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.
Ben is a 24 year old Web Developer from Cambridge and is a computing graduate of the University of Manchester.