347 words
The Register ran story on commercial websites that suck by excluding people using what they consider uncommon web browsers or operating systems along with a hall of shame. It reinforced my view that NatWest is the bank that sucks worst as far as online banking is concerned. They make me keep a copy of Netscape 4 on my hard drive and start up the Classic environment in MacOS X to use it as their site refuses to work with currente Netscapes or Internet Explorer / Mac.
A very nice link in the article pointed to a site explaining why people doing this are morons. In addition it could be pointed out that sites relying on massive Java(Script) usage are mostly caused by so-called web-designers wanting unnecessarily moving screen displays or being too lazy / incompetent to do things properly on the server side.
There are sites doing things well, of course. Despite all their bastard data-mining and stuff, amazon's site remains rather clean, I never saw it fail to work in any browser - even Lynx and while being downwards-compatible it remains fast and useful. I guess this is because amazon actually try - and apparently almost succeed - to earn money on the web rather than just having a site becaus some highly paid consultants told them so.
Another positive example is my other bastard bank Deutsche Bank. A clean website that I haven't seen failing in any browser yet. They even serve up different style sheets for Macs and Unix machines. Definitely a nice touch... and their site is done in WebObjects. Interestingly web sites run by WebObjects never failed on me yet, those running on custom made scripts hardly do while those failing mostly run on ASP. While I am not trying to suggest that ASP is not capable of running a non-trivial website - after all some sites do seem to work - I believe this indicates that the moronic 'web-programmers' are more inclined to use that technique - possibly because it's more adjusted to their twisted state of mind.