twist of fait accomplis

The web standards community's been aflutter with talk since yesterday's launch of the new All Music Guide site. The old site was pretty bad... not with regards to content, of course, on that front they've always kicked ass, but the previous design was just—for lack of a better word—uncomfortable.

Nevertheless, I love the AMG. I own three of their books (guides to jazz, blues, and hip-hop) and visit their site more than any other site aside from Google. I'm constantly using them as a reference when I'm writing reviews and am always impressed by the breadth of their coverage (despite lingering content issues that confuse two different Raheems... I'm sure it's only me, Raheem, and Raheem that are bothered by it).

But when their new design launched yesterday and I was greeted with a banner telling me that because I wasn't using IE 5.5+, I wouldn't be able to view their site correctly, I fired off an e-mail to them, as did many others. I pointed out that when even the Department of Homeland Security is advising people to stop using IE that All Music needs to realize the importance of developing a site that adheres to standards, allowing the site to look proper in any browser, whether it's Firefox, Opera, Safari, or the browser on a cell phone. I told them that it's easy to develop a site that adheres to web standards and that with the number of alternative browsers in use, it's irresponsible for a site like theirs to ignore the idea.

Today they posted a response to their site:

Optimizing a site of allmusic's complexity and size for all browsers and operating systems is no small feat. This isn't a simple "brochure-ware" site of static pages. While we would love to optimize the AMG sites for all browsers and all operating systems, we simply don’t have the necessary resources to do so. Despite some users flattering comparison of our site with that of Google, Amazon and Yahoo!, we are a small company with limited resources. So, we had to pick the most widely used browser by our users (over 87%) to optimize the site for and then work on compatibility issues with the other major browsers as we go forward.

We are concentrating on making the site more accessible through Opera, Mozilla Firefox, and Safari. We know how important it is to our users and we're moving quickly.

The second paragraph makes me happy and from what I understand, they're keeping true to their word with changes already appearing, but the first paragraph bothers me quite a bit. It's wrong on so many levels. How about I pick it apart bit-by-bit, just for fun?

"Optimizing a site of allmusic's complexity and size for all browsers and operating systems is no small feat."

Actually, developing a site with web standards is much easier than trying to code with assorted proprietary code. The code base is smaller and it helps you focus on simplicity.

"This isn't a simple "brochure-ware" site of static pages."

So what? The complicated nature of your data and back-end processing has jack shit to do with the way the information is presented. All the data and its processing is server side. Do what you please there. But the code that's interpreted on the browser? Churn out standard, non-proprietary code and you're golden. It doesn't matter how static or dynamic your site is.

"While we would love to optimize the AMG sites for all browsers and all operating systems, we simply don't have the necessary resources to do so."

While there aren't any formal ROI studies that I know of that show the value of developing with web standards, Keith's comparisons line up with my own experiences. Complex sites become simpler to develop, maintain, and change and take less time to develop. The fact that All Music is a small company should be the reason that they don't use complex, proprietary client-side code, not the reason to justify it.

"So, we had to pick the most widely used browser by our users (over 87%) to optimize the site for and then work on compatibility issues with the other major browsers as we go forward."

Allmusic.com is the 36th most popular site on the web. I can't even wager a guess at how much traffic they get in a day. But let's assume, conservatively, that they get a million hits a day. 41,667 an hour. 694 a minute. That means that every 0.67 seconds, someone is told that they won't be able to view the site properly. How can a site with appeal as universal as All Music's publicly launch a site that will essentially reject a user every half-second? [update: corrected 0.67 seconds to 1.5 seconds... thanks, Jeremy, for proving I'm weaker at math than I thought!] [update to the update: I was right the first time. Damn my insecurities.]

And this all goes without even critiquing the look-and-feel of their new design. It's slightly better, but the banner ad at the top and the unusually large allmusic banner take up a significant chunk of screen space, even on my 19" monitor. The artist pages are quite fragmented and don't seem to offer a "show me all this info" option. And they're not really making the best use of screen space considering the amount of information they need to display.

All this aside, though, All Music has a chance to make things right and seem to be committed to doing so. Let's hope they are.