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David is an occasional blogger, software engineer, Nintendo fanboy, liberal, news magazine addict, voracious TiVo user, and bibliophile. He was born in St. Louis, grew up in southern Indiana, and returned to St. Louis to attend Washington University. He hasn't managed to escape yet. He's a fan of free wine tastings, too many tv shows to name, and eating out. David makes his living developing web applications used internally by his employer. He doesn't blog about work because he's heard too many stories about that causing workplace troubles. There's more on the about page. |
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23 February 2001 - 11:32 pm
nickd.org, one of the websites that I frequently visit, has decided that he no longer wants visitors to his sites that do not use "standards compliant" browsers. The list of "standards compliant" browsers does not include my browser of choice Netscape 4.75. I use Netscape 4.x on both Windows and Solaris, and I am very happy with it. Now, some loser kid has decided that his website is too fucking cool to be viewed in Netscape. Am I the only one who remembers the days when content was more important than presentation? The days when people searched the web for useful information, and not for fancy fading links or elaborately laid out pages?
All of this is, of course, the fault of the Web Standards Project, an organization whose "mission is to stop the fragmentation of the web, by persuading browser makers that standards are in everyone's best interest. Together we can make the web accessible to everyone." Everyone who uses the browsers that they recommend, that is. In fact, I couldn't even visit the Web Standard Project's (their abbreviation is WaSP, which I thought had other connotations) home page without loading IE 5.5. Netscape gets redirected to a crappy update or die page. Is this the way to make the web more accessible to everyone, by refusing content to those who haven't updated their browsers recently? I mean, their list of recommended browsers isn't really outstanding. They list two free browsers that run on the Windows™ OS: IE 5.5 and Netscape 6. While IE 5.5 may be "standards compliant," I don't particularly like the way it renders pages or huge percentage of my hard drive its installation requires (Not to mention the fact that I try to use MS competitors whenever possible). And Netscape 6 is just about as crappy a browser as I have ever used. It takes the better part of a day to load, and its interface is crap.
Of course, all of this skirts around the major issue here: refusing to let people view your page based entirely on the browser they are using is about as elitist as you can get on the Internet. For those of us with broadband connections to the Internet, upgrading, while boring and tedious, isn't the end of the world, but for the millions of people who connect to the Internet via a modem, downloading the "standards compliant" browsers can be an effort of futility. The two free Windows browsers recommended by the Wasp are huge downloads, both in excess of 30MB. When I use my parents computer at home, downloading 30MB takes hours and hours, and their connection usually gets dropped long before the download completes. Browser upgrades are close to impossible over a modem connection, mainly due to the feature bloat of the two major browsers.
Of course, by now you're thinking, what about Opera, it's free, isn't it? It is, but only if you're keen on having ads displayed while you browse. If you would rather be in control of your own screen, you have to pay $30 for the ad free version of Opera.
This is crap. I am no longer going to visit any sites that require me to load IE or Netscape 6. You should do the same. We need to fight back. "Together we can make the web accessible to everyone." For real.
Posted by on 23 February 2001 at 11:32 PM
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