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WWW Inventor On Microsoft's Browser Tricks
Unipuma writes: "Tim Berners-Lee gives his views in an interview with Silicon Valley about the latests blocking of the MSN website for most other than Internet Explorer browsers. 'I have fought since the beginning of the Web for its openness: that anyone can read Web pages with any software running on any hardware. This is what makes the Web itself. This is the environment into which so many people have invested so much energy and creativity. When I see any Web site claim to be only readable using particular hardware or software, I cringe - they are pining for the bad old days when each piece of information need a different program to access it.'"
That's because they're foolish. I regularly send "I'm a pain in the ass" mail to whatever marketing address I can find to inform people that locking potential customers out of their promotional websites is the height of stupidity. Use of Flash or other plugins may be OK for optional "tours" or whatever, but to block a customer from the main page due to lack of a plugin is a clear case of marketing people gone wild without adult supervision.
The idea that flash animation is required to grab attention is based on a misunderstanding of the context. If I go to a commercial web site, chances are I've gone there on purpose to gather information. I do not need to be impressed. I do not need eye candy to keep me "stuck" to the site. I just want information.
The same goes for access sites at banks or credit card companies (like Citibank, for example) that feel the need to drown me in stupid flyover popup menus. Why why why? I just want to check my balance, and your 100K of Javascript does NOT make my life better.
E.G., if I wanted a Flash animation, but defaulting to a static JPG if Flash wasn't available, or in the case of a text browser, a short paragraph describing what the user could have seen, I could do this:
OBJECT type="x-application/flash" src="image.swf">
If OBJECT was used more, then it wouldn't matter if content was mostly in plug-ins; it should be no problem to rewrite it to use alternate methods to maximize those who can see it. In non-4.0 browsers, the code above simply looks like the inner text block, so they will still see something.<OBJECT type="image/jpg" src="image.jpg">
This is a the default text rendering here.
</OBJECT>
</OBJECT>
The problem is that OBJECT is yet to be strongly implemented by any browser, IE, NS, Opera, etc. Yet it was introduced in the HTML 4.0 standard, which is more than a year old, so it's a matter of getting these browser makers (all of them, not just a few select ones) up to speed on the latest approved spec asap. With how Mozilla does a separate development of the Gecko engine that handles the HTML display from the mechanics of browsing and the UI, this can help, but I doubt that one can do a similar separation with code from IE or Opera.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
It says 'www Inventor' in the headline... yet I don't see Al Gore's name anywhere...
Ha ha ha, yes, how funny.
However, the joke goes that Al Gore "invented" the Internet, not the World Wide Web. The WWW is only one aspect of the Internet, certainly the killer app that brought it mainstream in the 1990s.
Good ol' Al never sought credit for "inventing" it, but did claim some responsibility for "creating" it in its current form: a public and global network mostly driven by the private sector. In his years as a lawmaker, he did sponsor legislation that supported this transition from a purely academic (ARPA) and military (DARPA) tool of one country, mostly driven by the government of that country.
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The right which is being abrogated is the right of other browser publishers to compete with IE. Since Microsoft has been ruled a monopoly, special rules apply to them which don't apply generally in the marketplace. Monopolies cannot use their monopoly power to exclude competitors. Some of the licensing issues such as excluding Netscape from the Windows desktop might be permitted if MS were not a monopoly, but as a monopoly they cannot use this power.
Try checking your mail with Opera or Knoqueror. As some who have posted here suggested, this story is just news because it's MS.
Me, I want it all: I want to be able to browse to any website using a good, standards-compliant web browser and see the content. I have done corporate web development before too. Yup, it's tricky supporting all of the new browsers while maintaining compatibility with the dinosaurs like NS4.x. Such is life. Get over it.
Oh, and MS and Netscape are not the only offenders. I sent a polite letter to ATI a few months back when I was trying to decide on my next video card and found out that ATI shut Mozilla/NS6 out. They left Konqueror though, so I was able to browse the site. Man was it broken..
My bank, PC Financial, has had on and off support for alternate browsers. It had always worked with Mozilla/NS6 and they that stopped for a while. It seems to be working again, and now works under Konqueror too, so at least they aren't all bad...
Finally, I went to www.ea.com a while ago. As usual, I tried with both Mozilla and Konqueror. Again, no good. They blocked them out, and suggested "upgrading" to IE.
I can understand wanting to let NS4 go, as it really is showing its age, but that some major sites don't support NS6/Mozilla is baffling to me. It's not _that_ hard to get right.
Oh yeah, one more thing: msn.com is a _very_ popular domain. Don't forget that it is set as the default start page for IE users. Back in its day home.netscape.com had over 40million hits a day for this reason. Now msn.com has this going for it. (But yeah, the content isn't too hot..)
Well, there's my rambling..