psy

• Steven Clark
  May 29th, 2007 at 0:23

  IT people (titled web developer / designer) with things on their resume like XHTML, CSS, PHP, Java Programmer - phone you and ask how they can change the title of their home page or want to know why they can’t paste from MS Word to Wordpress just because ‘everyone does it’!

  IT people who hire you to create web standard pages then insist on chucking every junk bit of obtrusive non-validating whatsit on the pages so they don’t validate - what’s the trouble they say, it works doesn’t it?!

  IT people who phone you at midnight on Friday night insisting to discuss some trivial 1px shift in Safari something or other because to them its the most important thing in the world so you must not sleep until this is fixed.

  The big one…

  IT people who ring you and the first thing they say is “the last developer i had was a total idiot so i fired him and need someone else” (see the red flag in that sentence anyone?).

  Oh i’m probably just jaded lol.

• Jermayn Parker
  May 29th, 2007 at 4:07

  That actually sounds like half of the IT team at were I work part time…

• Tommy Olsson
  May 29th, 2007 at 9:25

  When people say,

  the other major player besides Internet Explorer.

  When they go to lengths making others aware of Firefox and Safari, but never mention Opera - the fastest and most secure browser available; the most configurable and the one with the most features built-in.

• Robert Nyman - author
  May 29th, 2007 at 9:29

  Thanks for sharing! I think I should’ve written Web instead of IT to be more specific, but

  nevertheless I generally agree with your suggestions.

  Webstandard-Team,

  Oh, that’s too much to cover in detail here, how to present it and argue.

  Jules,

  No problem, that is a totally valid one.
  Hayo,

  In general, I’m on your side. But I think that if you are, say, a Project Manager for the

  building of web sites, I think it’s your obligation to know about a web browser that has 3-4% of the market, just

  as well as the other major web browsers.

  Thomas,

  Well, yes, but maybe not management people…

  Megan,

  Hmm, driver confusion. It’s been a while since I encountered that!

  
  “everyone just uses Microsoft, don’t they?”

  Quotes like that are actually the biggest threat to web interoperability and the whole future

  and idea of it. No matter the product, the web is not just one company.

  eugene,

  But of course!

  Georges,

  ½-pixels are indeed the new fashion.

  Steven,

  Long time, no comment!
  It sounds like you had some web developing suffering as of lately…

  Jermayn,

  I feel your pain, I really do!

  Tommy,

  Well, it’s a hard one. Naturally I think everyone should know that it exists, especially in the mobile phone market. But if time should be set aside to ensure everything works in it? I don’t know…

  99% of the time, things that work in Safari and Firefox will work in Opera, but in cases when it doesn’t, Opera’s market share is so miniscule so it has to be a budget decision if extra time and money should be spent in Opera-specific work.

• Love
  May 29th, 2007 at 14:19

  Clueless people putting down other clueless people to look good.

• mahalie
  May 29th, 2007 at 19:47

  How bout people who say “I was a web developer in my last job”, then say they don’t want RSS on the firm’s new site because it could cost a lot and no one uses it. Then they email you with a link to “cool feature” they’d like to include (could we use this?) and it’s an IE-only javascript image swapper from 1998!

  No wonder some people think I just push magic buttons. Thanks for this thread, it was cathartic.

• Robert Nyman - author
  May 29th, 2007 at 22:43

  Love,

  Most definitely! But sadly that seems to go for all kinds of work and environments…

  mahalie,

  Ah, yes, wonderful, isn’t it?

  Thanks for this thread, it was cathartic.

  Sure, you’re welcome!

• Chris
  May 30th, 2007 at 22:44

  Ha! Brilliant. I’m a web developer myself and prior to that I spent 4 months working on the Service Desk. I was amazed how many people from my own IT department would ring to ask the most obvious questions.

  The most shocking was when a guy in our network team - essentially the man in charge of the net connections, proxys and firewalls - saw my workmate with his IE favourites window open and asked if could “POP up sometime and install it on his machine”.

  Mind you, they never taught me that at university either. I had to work it out for myself.

• Robert Nyman - author
  May 30th, 2007 at 22:57

  Chris,

  Ha ha!

• Kris
  June 4th, 2007 at 10:20

  People who ask me to change an image in ‘Adobe’.

• Robert Nyman - author
  June 4th, 2007 at 10:36

  Kris,

  Yes, that’s a nice one.

• Christopher Papastefanou
  June 11th, 2007 at 15:19

  People who don’t seem to realize that Mac OS is an operating system on which you may run different browsers, that among themselves may produce different results.

  Oddly enough I hear this a lot from people that actually do know. They just seem to forget that they know, and pretend that Mac is a browser, or that Mac OS runs one browser and one browser only.

  I often hear developers say: “So it works in Explorer and Firefox. How about Mac? Does it work on a Mac?”

  Adding to the frustration, it’s very difficult to correct them without being condencending, explaining the difference between an OS and browser to a developer…

• Robert Nyman - author
  June 11th, 2007 at 21:58

  Christopher,

  Ah, I wholeheartedly agree, I hear that phrase all the time too. Pretty sad, actually.

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