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Microsoft's IE 5.5 Flouts Industry Standards
Eric Harlow writes: "Microsoft's newly released Internet Explorer 5.5 is trying to do something Microsoft was worried that Netscape might do -- make the browser a platform. Of course, now that IE has 86% of the market, it can lure developers into using flashy new tools that leave Netscape users out of the dust since the new IE has all kinds of 'IE only' features -- and they haven't managed to fix standard items as CSS."
Here's the CNET story; a snippet reads: "Together, the proprietary innovation and the purported faults in standards compliance mean that Web pages created to work for IE--widely considered to be the dominant browser--won't work with browsers from Netscape, Opera Software and other providers."
Similarly, jchristopher writes: "The Web Standards project has come out against Microsoft again, this time blasting them for the proprietary "enhancements" found in their recently released IE 5.5 Web browser. Microsoft is up to their tricks again. Meanwhile, the browser still does not fully support CSS1. Here is the press release from the Web Standards Project."
I wish companies would stop touting incompatibility with others as a desirable feature rather than a liability. Would you buy a wrench that said "Works only on Ford"?
I'm currently doing a stage in the french arm of w3c. CSS1 is not that hard to implement... it's ridiculous that MS, which has so much more resources that the w3c does, is unable to get a working version of CSS1 out. And CSS2... oh boy. Also, one of the strengths of XML is that it's very easy to extend. However, any xml extension will be correctly parsed by any xml-parser, meaning that the obvious choice for an extension mechanism would be to base it on XML, at least ensuring that the extensions don't interfere with existing software.
So why is microsoft's "DHTML" not XML compliant? I truly hope this goes the way ActiveX did... the "no go" way.
Furthermore, I would make sure that the extensions can easily be transformed to existing tags using XSLT. XSLT (frequently referred to as XSL) is a language that essentially allows one XML document to be transformed into another. Simplistically put, you make you're own markup (extensions) and "map" them onto different xml elements (tags).
Meaning if a browser wanted to, it could load a compatibility XSL transformation from, say, it's website so it could at least make something from the new tags, even if some functionality is missing.
Notice that this only works when those extensions are xml... guess why microsoft didn't want that...
BTW, I have no clue about official w3c opinions...
--EMN
I used to be a Netscape user for several years up until this year, when I switched over to IE. I was amazed at the difference I saw. IE is much more tolerant of mistakes, handles tables a whole lot better (actual size and background images being two of the biggest factors) and has support for the hover style, a feature that can sublty but importantly enhance a page.
Now I don't mean this to be a post just in support of IE. The reason I bring this up is because it really is an issue of innovation. It sounds cliche to talk about Microsoft and its innovation, but I think that perhaps this is most apparent on the web, with browsers. I cannot tell you how many times I have felt held back by Netscape's lack of functionality, and even compliance with standards. Things have taken twice as much effort and in some cases rquired a "dumbing down" in order to get them to work well and look good in NS. I know that NS is working on the Mozilla project, and I've heard pretty good reviews of v6, but the fact that no major upgrade (and I'm primarily looking at adding functionailty) has been made for several years has really hurt the web in my opinion. In my experience, the pages for IE are much more flexible and technically advanced than those that run on NS. So my point here is, advancement is a seriously important aspect of the web.
On the other hand, however, a lot of the problems with the design has also been browser compatibilty. This requires constant checking, constant updating (have to keep on top what who has what) and in general it makes things very difficult. Usually the problem is more that one browser doesn't meet the w3c's standards rather than there being a specific proprietary advancement that the other does not ahve. Unfortunately, what Microsoft is proposing will be a proprietary advancement, and this one NS is sure to not follow.
I don't know what to do about this. The web has developed so well in the recent past because of the balance between innovation and standards. There has been a pretty good balance between pushing ahead and joining the others. I have to say though, that the web cannot continue to be where its at for very much longer. Static web pages, limited funcitonality and unwieldy design languages I hope will soon be a thing of the past. I guess when it comes down to it, I am very happy that MS is doing this.... we obviously can't look to Netscape/Mozilla for innovation since it seems like they're more concerned about integrating AIM into the browser than really advancing the technology. I am also somewhat apprehensive about how this will shape how people view the web but frankly, after years of struggling with mediocre and limited design space, I'm ready for something new.
While everybody knows that Microsoft likes to take standards an mess with them, I find it kind of funny that people around here are claiming that it's this sort of action that isolates Netscape users. I use Netscape myself, but I'm also a web developer, and the more I hear about Microsoft's browser dominance, the less I want to continue to support Netscape.
That's because supporting Netscape and IE doesn't mean maintaining strict standards compliance- all of my pages adhere to strict standards- but working around a list of bugs and horrid design decisions the size of your arm just so that Netscape won't mangle your page while IE users can see it just fine. Even though Netscape invented Javascript (as a way to lock out IE users? I don't know), IE does it better- I'm not talking about the incompatible DOMs, I'm talking about simple things like the fact that Netscape won't let you dynamically change the size of form widgets without a PAGE REFRESH, something that I'm sure my users would love.
It's quickly becoming an IE-only world, but it's not because Microsoft uses proprietary tags- honestly, why would Microsoft care about squashing Netscape 4.7 at this point? The only people who use it are die-hards and people without any IE option anyway. It's because as bad as IE's compliance is, Netscape's is ten times worse. Netscape is just suffering from the fact that it used to be the big dog and so it thought it could get away with anything, and it was right, but now it's not the big dog anymore, and developers are tired of putting up with it.
Sorry, it had to be said.
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-jacob
-jacob
I posted this ealier but was a bit vociferous, here's a calmer version of my earlier post:
The article is belaboring something that has been a fact of web development for at least the past year or two. Both browsers have had things that only work on only their platform for years. Anyone remember BLINK and MARQUEE? How about javascript? They use different DOMs so different code has to be used to do the same thing. Sites like Dynamic Drive have been seperating their scripts into IE-only and Netscape only for as long as I've been going there.
Netscape has been flouting standards for as long than MSFT with their proprietary LAYER tag and inventing Javascript. Frankly as at now (but not for long with Mozilla in the works) MSIE supports more of CSS1 than Netscape for proof of this check out this page and use this image as a reference. In MSIE it renders with few flaws while in Netscape it looks like a Picasso. The problem is therefore not with MSIE's support of CSS1 standards at least not now.
The problem is that MSFT's proprietary additions to their browser such as the XML parser built into the browser which is available for scripting and others are so tempting to developers that they ignore the fact that these things work only on IE and rationalize (if you can call it that) this away with "Most people use IE." The fact that W3C takes a long time to ratify standards has not helped this either. PS: For all those who do not realize how long both browsers have been incompatible and flouting standards read Dynamic Html : The Definitive Reference by Danny Goodman for an informative read.
PS: The above post is very correct, MSFT doesn't force websites to use it's proprietary additions or to script only for IE, bad web developers do this. If people didn't use the IE specific things in the browser for websites on the world wide web (as opposed to a local intranet were such things can be mandated) then this would not be an issue. Web developers are more to blame for the browser segregation than MSFT.
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Really, this is not that difficult to combat, considering how good Mozilla really is -- and therefore Netscape 6 will be.
Anyone who cares a whit about the issue: start designing your own sites now to use only standard technologies (XML/CSS/DOM) as far as Mozilla will let you. Mozilla itself has a few things that are non-standard -- don't be tempted!
Worried that this will lock you out of MS's 86%? Never fear. Sniff the browser in your configuration file and return the exact same code, except with the tag stripped out, when IE-anything or Mozilla tag was new. Both people can still use your site without problems, of course.
It sure beats maintaining two separate versions of your site -- which is what you'll have to do when AOL merges Gecko into their next major rev. The reason it's worth waiting for standards is because CSS, when properly used, is nice like that.
This is my plan for the next version of my site.
Hold on a sec. When AOL 6.0 is released, it won't include IE, it'll include Mozilla based. Assuming that most of their 23 million users will upgrade (who doesn't like shiny things?), it'll be a whole new situation. 80% will quickly drop to 40%. I'm sure when you install AOL 6.0 you won't even have the option of using IE, it'll just disable it. IE only specs will mean anti-AOL, and thus definitely anti-consumer.
Browsers are just horrible. Why? No one implements the standards properly. And once a company manages to get a lead in their market share, they ignore the fact that their browsers are broken by design, and add features that the marketting department orders.
..
The Day the Browser Died by Jeffery Zeldman illustrates quite nicely how this happened with Netscape v4, which fails to support CSS very well at all (IIRC, it turns CSS into some sort of Javascript style page stuff).
People have never had much choice when it came to web browsers. In the early days, it was Netscape or Mosaic, and Netscape was the clear leader. Because of this, people didn't care that Netscape was horribly broken, and wrote HTML which was broken by design (such as elements without terminating semicolons). Then Netscape would release an updated version which fixed the behaviour, and a lot of the web would just "not work"
Enter IE. IE came along as a half-baked licencing of the Spyglass Mosaic source. Think Mosaic v1, but in 1996 when it had to compete against Netscape v2. It didn't get any better until IE v4 in 1998. But IE 4 (and 5, and 5.5) also have gaping holes in their support for common, well known standards.
So what's a web designer to do? Because the two main choices (ignore Opera, 99.99% of people will not use shareware when all other browsers are freeware) are both so poor, the web designer is stuck using the lowest common denominator standards, using horrible kludges to work around the broken feature sets of the browsers used to render their work. Worse, once one of the two browsers gains more than a certain percentage of market share, a lot of web designers will go ahead and write broken HTML using the features of the most common browser out of exasperation (not to mention all the "web programming" programs targetted at absolute newbies, such as Front Page, which produce highly non-portable HTML).
Microsoft (and some other FUDsters that remain) like to talk about Linux and fragmentation of standards in the Unix camp, yet they go ahead and do EXACTLY the same thing in their own little places. The balkanization of the web is well on its way to happening, thanks to the standards-incompliant browsers out there.
You think it's bad having to spend 799$ on MS Word to be able to read the macro viruses that most companies use for documentation systems? Wait until one company (in this case, Microsoft, but Netscape was just as bad when it had its large percentage of market share) has control of web standards. How much will a good browser which supports the latest MS-HTML feature cost in 2003?
Dr. Jakob Nielsen did some research into browser usage patterns that could present a way to avoid the problems of incompatible HTML. It's simple: get a browser with standards support available before Jan. 2001. If you can get it into that window, people will start using your browser.
Mozilla looks like it can make it, if they get some help from people in making sure that they have good standards compliance out of the gate. Right now, Mozilla has some notable problems with CSS 1 (such as conflicts between CSS margining, paragraph indentation, and HTML 4.0 tables) and other parts of its rendering engine interacting badly.
Web designers want to use standards in their daily business. It lets them be free to write sites that work the best possible way. If you give them clients using standards compliance browsers, they will make standards compliant websites.
If the free software programmers help get the gecko engine working properly, and provide a nice wrapper to it (such as the Galeon Gnome wrapper for Gecko), people will switch to it. Provide stability, provide standards compliance, and give it away free. People will download it (especially since gecko+wrapper should be a lot smaller than Mozilla itself, which has so many other things people might not need, like YetAnotherMailClient). The only catch is that you also need to have a Windows version, or you can bank on MS being able to force people into using IE 6.0.
We have a headstart on MS because Gecko is here today with the source open to people who can help fix it and get it out the door. Don't let this opprotunity go to waste. We can beat the marketters at their own game.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I love IE. It's stable (usually), powerful, and is the only useful XML client out there. Where the features it provides are generally helpful and likely to be (or become) mainstream, then I'll happily use them. I write SMIL that only works on IE 5.5, because it's my only option for SMIL, and in my particular context that's enough reason to change browsers. As SMIL is standards-based, then I have no guilt about doing it (Mozilla can play catch up as soon as they feel like it).
I'd love for there to be more good browsers. I'd love Mozilla to do XML (Yes, I know what it does, and that isn't useful enough). I'd love Amaya to be more friendly than a rottweiler with toothache. I'd like Opera to understand Unicode (big Doh! on that one, guys). These are business issues though, and as a web-geek, I'm not in a position to fix them. Hey, I'm just a red-shirt, and I know what happens when they go up against the Borg.
OTOH, M$oft "innovations" are evil, not part of the standards process, and should be shunned by all right thinking web developers. If M$oft want to use them on their own site, then that's their privilege and their problem if it goes wrong. No-one else should touch them with the proverbial bargepole.
PLEASE, browser makers - give us working, reliable CSS and a standard DOM before you fool around with anything else.
I think this is a case of a double standard.
Netscape did this quite a lot years ago: the introduction of cookies, numerous tags like and all the stuff.
Nobody seemed to cry "you're not standards compliant" then; instead, they hailed Netscape for their "innovation" (now a tainted word after Microsoft abused it so.)
The thing is, both companies have always shirked the standards bodies, if for no other reason than they are slow. The Web moves fast, especially web technology. In just the past year I've learned or been exposed to at least 7 new web-development technologies/frameworks. I can't think of another industry that even comes close in terms of speed.
I believe it is wrong to shrug off the standards bodies until you have already implemeneted/forced your standard on the world. But we aren't going to change that corporate mindset (at least, not until we get rid of the single-vendor dominance of web browsers.)
I don't support Microsoft's actions (in fact, I am ideologically opposed to using IE because I detest their behavior surrounding it so much) but I do think we should remember that Netscape did this too; they aren't the innocent here. And sadly enough, they will have to continue to do it in order to win market share back. A pure standards compliant browser just isn't enough to make it these days, I'm afraid.
This can only put the Mozilla guys under more pressure. The longer they take to release their browser, the more people will develop their pages for IE. It will happen because people don't have inifinte patience. Mozilla may be standards compliant, but if by the time its released those standards don't mean anything it doesn't help much. If I could help them I would but it's way out of my league unfortunately. I wish them luck, and hope they release it before its too late.
THAT is a most excellent idea!!! Let us just see what the headlines would look like if other people did the same thing...
The Army today finally released it's 2674 page causualty list from it's recent exercise training in South Carolina. Unfortunately for the Army, the think tank "innovating" new techniques forgot about the importance of digging in your troops AFTER advancing friendly tanks have stopped. They also failed to recognize the elusive threat of sending Airborne troops up without parachutes.
And here's another one from another Corporation
GM today announced the recall of over 36,000 light trucks that were built and sold as 2001 models, before the DOT established it's safety standards. GM's stock plummeted today as well, as a class action lawsuit against the company was filed in a circuit court. Seeing as how many of the deaths in GM light trucks were caused by either hypothermia, due to a lack of windows, or caused by carbon monoxide emissions in the cab of the truck. The exhaust was routed through the cab through a new GM innovation called exhaust heating. The lawsuit is expected to cripple GM.
And here's one from a utility company...
The entire National Power grid was taken down today unexpectedly as both the Detroit Edison, and Consumers Power switched over to a 500 hertz, 260 volt power system, innovated last week by the US Government. Although the system wasn't due to come online until 2015, Both Detroit Edison, and Consumers Power thought to get a jump on the market by converting their system early. Trillions of dollars are thought to be lost, and it is not known how long our batteries will....
krystal_blade, shooting first, then asking what sized bullet he should have used for that gun later.
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
Standards are good when they help people to accomplish their tasks. If the standards body can't provide workable standards is a reasonable timeframe, then it's difficult to blame Microsoft of Netscape for introducing them on their own.
I have no love for Microsoft or IE, but I really don't see this as being an issue of anti-competitiveness.
Everybody uses M$ Word because they don't have a choice.
;P
As a business you can't say "You can't send those Word documents to me - I can't read them" - you HAVE to be able to read them. Unfortunate, but that's the reality.
Now, you have 2 choices here - use a competing product (StarOffice, WordPerfect, AbiWord, etc...) that has SOME support for Word files - but won't read them perfectly, or give in to the peer pressure (which is really what it is) and use Word.
From a corporate standpoint, using Word is the optimal choice here. Corporations aren't moral entities. They don't look at what the company does, or how it treats it's customers. They look at what everyone else uses, and go with the herd mentality.
Due to this, and the fact that so many places "standardized" on Word, everyone else has to, lest they be incompatible with their peers. In business, this is a life or death thing (or at least it is perceived to be.)
So there really is NO choice for most companies.
This is the world M$ wants. It's the world they've gotten. Unfortunately, it's not going to change anytime soon - splitting Office from MS/OS, as Judge J is proposing, isn't going to do a damn thing about this. The only thing I could think of that WOULD help would be forcing them to open their file formats for other companies to become compatible -- this of course will never happen.
Predictions:
- Bush will (unfortunately) get the presidency
- Due to pressure from Bush (direct or indirect through appointments to various positions) M$ will get off easy, with little more than a little wrist slapping
- Nothing will change with regard to M$'s business practices or it's strangle hold on the business world
- Linux will gain popularity amongst people who disagree with M$, but their corporate bosses will tow the M$ line because they have to.
Of couse, I could be talking out my @$$
Right now they don't:
Validate Slashdot.org HTML.
You seem to be missing the point. It is not whether M$ should wait for Netscape, nor that Netscape is a standard itself, it is not. It is the fact that M$ is ignoring industry standards while adding proprietary "features"
99% of all statistics are made up on the spot. -- Bruce Karsh
I don't know if there's much anyone can really do about how Microsoft designs their browser except let the justice system do whatever it does.
On the other hand though, what happens if people go after the businesses who make everything Microsoft only? Corporations are Microsoft's main customer base after all, and personally I see them as (stereotypically) at least as dumb and irritating as Microsoft itself in this area.
Unlike internally used applications, websites are where businesses have to interact externally with their customers, so the choice of how they do it should be an important decision for most of them. What sort of impact does it have if and when businesses get flame mail about their propriety-based websites?
Are there any IT people out there who can comment on this? Maybe getting enough negative (but constructive) correspondence could help convince some management people that cross-platform standards design is a good thing - irrespective of Microsoft's market share.
Call me crazy but I trust W3 standards development more than Microsoft standards development, and the last thing I'd want to see right now is Mozilla to have to implement a "Microsoft mode", because then there would be no going back.
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OK, I think I have to take some exception with the statement that CSS1 is "not that hard to implement". When you look at the full scope of the standard, and at some of the stuff in the W3C's own CSS1 Test Suite, I think it's clear there is some very tricky stuff in here, especially if you want to render things as quickly as possible. But, yes, I agree that everybody has had enough time to get this much right by now.
Then the big problem is that there are some notable holes in CSS1 that have been attempted to be filled in CSS2, but then now there's also CSS3 coming down the pike...and it's not the case that stuff in CSS2 and CSS3 is very advanced or special interest stuff. I'm afraid that I must say, however much I might like the W3C, that they have not always done a great job of providing standards that "step up" nicely.
But there is a bright side; I think the idea of style sheets has now, finally, really begun to take hold to the point where everybody will have to support at least the most popular subset of CSS1 and CSS2 in order to be taken seriously. I mean it; if you look at the W3C's CSS web page in IE 5 for the Mac, (and then with Netscape Navigator) you'll immediately understand what I mean here.
Unfortunately, this is another side of the Catch 22 that is W3C standards compliance. The XML people on W3C panels are wildly enthusiastic about XSL, which, however, was so ungainly a project, and took so long to get anywhere that they had to split it up into pieces. There is XSLT, as you point out, and there's the part of XSL that actually styles the text into formatting objects. Now, the problem is that while everybody has been going gaga over XSLT, whose widespread use is still well into the future use of CSS via the DOM has slid into a weird twilight zone, even though the CSS/DOM approach actually handles many (if not all) of the problems that XSL* will handle. Meanwhile, of course, Microsoft does have an almost-compliant XSLT to go with their almost-compliant XML parser, and...I think you see where this is going.
For today's web pages, insist on standards-following CSS/DOM (even with your XML), because that is now finally available right now. Yes, XSL* will be cool, whenever it gets here. But don't hold your breath.
Babar
If only companies actually used new features to make their sites better. As things stand currently, this is extremely rare. Too many sites these days make you wander through 300 clicks of gee-whiz-wowie-did-that-just-move bullshit in order to get through to any content whatsoever. The vast majority of web "designers" should be shot.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
As IE becomes more dominate and web developers begin to more and more develop for IE only (especially for intranets where one can dictate the use of a browsers), MS will undoubtable tie the enhanced features to IIS. I think when that happens Apache market share will drop like a rock. This is the scenerio that concerns me and it is the obvious busness plan.
But what to do about it ? But MS stock ? Cheer Mozilla ?
I don't think it's a problem for Microsoft (or anyone else) to release software which has new features and can do new things. This isn't the issue. I mean, we all want innovation, right? The issue is that they are creating these innovations at the expense of existing standards.
The problem here is that crucial phrase: sites designed for Explorer will be unviewable in other browsers.
A good site designer will ensure that any newer features he incorporates into his site have a fall-back alternative for older browsers to use. This applies from <NOSCRIPT> tags, right down to simply using ALT text in your images.
The only way Microsoft can really cause a problem in this regard is to make it impossible (or difficult) to offer a fall-back option.
The real problem is all the lazy site designers out there who simply don't bother to code fall-backs, or maybe don't even realise that they should be coding them. The more popular "site design" tools are also to blame for not making it clear, and those of us who use 'other' browsers are also to blame for not complaining enough when we come across a site which does this (not buying from them simply isn't good enough - they won't even notice).
Having said all that, I do believe that Microsoft could and should have submitted their enhancements to the standards authority. I mean, come on MS - how many times to you have to shoot yourself in same foot before it hurts??
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
Look: standards come in two flavors: de jure standards and de facto standards. De facto standards are established by markets. While ideally, this means that customers flocked to this standard becuase of the superiority of the code, MS has demostrated time and time again that it is their market and anticompetitive behaviour that establishes this de facto standards. This means that engineering specifications are ignored.
The famed stupidity of the .doc format is exactly like that: it contains gotchas like a history, where people can reverse changes to the a document to see the changes made, the formatting specifications are nebulous enough that formats on one computer would differ in others.
De jure standards are better in this regard, because by submitting it to s standards review process, peer review ensures that the worst engineering aspects are thrown out, and a good compromise between competing goals can be ironed out openly. As an example of this, notice how MS word is totally unsuited for physics and mathematical publishing. Do you think MS deliberately ignored this market? Or do you think it is a result of them catering to their business clientele, and making them blind towards other perfectly good uses of their general purpose wordprocessor?
Speed of software development is never itself the issue. Compare the two branches of the Linux kernel. One caters to those who need stability, and the speed of upgrades is thus slower. The other is very fast, but make break between releases. Different styles to meet different demands - that is what software should be. And quite a few general users are starting to demand better engineered products - something which nobody really cared about before.
What's truly sad here is that MS is completely capable of creating a standards-compatible browser - their Mac group demonstrated it with IE 5 for the Mac. Instead, they choose to perpetuate the browser hell that web developers have had to live with for years because that validates their whole business model.
Microsoft's whole spin is that their products are better because of how easily they interoperate, and adhering to standards would only make it easier for competitors to offer this feature.
Until Mozilla, Netscape was no better, though, and I'm sure they wouldn't have embraced standards and open source had they not been driven to it by MS's monopoly.