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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.'"
Granted, it's the freshest big outrage in our mind, but if you can hop in the Way Back Machine and head back a couple of years to when Netscape was still a viable contender, there most certainly were "Best Viewed With Netscape" sites to go with the "Best Viewed With Internet Explorer" ones. I remember this well because IE had a hard time working with JS 1.1 and I railed for us to make our site a Netscape-only one then much as I rail for my company to make our site an Internet Explorer-only site now. IE may extend the standards, but at least it supports them.
The dream of a fully open web is a beautiful one, but as long as people use GIFs, PDFs, Flash/Shockwave/Real Player/etc., don't bullshit yourself into believing that Microsoft is the company committing the most egregious offenses when it comes to balkanizing the web.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
What does this have to do with anybody's rights? If MSN shuts out other browsers, well that sucks I guess, but I have no inalienable right to read MSN with Opera. And there wasn't much in the article about anybody's "rights", just a discussion of the meaning of W3C standards.
But based on what Mr. Berners-Lee says I feel kinda awkward now. Indeed, the web should be accessible by everyone and everything. There's more reasons why TBL is right, and Microsoft is at fault there as well (MS extended HTML tags anyone?). But that's probably another story and that's offtopic.
I will remove the ban on MSIE from my site when I have the time... What the hell was I thinking?
Isn't the main problem that everyone wants the web to be 'cool', not just deliver information. When the internet was invented, it was a way to share information without requiring seperate programs to access information from seperate sources.
As a web developer, managers mostly care about how it looks, not how it works. They care about what their managers think, not what site visitors think. Everywhere I've worked sees between 90% to 98% M$ browsers, so the managers wisely decide not to spend time/money on developing for other browsers.
As for Microsoft's claims that other browsers don't work as closely to the standards as theirs does, thats obviously hogwash. Embrace and Extend is their true scam.
there are 2 kinds of people. those who divide people into 2 kinds, and those who don't.
But the question still remains, who really wants to visit the MSN site anyway? I'm one in the opinion that the MSN site is already simply pro-microsoft messaging, so what's the big deal. Sure, other sites do block certain browsers, but I'm in the opinion that web developers should try their best to make it look good in all (I sure do; still design on Netscape 4.7, but add features that work in one browser (by way of the navigator.appname function.) Yeah, that discriminates against non-JS users, but there are ways around that, too, you just have to accept not having a snazzy front end.)
The thing you have to ask is is it worth it. If you don't care what MS does with their pages, use Mozilla (or Konqueror, if that turns your crank) and read something else. If the hits go down they might reconsider.
But maybe I'm just ranting.
- Relativistic? That's barely Newtonian!
This is just another example of how Micro$oft is taking over the market to its entirety. I can't understand why it is taking so much time for the courts in the states to do something about micro$oft considering almost every few days I come on Slashdot I see another thing such as this that shows micro$soft as being monopolistic
And another ting, to be honest I never use MSN (besides a old hotmail account that is about to go) so if they do make it completely IE only, then I will not be hit. Just as long as SlashDot here stays free to all web browsers then I am happy
my 2 cents plus 2 more
The question is if it is possible to have freedom while allow a single company control. Or is it a matter of the golden handcuffs, and an S&M relationship between the marketer and the customer?
Even in an S&M type of relationship, there is the matter of trust. And the problem is that in a large company, there will be people you can not trust. It becomes a fight between people who want to improve the product vs people who wish to get head by destroying their competitors. MS seems to have segregated these tyeps somewhat, pushing the destructive types into marketing.
I do not want an S&M relationship with my software provider. I want a meritocracy of software, not a meritocracy of marketing and propanga. By the actions of marketing , and the silly games they play in system design to lock out other companies, Microsoft lost me long ago. They could not trust the quality and craftmanship of their own product to win the customer over. They had to use dis-honest means. Which meant that I started dis-trusting what the system was telling me. Their very tactics taught me to distrust them. I think that any thinking person tends to resent this kind of thing after awhile. After all, these efforts to take control are not even with your own best interest at heart, not matter how misguided. It is with their own best interest at heart, without regard for the benefits to others. Most people do not like being used in this way.
The example of MS behavior regarding the Web is only more of the same.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Isn't this basically what the DCMA effectively forces one to do- that is, if you follow it to the letter?
Look, I can't use MY pencil because the RIAA hasn't licensed it to write an opinion about song X from artist, erm label Y. (Yeah, exaggeration, but what the hey..)
The "bad old days" is precisely what large copyright-holders want- It makes control so much easier when it is illegal to create, copy, or use information (which I might point out is the lifeblood of any culture..) without using their hardware or software.
Just imagine what it will (could) be like if we followed the DCMA to the letter =) What fun.
Right.
I think you are missing the point totally..making your site accessible to all browsers definitely does not mean serving to the lowest common denominator. It just means you should detect the browser & serve content appropriate for it. If a browser supports the fancy stylesheets & latest HTML standards, by all means take advantage of that, but don't forget folks using lynx who would prefer text-only content.
As for plugins for Flash etc., I don't think this is comparable to shutting people out, as long as parallel content is available (whenever possible). Of course in all this, the most important issue is of the development cost in creating content for the large number of browsers out there.
Yeah, but there's varying degrees of viewability. I just redesigned a site and before I did, I took a hard look at the statistics of our users. About 70% of our users were using IE 5. Another 30% were using Netscape. I could see that of that 30%, around 70% were coming from in house, and I know that we aren't using Netscape as our default browser anymore. So that meant that I could safely assume that around only around 10-15% of the people visiting our pages were using Netscape 4. We were lucky and didn't have anything less than NN4 or IE5, believe it or not.
So when the PTB said they wanted popout menus and cute mouse over events, I made them work in IE. Netscape users get all the site, they just don't get little popout submenus. They can still get to those menus with 1 click, so they aren't missing anything.
The site looks good in lynx, which I actually care more about than either IE or NN, since the people using lynx may be blind and need a text only browser so the screen can be quickly read to them.
When I get time, webmaster is only one of my duties, I'll make the popout menus work for Netscape. I've already got all the browser detection coded in, so the rest will be a cinch.
Konqueror and Opera handle the IE pages correctly, so Netscape is the only one that is special.
But I disagree that you think that MS didn't block on purpose. If all they had done was to only allow IE browsers onto the site, I can see that as being a bit of egotism and lack of foresight in whomever programmed that. However, as specifically pointed out, it was blocked certain browser strings; that is, with the default Opera identification string, it was blocked, but when it was changed by one letter, access was granted.
But again, as the NYT article indicates, that might not have been done at the upper levels; it could have been some younger native programmer not realizing the right way to impose such a block. However, given that the latter version happened over the former, it suggests there might have been much more deeper alternative motives for this switch.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
"What does this mean ? Is he comparing the "bad old days" with supposed "good recent days", the latter when every piece of information can be accessed by a single program ?"
Apparently so. And the proof is in the ability of search engines like google to find stuff all over the world.
"Schlepping up numbers or words on a webpage does not constitute real 'access' any more than does providing printouts or plain text files - you still need a program (or human) to parse the output, and this is usually trivial compared to the work involved in using that information"
Compare going to the library to read the CIA world fact book to browsing it from their website. Hell compare a BBS to slashdot. Sure you still need access and someone has to pay the freight but in the end if you can it's a good thing. More access to more information and access to global communication mediums are a good thing.
"And what does this have to do anyways with MS trying to block access to websites when using anything but Explorer ? This is an attempt to make ALL their information accessible by a SINGLE program, and NOT an attempt to make every piece of information accessible by a DIFFERENT program."
Easy it comes down to this. Microsoft is making the web that they own into areas only IE can access (Yes I know you can forge your browser info but how many would just switch instead?)it's their right but it's a poor choice acessability wise. He called them on the carpet and is using his place as a web pioneer to get his point across. This should be applauded not derided.
"We owe him a debt of gratitude for inventing the web but as far as I am concerned his invention does not make Berners-Lee's opinions on these subjects any more or less valuable than any other reasonably astute person,"
Hey it's your opinion and you are entitled to it. At the same time, the medium of expression you choose to use today and that was seen by likely tens of thousands of readers was the one he helped bring into being.
"and his opinions are even less valuable to me when they range to social commentary."
But how do you reconcile that with the very idea that communication of ideas is a social thing? If someone didn't have a grand but flawed vision we might not have the web at all.
"Most of his writings I have found to be incoherent or self-contradictory."
Yup over many years and keynotes and papers he sure has put out a lot of stuff. Some of it is oppositional to prior views he held. Some of it is also little sound byte quotes taken from grander visions. Maybe he mellowed a bit. Maybe the world changed from his idealistic view of one program to create view and communicate. My point is lots of things change and our ability to adapt is a good one. Don't begrudge someone that ability.
I believe that todays web-pages have become far too complex to fulfill the purpose they were originally intended for; originally HTML was a simplistic markup-language, which focused more on the content-structure of the document instead of the layout, using tags like H1, B, A, P etc. When sticking to these very simple tags, it is up to the user agent to render the page as best it can for its particular medium. A HTML-page should be as easily viewable in a browser on a 16,7m colour modern computer system as on a cellular phone, text-mode browser (lynx etc), news-ticker, blind-terminals or whatever. These different environments requires highly different methods for formatting the data, but the main concern is that it is still easily viewable, and has a logical structure (ie you can distinguish a headline from a footnote).
Today, however, HTML has become very layout-centric, as opposed to content-centric, with emphasis on tables and invisible GIFs for arranging the data. This is most probably a consequence of larger commercial companies moving content onto the web, and using a mindset from magazine and newspaper production in this entirely new medium; and that's where the problems start. When you try to develop a web-page as you would a page in a magazine you have to use alot of tricks to get the desired result, and these tricks corrupt the basic meaning of an html-page. For example, it is not uncommon to have ten nested tables to take care of a basic page layout. However, the purpose of tables is not to take care of layout and design, it is to present data matrixes. And it is this kind of widespread abuse that has messed up the web to the point where it is only properly viewable by a handful of browsers, of which maybe only one or two display it as was intended by the page creator. Luckily we have new standards like XML and XHTML (I have no experience with XHTML whatsoever - so apoligies in advance if this should be wrong) which allows us to separate content-structure from layout and design. But people will most probably abuse these new standards as well... I just think that something's VERY wrong when a browser contains more source code than a complete operating system.
One of my client's sites was written with just IE in mind. It makes heavy use of CSS, and Netscape's CSS bugs just cough on it.
.5% and 1.5% of this website? They probably aren't worth spending resources on beyond testing on the Mac, but you have to evaluate your costs.
However, the logs indicate that currently 8.5% of our users are Netscape 4.x.
The operations guy at the client broke out his calculator, saw the costs of my fixing the system for Netscape, saw the revenue/profit increase, and saw that B>A and said, do it.
I was hoping to just change the style sheet, but Netscape is totally busted, so it looks like separate scripts. Sure the IE version will be the priority, but when you can increase profits 8-10% of more (in fact, increasing revenue by 8% should increase profits 10%-12% based upon some fixed costs, etc.) it becomes really hard to justify ignoring.
Unless technology costs are a rediculously high percentage of your budget, you can't ignore 8% of the market.
Now WebTV and Mac, that are
What about non-commercial sites? Code to HTML standards, and use minimal CSS. While we have sites that need heavy CSS to look amazing, the site could work without them. Limit yourself to fonts, sizes, etc., and you'll be fine. Don't worry about it looking right tot he pixel and you'll be fine on multiple browsers.
Alex
I was trying to download the latest Intellipoint mouse drivers from Microsoft's website using Mozilla. I drilled down to a page that listed the latest (or so I thought) ver. 3.x drivers for my mouse.
I clicked the link to download and was taken to a custom 404 page that offered links to other pages where I might find what I was looking for, those pages took me to even more 404 pages and so forth and so on.
Out of curiousity, I tried downloading the drivers using IE 5.5, this time I was taken to a different page that listed the (real) latest drivers for the Intellipoint mouse, version 4.x.
It seems like a whole lot of effort to go through to make it difficult for people that haven't been assimiliated by the M$ borg.
And besides, drivers should be freely available to anyone, regardless of what browser/platform they are using. What if I was downloading it from my Solaris machine to use on a Win9x machine that didn't have a fast connection?
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with. - Tennessee Williams
TBL is absolutely right. The foundation for a free Internet is standard compliance. But where are we when not even Slashdot is W3C HTML compliant???
I tried to validate it at validator.w3c.org, but I got more than 600 errors!
Try for yourself
No Goat is hidden here
Interesting point, but think about this: this little stunt got all the critics talking about something MS could easily reverse, instead of talking about Win XP. It's a beautiful, no cost distraction to focus critical attention away from the really big coup. Classic misdirection. And I believe it's intentional. When it comes to marketing and PR, MS is ten steps ahead of everyone.
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
CSS vs. Layers.
MSIE, Opera, Mozilla uses CSS (Standard), Nutscrape uses Layers (and the evil layer tag, pre CSS).
Javascript.
Standards, HA, Javascript does not know of these 'standards'!
Then you have the fact that some tags are just interpertated differntly!
Then you have the fact that not all the standards are implemented, so even if it's perfect HTML (validated & everything, which I have) it still rendereds diffrently on diff. browsers.
When I play as web-dev I normal go for this approch:
HTML 3.2 + CSS Compatable first and formost.
MSIE Comptable 'extras (inc. Java Script)'
if I have time, I'll add netscape etc.
Insightful but Overrated Troll
MSN is obviously not a real news (or portal) site but just an off-shoot of microsoft that is aims to extend microsofts stronghold. Why is it that microsoft can create a very viewable website for microsoft.com (where they pedal their wares) but can't do so with msn.com? The news does not have to be fancy just informative- is there anything fancy about yahoo or even cnn? This is stupid microsoft tried to make a very small percentage of people start to use internet explorer not because it is better but just because microsoft can exercise that kind of power. Remember: "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely!"
Real men dump cores! Read my journal, I am neat.
Actually I did the first bckground images, it was not a Netscape invention.
Netscape was at the time trying to work out how to implement tables. The problem being that they were trying to parse their HTML with a yacc parser which doesn't work because SGML is not an LR(1) grammar but that was all Rob and Lou had learn't in their undergrad Comp sci compilers course.
Frames might have been received with more enthusiasm by the rest of the Web community if the proposal for the standard had not been delivered in the manner of the Japaneese declaration of war prior to Pearl Harbour. By the time the spec had finished scrolling off the fax machine Netscape had already released the new browser.
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