I definitely agree with Kalsey's point about requiring cookies for non-essential parts of the site. The value of a cookie session pre-purchase is only on the part of the site. Although sites like Amazon and Network Solutions remember your previous searches, this behevior should degrade gracefully.

I don't necessarily agree with Kaufman though. The message would have been very inappropriate for a site like Pottery Barn, but it has an attitude consistent with ESPN's overall image.

Think about someone who says "Just get it done, your lame excuses don't cut it around here". Now if this was from someone's boss, its a pretty harsh statement. If this is from someone's football coach, its considered par for the course.

-Posted by Eric on February 25, 2003 05:19 PM

Attitude and content are two different things. I agree that they had the attitude right, but they got the content wrong.

-Posted by Joshua Kaufman on February 25, 2003 05:35 PM

"Attitude and content are two different things"

Sure, that's sort of true, just like 'water' and 'wet' are two different things. :)

-Posted by Dan on February 25, 2003 06:15 PM

I would love to do that on our site. I truly, truly would.

Unfortunately, I have a bit more tact than that, not to mention appreciation of employment, and understanding of customer service.

Might work for ESPN, but our customers (especially the internal ones) wouldn't be pleased at being essentially called outdated idiots.

so we get to put a little text bar at the top of the intranet homepage suggesting people start using IE 5+ (we're not even going to try explaining upgrading to netscape 7) and leave it to the techs to remove all the NN4x copies floating around.

As for good copy writing, it's essential, of course. Clients don't often seem to think it's worth paying for, though.

-Posted by JC on February 25, 2003 08:52 PM

You know, now that I think of it, I've never had the balls to put something on site/app I've worked on that says 'upgrade because your software is old.'

Just today I launched a small site (dns.info.aol.com), that is for the more technically oriented, that I coded to be Nav 4.x friendly (against my will, but prolly for the best). It's completely maintainable from vi too ;)

-Posted by Dan on February 25, 2003 09:43 PM

"Sure, that's sort of true, just like 'water' and 'wet' are two different things. :)"

No, attitude and content really are two different things. It's like the difference between the tone of your voice and what you say. How you say it can make it all the difference. Unfortunately for EPPN, they can't even speak properly, so it doesn't matter how they say it.

-Posted by Joshua Kaufman on February 25, 2003 10:46 PM

How ironic. Just ignore that typo in my previous post ;)

-Posted by Joshua Kaufman on February 25, 2003 10:48 PM

I'm kind of confused here. We agree that the attitude (voice) is appropriate, so what was wrong with the content?

They tell you that you are using old technology (true) and the there are benefits to using the site with current technology (true) and they provide you with a way to still see main content (via lite site). They also give you a wide array of options (they aren't saying you need to use IE). The message is a valuable one both to the user but to the Internet community. The numbers may sound harsh but they do drive the point better than saying "You should do this because we say so". Rather its a "Everyone else is doing it", which is a tried-and-true marketing technique.

As to the standards-compliance, it's true that most people won't know what that means in the web context, but people know standards, they know compliance, its not a tough concept to comprehend at the level desired by ESPN. Saying "Browser Upgrade Recommended" is weak and easy to ignore, I see crappy banner ads telling me to upgrade this or that all the time, and I obviously don't.

BTW, the page has changed, the number is now higher and the message is not nearly as powerful.

-Posted by Eric on February 26, 2003 12:14 AM

I'm gunna sitck to my guns and say that attitude is as much of a content item as the text that exudes it.

Well written instructions, warning, errors messages, etc all reveal a tone and attitude. Crafting what you say and how you say it and how you present it is one package that needs to be helpful.

(Now that I re-read this, I think I'm saying the same thing Mr. Kaufman is saying)

heh

-Posted by Dan on February 26, 2003 08:29 AM

Too funny. I sent the ESPN link to my boss as a joke suggesting we do it... but they changed it overnight... and he replied something like "it's a good idea but it might confuse our employees..."

I didn't realize it had been redesigned til I came here.

By the way, Dan, if you didn't know -- the input and textbox font is really, really, really small in IE 6 Windows... probably 6px

And I need to rematte my image, you changed the background color since I made it. Ah well. It'll lose the jaggies soon.

-Posted by JC on February 26, 2003 09:47 AM

Josh mentioned that font issues as well, but my Win 2k box with IE 6 (6.0.2800) shows the font at the intended size (10px). My office mate's Win XP box with Nav 7 showed the font really tiny. VERY weird.

So, after a little pokin' around, I've changed the font face to "Lucida Console" (at 12px) and degrade gracefully back to monaco and courier and 'monospace' after that.

Hopefully everything is kosher now in terms of readability.

As for the ESPN thing, I'm tickled that they changed all the verbiage on that page. It's more 'nice' now, but it's more verbose, and I think that sucks more than the concise rudeness. lol

-Posted by Dan on February 26, 2003 11:06 AM

I really liked the big pie chart with the "you are here" pointing at the tiny wedge.

Or maybe I just imagined that. It's gone so I can't confirm.

There's too much verbiage now, I agree... people aren't going to read it. And they moved the browser upgrade links off to the side, I didn't see them at first.

Font's bigger now. Still a bit small. Both were readable, but not easy on the eyes, 'specially running 2304x864 on a couple of 17s

jc

-Posted by JC on February 26, 2003 11:44 AM

The font looks fine (though now smaller) on both my boxes (XP/2k). Of course, the font size would be less of an issue if it was scalable. Whatever happened to the ems?

Good call on lucida console, I use it (for monospace) on all my editors and web pages.

-Posted by Eric on February 26, 2003 12:20 PM

em's were not working out at all. The default size of 1em renders WILDLY different on Mac and PC and between IE, Safari and Nav 7. It was scary.

0.9em was really a problem where I wanted to show the communiblog area with a slightly smaller font. I was hoping for a standard of around 12px for normal text, and 0.9em would be an equivelent 11px (or 10 at the absolute smallest).

Instead, I found one browser/operating-system combo (I forget which) was showing 1em at 14px and 0.9em at about 8px. I was rather disapointed, and I want to have the simplest, cleanest and human readable style sheet possible. I also remembered the point someone made (JC?) that most browsers allow scaling of text even if font size definitions are in px.

So, I went back to the reliable "px" definiton. It's a less than perfect or 'correct' solution. :(

-Posted by Dan on February 26, 2003 12:49 PM

I think you were doing something wrong if those were your results. First off, you don't set anything to 1em, its redundant. Also you were probably nesting them or setting them on the body or something. After much research I found that em looks nearly identical on all browsers, Mac or PC (never tried Safari).

As far as "most browsers" allowing font scaling in px, this is true, but somewhat misleading. Most browsers do, but the vast majority of instaces or installs of browsers (meaning the approximately 90% using IE on Win) do not. Relying on the browsers ability to intentionally go against the recommendation seems a little off to me.

-Posted by Eric on February 26, 2003 04:29 PM

Yeah, I was nesting, but only one level deep. I was keeping it simple, but the variance was terribly inconsistent, and I didn't like that one bit.

-Posted by Dan on February 26, 2003 04:34 PM

The default area of form field is generally static, so I'd recommend using px in them. If you relatively size fields using ems in your CSS, then using ems for fonts makes more sense. From my perspective, there's really no point in using a relative font size unless the container is also relatively sized.

-Posted by Joshua Kaufman on February 27, 2003 08:35 AM

More discussion on this topic at Signal vs. Noise.

-Posted by Jason Fried on February 27, 2003 10:00 AM

Hmm... looking at my own form fields, I have the font set to "Verdana,Arial,Helvetica" and no size set at all.

Does the font on my weblog look vastly different in different browsers, Dan? I don't use that many on the Mac, mostly just safari and omniweb.
I know the layers overlap badly on some of them, but I haven't tested the font size since I switched it to .6em.

-Posted by JC on February 27, 2003 10:00 AM

Where on Signal vs. Noise, Jason?

-Posted by Joshua Kaufman on February 27, 2003 10:20 AM

http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives/000085.php (or just click my name -- the URL is linked there).

-Posted by Jason Fried on February 27, 2003 02:38 PM

Thanks for the discussion about our ESPN upgrade page. We aren't above taking suggestions to make things better... that is why the page has changed a bit since its first iteration.

The comment about how a coach talks to you as opposed to how someone in the workplace talks to you is an insightful one. We do try to inject a bit of attitude into everything we do, but certain we aren't trying to make anything feel stupid here.

The main goal of this page for us has always been education and that's why we are big on the statistics, big on the pie charts, and big on the 'everyone else is doing it' language. Look, if not a single person upgraded their browser after reading this page, it wouldn't affect our bottom line. 1% isn't going to break any banks, and the improvement in what we are able to offer the other 99% of the world more than makes up for it. We simply wanted to educate people why we made this decision and let them know that their Netscape 4 is *not a normal browser anymore*.

It's sad but since most sites still cater to Netscape 4, Netscape 4 users (and IT managers who haven't upgraded their users yet) think their browser is just as good as the next one. It's kind of like if you're a parent with a kid who has an attitude problem. You can either tolerate his attitude problem or you can do something about it. If you tolerate it, the kid will think he's normal and will end up missing out on some great opportunities in life. If you deal with it right away, it may take a little tough love but it's good for the kid in the long run. God I hope no one quotes me on this. This is just my opinion and not necessarily representative of ESPN as a company, blah blah blah.

-Posted by Mike Davidson on February 27, 2003 10:05 PM

Mike, again, I've got to give you credit for being engaged in the discussion (here and at 37signals), and keeping your cool. Thanks for stopping by and adding your input (which is valuable based on being involved with a heaviliy trafficed site that is likely an Info Architecture challenge).

Re: Nav4 support, the decision to do support it is made in your server logs (which I'd love to get a peek at). I behan making this case to my bosses and clients two years ago...

"Supporting Navigator 4.x represents a business risk."

I know that sounds extreme, but imho, it's true. The added development time to support a buggy and outdated browser costs money, usually lots of money, and causes aggrevation, and makes for a compromised product. In some situations, you can tell the users they must use a certain client (such as a closed enterprise level web app) but on a public site, you can't do that if you want to welcome all visitors.

I have the luxury here at this site to support what I want based on my whims, it's great. The publically facing sites I create at AOL are intended to be viewable on all browsers, acceptable on Nav4, and good on all 'modern' browsers.

-Posted by Dan on February 28, 2003 08:51 AM