Is it just me, or is there a high rate of Taiwanese web sites that are only fully functional in IE? I’m a Linux and Firefox user, and I rarely run into this usability problem with sites outside of Taiwan, and it’s not a language issue. I regularly come across sites that really should be designed for all users, including university sites, hospitals, and public utilities, that only really work in IE, the most recent being cht.com.tw/CHTFinalE/Web/. Is it just me, or is this an issue for others? Just doing a reality check here.
Seems like it, the CHT site doesn’t show correctly in Opera either.
I am not IE user, but I can run into this website. It’s Chumghwa Telephone’s frontpage. I used to Pcman, kkman, firefox (sometmes)…
and I have no problem to run website. even I used cellphone run those website are work.
Do you want to check the firewall or Antivirus which they block the browser. maybe the company or hospital’s serve block your brower or website.
hope you solve your problem
You’re not imagining it - IE is completely dominant in Taiwan (with many still using the loathsome IE6). Hence Taiwanese web designers don’t waste any time designing for anything other than Internet Explorer. Even in my tech-savvy company I am considered weird for (a) using a Mac, (b) using Firefox on a PC before the boss bought me the Mac © designing a cross-browser-compliant corporate site.
I just checked the site you linked to in Camino, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Shiira on the Mac and Firefox, IE6 and Safari on the PC. Only IE6 on the PC works properly. Gah.
I have no hope of things in Taiwan changing any time soon with regards to web design standards.
Luckily for Linux users, there is a handy plugin for Firefox called IE View Lite. By linking this plugin with WINE, the page can be viewed.
Web pages don’t work in Taiwan. And another funny thing is that the Mozilla site is simplified Chinese for me by default, though I’m in Taiwan.
The Taiwanese are generally crap at web design. No cross-browser compatibility, over-reliance on Flash, setting “recommended” screen resolutions, slow-loading pages,… the list goes on.
All of which are things everyone else was doing too, just a few years ago. Which doesn’t make it okay, but it’s certainly not the only area where Taiwan is a few years behind everyone else …
the M$ “implementation” of html and xml is carefully designed to be just that little bit different from the agreed open standard, that they themselves helped to develop, so that other browsers are not compatible with IE especially in its more complicated offerings, like forms and interactive tables. this is called “anticompetitive behaviour” although MS claim that they are doing no such thing.
Taiwan web ‘designers’, to give them more more of a title than they generally deserve, often plump for the simplest, cheapest approach and use the cheapest (ie M$-provided) software to build websites with. i am not sure if many of them even realise that there are other browsers out there that adhere to the international standards. Oh, and they are more than happy to force your browser to waste time, bandwidth and effort displaying lots of supposedly ‘cute’ animations to enhance your web experience.
a pox on them all.
… which in Taiwan means free of charge. Most companies I’ve worked with / for have just enough licenses for Windoze and Office to keep the BSA off their backs and not more. Given that books on programming in VBasic, MySQL and ASP are so cheap and plentiful, it’s little wonder they have a stranglehold.
[quote=“urodocus”] I am not sure if many of them even realise that there are other browsers out there that adhere to the international standards.[/quote]Many of them don’t seem to realize that there is a world out there, let alone one that uses different platforms or browsers…
Me: Do you know how this renders on an English machine?
IT person: stare blankly
Me: Do you know how this renders on a Mac?
IT person: stare blankly
Me: Do you know how this renders on Firefox?
IT person: stare blankly
ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
[quote=“urodocus”]Oh, and they are more than happy to force your browser to waste time, bandwidth and effort displaying lots of supposedly ‘cute’ animations to enhance your web experience.
a pox on them all.[/quote]
To be fair I have met a lot of web designers who want to make clean, modern looking pages. Problem is that their bosses won’t let them. If the boss personally likes flying cartoon figures, exploding pink fluffy dinosaurs and marqueeing text then that’s what goes on the web. It doesn’t matter if the target demographic is research chemists or middle-aged alcoholic lechers. As far as the average Taiwanese boss is concerned, there is no upper limit to how much text or how many images can be crammed onto one page. There is no such thing as too much color or animation. There is no limit on how long an item can have a flashing ‘NEW!!’ image next to it.
Obviously if they cannot grasp any of these simple ideas they cannot grasp the idea that if all the crap on the page takes two minutes to load from the server that’s in the same room, it will take an hour when viewed from America! 
I think a pox is much too light a punishment for those who use marquee or flashing text. I think being bound and gagged, eyelids taped open, in a cell with continuous speedmetal played at 104dB and strobe lights at alpha frequencies isn’t even enough punishment for these people.
A few years ago I was asked by the government to put together guidelines for Taiwan’s English-language Web sites and present these to various officials and webmasters. (A few things there are slightly outdated. But the principles remain the same.)
Of course everyone went, “Wow, you’re right! I never thought about all that before.” And of course no one did much of anything about this later because that would have involved not only (1) loss of face for those behind the creation and approval of the many screwed-up Web sites in the first place, but also (2) actual work (though following the guidelines would save work in the long run).
Oh well. At least I got paid for my exercise in futility.
Hey, that’s my idea of a good time! I’ve been thinking of opening a club where that’s the chief drawcard. obviously, you won’t be coming…
i agree about there being some web designers here who actually do have a decent understanding of the limitations of the web and how to make crisp clean fast web experiences happen with the least fuss.
but then there are so many more who don’t.
and it’s not just a web problem: look at the local TV news screens: three, four or even five countermarching scrolling text bars, whizzing cutesy little corner animations, strange skewed perspectives on inset images, urgghh…
and believe it or not, they actually have productin crews from Hong Kong and China come here to learrn how to do that, so they can use thaose excellent approaches in their own shows. (my wife is a senior TV news producer, and even though she hates all that crap, she is not allowed to change as the ratings are good and thus that’s obviously what the public wants.).
Hey, that’s my idea of a good time! I’ve been thinking of opening a club where that’s the chief drawcard. obviously, you won’t be coming…
[/quote]Haha. No no, it’s not that I don’t like speedmetal or strobes. The point is that most Taiwanese hate that sort of thing and therefore it would be a good torture technique. Torture to me is having to listen to an awful student practicing on the piano… as I’m subjected to that every goddam day.
[quote]
and it’s not just a web problem: look at the local TV news screens: three, four or even five countermarching scrolling text bars, whizzing cutesy little corner animations, strange skewed perspectives on inset images, urgghh…
and believe it or not, they actually have productin crews from Hong Kong and China come here to learrn how to do that, so they can use thaose excellent approaches in their own shows. (my wife is a senior TV news producer, and even though she hates all that crap, she is not allowed to change as the ratings are good and thus that’s obviously what the public wants.).[/quote]
Yes. No concept at all of understatement. Hell, I can’t even get a good translation of that idea in Chinese that doesn’t sound negative in some way.
Also, I think if you would tune the TV in a noodle place to the snow channel, at least half the patrons would watch it anyway. That’s the only way I can explain why the Taiwanese watch the garbage that’s on local TV.
An over-stimulated culture of garbage. When I came to Taiwan there were not even those LCD screens on MRT Platforms. And later on, in the building where I worked, they installed LCD screens right next to the elevator doors, pumping commercials as well. It goes off topic a bit, but relevant perhaps that how the media or media channels in general here in Taiwan are just a means to bring on the trash. So why bother about a minority using some unknown web browser, everyone uses IE anyway, right?? (sarcasm). I suspect all what is mentioned here comes from commercial motives; serving a minority would not gain anything.
And of course some Western academic comes along and says that all that busyness might be not only a reflection of the essence of that society and its language (scripts) but even a good thing.
[quote]The Japanese enjoy many advantages in their communication system, each symbol system carries different inflections, levels of formality, and a wide variety of visual possibilities. It also allows them to add words from foreign languages rather easily, in a variety of ways. Hiragana, as a translation base for Kanji (Chinese characters), and Katakana for other languages. Then, they also use romanji. (I lived in Japan for some time, and a friend of mine there once said that he was glad our ancestors chose a 26 character based alphabet instead of what we saw every day. I am not so sure.)
An open question: Does this understanding and daily living with complexity explain their ho-hum response to the iPhone? Their massively complicated and crowded visual systems? Look to their close living conditions, and you will understand a Japanese, yes even an Asian tolerance for visual density.
Urban density equals typographic density.
The cellular systems available in the Japanese and Asian markets provided the functions of the iPhone long before the arrival of the iPhone. Interestingly, as my colleague Jerrold Maddox shared with Geotypografika recently, the cell phone novel format, begun as a largely female trend – much like Hiragana, in its ancient form! – has transcended the printed book on the national bestseller list there last year (see the New York Times article here).
A second open question: because their eyes (muscles after all) are so well trained through these various complex systems, are they “better,” more capable perhaps, at perceiving and interacting with complex information in contemporary media platforms? These gadgets and surfaces are certainly more popular and cutting edge in Asia (see the Korean giant Samsung’s worldwide success, not to mention companies in China, Taiwan, and Japan).
Consider how crowded and competitive the average news website or even television broadcast has become, then imagine, or better yet, have a look at what these comparable platforms look like in multiple languages. Those designers and producers think we want and can handle all of that information. Are the Japanese and Asian languages better for this type of information projection?
Is English well suited to carry all of the needs of the world?[/quote]
Holy ugly flashbacks of grad school, Batman!
I just noticed that the Taipei Times recommends Firefox. Makes a nice change from the usual IE recommendation.
Latest culprits: The morons at Changhwa Bank who believe that only people who use IE (The World’s Most Insecure Web Browser™) could possibly want to use their web banking system. Even their FAQ doesn’t work (no doctype declaration and broken javascript).
I had to open an account there seeing as my company has shifted its banking to CHB - despite this I was actually interested in using their internet banking, but fuck it, now I’m just going to clean the account out every pay-day.
treid lodging a tax return on-line lately? nifty little plug-in device that reads your secure chip-card, etc, that only works on WinXP with IE.
China Airlines: eCheck-in (which is actually useful and something many other airlines don’t have yet) is IE only.
My favourite: Branding Taiwan - even the W3C validator refuses to look at this page.
And what’s with the tax system software for online payment of taxes: IR900… it doesn’t run even on my WINXP SP2 Chinese language computer… this year we’re filing manually, it looks like software doesn’t work…! And the kind engineers suggested on the website, reinstalling my OS to file electronically: let’s see 2 hours to install, 45 minutes to write the form and go to the post office… Mmm.
I used to favor technology over most manual things, now I’m filing manually (less hassle), ditching technology solutions for running virtual systems, and trimming out the problems from my life. I just removed my Gallery install and am uploading all my pictures to FLICKR…
Websites should be open to all modern browsers (or at least the top ones!), online tax payment should work (at least in Chinese!), Virtual Systems should allow me to virtualize a system that I already have installed, and Gallery should just work, but it’s just extra problems.
Who knows… I might be going back to pen and paper sooner or later.
Never were truer words spoken.