The Static Page

Bifurcation of the Web

I've noticed something happening to web sites across the web. They are bifurcating.

There has long been the problem of standards compliance, with web masters and designers building pages that expect bugs in particular browsers, whilst those interested in proper cross-platform and cross-browser performance fought a bit of a rearguard action. The nature of this battle has changed over the years. Initially, it was between versions of Netscape, as early versions quickly added features like tables and then frames. Much more recently, Microsoft's push to get as many people as possible onto IE has shifted the battle. To many designers, building a web site means building it for IE. Sometimes they don't even consider that there is anything else.

It could be viewed as fortunate that there are still large numbers of web sites that are built with HTML compliance in mind. Or at least don't descend into IE bug-compatility mode. I can remember when Rob Malda had a major review of the HTML that SlashDot generated. At the time, its HTML compatibility went as far back as Netscape 2, which Slashdot's table-oriented formatting was really pushing. Also at the time, the highly-compliant Opera was beginning to make its presence felt and in the end, heading towards more standards-compliant code was deemed more important than accomodating the quirks of an old browser few people still used. More recently, many of you will recall when InfoWorld upgraded their web site. The resulting design was very ambitious and from a technological point-of-view was moving in the right direction with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). But it turned out to be a little too ambitious and didn't work right in too many browsers. I never did figure out what browser they had designed it for. The bug-compatibility can be taken further, of course. Netscape 4 is notorious for having a buggy implementation of CSS.

Meanwhile, IE has slowly taken over the role of The Ubiquitous Browser. The vast majority of new PCs now come with IE installed, since Microsoft have tried to insist it's a part of Windows, and it is usually installed with Macromedia Flash and various other plug-ins. It also has its own extensions to JavaScript which web designers often use to great effect, as do they with Flash. An example of a site designed to this platform is Panasonic Australia - a fairly content-free site, pampering exactly to the sort of young adult with disposable cash to spend but with little or no clue as to how his PC works. It assumes a fairly modern and relatively default IE install on a resonably fast PC with a working sound card. And is gaudy in the extreme (it also managed to crash Opera's Flash plugin when I tried it...). Designed by someone who has probable never heard of the term "User interface", let alone what a good user interface might be. Someone who would probably be better employed designing CD-ROM content, not web pages. Of course, if you can find an email address for these types of site to ask when they will stop expecting IE and its bugs, you will generally get ignored. Since they see almost all of their traffic as coming from IE, they aren't interested in what else there may be. It becomes self-perpetuating. So if you don't fit what they think you should have on the desktop, you'd better pray you don't need what's on their web site.

What is happening here? Simple: the web is bifurcating. Dividing. Separating. On the one hand you have web sites lazily following Microsoft's wish for the Internet, whilst on the other hand who don't. Advocates of the latter can bemoan the continuing existence of the former, but many of their patrons don't care and wouldn't understand. It becomes a problem with the two extremes meet. Then you get web site designers getting flaming emails about what "standards compliance" means, with J Random User looking disinterestedly at the not-Flashy and sometimes downright boring sites that won't dance to IE's bugs.

I can't see this situation getting any better any time soon.

Wade Bowmer, aka Static.

discussion

Comments? Email me at static dash page at yceran dot org.