Browsers fail to maintain standards

If you're one of those people who uses one browser at work and another at home, you may have noticed something odd sometimes the same Website will look completely different depending on the browser.

For example, if you have access to both a 4.0 or higher version of the two main browsers, Netscape Navigator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer, have a look at Microsoft's own site http://www.microsoft.com. Odd, isn't it? Perhaps your own company Website also comes in two forms.

Unless your site is very basic, with none of the dynamic add-ons that perk a site up or make it more functional, you can assume one of three things. First, that you have twin Websites, and which one you see depends on what browser you're using. Second, your (lazy) Website developers designed your site using only the tools for one proprietary browser Netscape's or Microsoft's and anyone looking at it with the "wrong" browser is at best, losing some site functionality, or worse, is looking at a jumbled mess.

The third option, like the first, is another aggravation for Website designers. Visitors to the site get the same experience regardless of the browser, but that's because the Web designers have had to do some fancy technical footwork behind the scenes to get the proprietary technologies built into one browser to also work with its rival.

According to a new consortium of Web companies set up this week, at least 25 per cent of the cost of building Websites for clients is tangled up in resolving the inherent incompatibilities between the two leading browsers, wasting millions of pounds each year.

The pressure group, called the Web Standards Project (http:// www.webstandards.org), came out swinging against the two browser giants, complaining that they were adding enhancements to their browsers which did not conform to the standards they themselves supposedly supported and indeed, had helped create. Those standards had been approved by the World Wide Web Consortium (http:// www.w3c.org), the global Web body that is recognised as a key standards creator.

In other words, the two companies are paying lip-service to the idea of standards, and making sure they have a hand in creating them, but then ignoring them with a cavalier disregard for the people building the Web the developers and designers, and those using it you.

The compatibility problem is threatening to transform the Web, but only in the most senseless and pig-headed ways. Either businesses end up paying for the incompatibilities through increased Website costs and lowest-common-denominator Websites which avoid using conflicting technologies, or we all lose out by being inexorably steered towards using the same browser (and much if not most technical innovation has come from healthy competition, not monopoly).

One solution is to create non-proprietary standards. Those are standards which offer technical specifications that ensure products will interlock without compatibility issues and that content (image, music, or text) can be broadcast and delivered without conflicts. That's been the approach of an international organisation called MPeg, the Moving Picture Experts Group (see related story, page 7).

The other approach is that of W3C: allow companies to create technologies which they can submit for approval as standards. But that approach is farcical if the companies which create the standards not only won't conform to those put forth by their competitors but also ignore those they created themselves.

The Web may be a young medium but that is no excuse for browser companies to act like spiteful children. Voice your disapproval and add your name to the support list at the Web Standards Project's Website.

Karlin Lillington is at klillington@irish-times.ie