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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.'"
It would probably be a good thing if browsers followed the HTML standard. I can't tell you how annoying it is to make a decent looking website only to find out that your Netscape 4.7 users see garbage.
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
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.
I wonder what his opinion is on needing a plug-in to view some content--it basically amounts to the same thing.
The problem is that in order for all browsers to see everything, a web site would probably have to use HTML 1.0, resulting in a very boring web. More current technologies aren't standards based since they are so new. Where does it stop? Everything must be compatible with Mosaic 1.0?
I don't agree with the MSN lockout, but there are instances on the web where a program is required to view certain content, and I don't see any sites getting rid of Flash just because Lynx doesn't support it.
Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?
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?
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 ? 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.
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.
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, and his opinions are even less valuable to me when they range to social commentary. Most of his writings I have found to be incoherent or self-contradictory.
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.
Many sites on the web are designed toward some goal. Many are designed to be most useful in IE, because most users are using IE (depending on who you ask, the numbers will vary, but nobody denies that IE has the stranglehold now). The only reason this makes Slashdot is because the anti-Microsoft bias of the editors itches to report something like this. It's done every hour of every day on some web site somewhere.
Does that mean IE is the best browser? Not necessarily. It is the most standards compliant browser? Not necessarily. Should people be designing their sites to be HTML 4.0/XHTML compatible instead of IE compatible? Probably. But I think the inventor of the web has a slight blind side to the fact that de-facto standards (namely, that the vast majority of users who browse the web use IE) are at least as powerful as bodies-based standards.
Funny. My ancient Netscape for Irix works just fine. I believed this story completely for a time because I had no real interest in msn.com. I'm sure they're locking out some browsers, but why not all?
[kidding]
Hey, this is just a trick to get us to try it- and thereby up their hitcount!
[/kidding]
Windows X-Con is ready for you!
I don't think that Microsoft ever really planned on blocking browsers. At least not yet, and at least not for the long haul. Oh, I think eventually they will block other browsers for real, but just not yet.
/. even posted this story...?
So, why did Microsoft block some folks from MSN? What were they so "foolish" you ask?
The answer is obvious. Microsoft are great at marketing. This was free publicity. Tons and tons and tons of free press....
After an Online Ruckus, Microsoft Opens MSN Site to All
What a total win! They have the NY Times giving them a great headline. Oooh, Microsoft the kind, the gentle, the good. Microsoft, so good for people. So willing to bend over for people.
What a crock. Wake up. It is sad that even Berners-Lee was suckered into this whole thing. People are always taking their eye off the ball. Microsoft knew they couldn't keep people out very long, but they knew it would stir things up. Free publicity.
Microsoft = marketing wizards.
By the way, given what I have said, isn't it a shame that we'll spend more time talking about Microsoft? And, isn't it a shame that
How to Download YouTube Videos
The ideal model for MS is one where not only do you need different programs for different information (managed "seamlessly" of course by Windows) but also where MS gets to ding your credit card every time you access that information.
It pains me to see Mr. Berners-Lee's accomplishment being twisted by MS's greed.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
It's a shame in a way that TBL didn't retain some kind of ownership over the HTTP protocol...
Then the W3C would have been able to grant licences to browser vendors wanting to use it, and make standards compliance a condition of the licence being granted.
If HTTP had been a licensed protocol, it would never have been as popular as it is.
When I want your opinion I will beat it out of you.
Actually developing websites that run well on MSIE, Lynx, Netscape and so on can be, to put it mildly demanding...
Somewhere you have to draw the line, expecially with a deadline closing in, management breathing down your neck, and users demanding "word functionality" in every god damn textbox...
Im not making excuses here, mind you. I fully agree that everything important chould be as accessible as possible. And that Microsofts attempts to "lock in" users are just as pathetic as usual.
But certain functionality issues can't be (easily) solved in all web browsers.
And all to often you won't be paid to even try...
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!
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 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.
Tell me, what standards does IE support that, say, Mozilla and Konqueror don't?
It was my impression that standards compliance is better in Mozilla and Konqueror than in IE, and that Opera is not significantly worse.
The only reason you would make your site IE-only is that it does not support the standard correctly in some cases, and that you want to work around its bugs without having to worry about how your hacks look in minority browsers.
That may be a valid argument if you are strapped for cash and are not very ethical about supporting monopolies. But to say that IE is ahead of other browsers in standards support is simply untrue.
Did anybody else find it mildly ironic that the author of article added hyperlinks to the text? Admittedly, in this case, they were useful, but wasn't the addition of hyperlinks to the page without the author's knowledge one of the features that was widely critizied in the upcoming version of Internet Explorer?
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.
The actual quote has Gore saying, "when I was in congress, I took the initiative in creating the world wide web." Which is actually a fairly accurate thing to say, since it was legislation he supported that opened up the internet for people to change.
Go Lakers!
let me see if I got it right: am I wrong, or that happened in the same period of time that XP was launched?
No, I'm not thinking what I'm thinking, right?
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
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
I think I'll be saving a copy of this interview to show to people who insist on using the most obscure plugins to do their web work. Maybe I am strange, but I really like it when I can look at web pages from any computer anywhere and have them look essentially the same. Thus, I tend to use simple HTML with well-supported graphics and non-browser specific tags. That doesn't seem like all that difficult of a thing to do. Trying to take over the computing world with a bad product just doesn't seem nice to me...
Posted from the wireless couch.
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.
Initially it was espn.starwave.com. Then Disney bought it, and the "go" network was born, thus: espn.go.com. Somehow, MSN has now partnered with Disney, and it has become espn.msn.com, complete with an MSN banner at the top (much like Slashdot's OSDN banner, but much larger).
What happens when sites like ESPN block users, because MSN told them to? On Friday, I visited ESPN site and found a pop-up window stating that my browser (Mozilla0.9.5/Solaris) would not display the page correctly, even though it obviously displayed it perfectly. The worry is that Microsoft will section off a part of the web and make it Microsoft-only, just as it tried to separate Java into running only on Microsoft browsers/OSes.
The solution is to stop visiting these sites (after 5 years of daily ESPN visits, I now visit CNNSI instead), but the word must get out, or the future of the web will indeed be bleak as Berners-Lee mentioned.
Right now they are able to avoid some criticism because you can reconfigure IE. You don't have to use their search sites, and you don't have to use the home page they so thoughtfully provide for you. But, what if they took the ability to set your own home page away? What if they took away the ability to choose your own search engine? What then? Why, you say, you'd just figure out how to modify the registry or hack the program or something like that. But you can't. You just violated the DMCA by doing that. You tampered with a security system, and you're going to jail.
This isn't paranoia. It's a logical extension of what we're seeing right now. Not only will it be difficult to NOT use Microsoft's chosen service providers, it'll actually be illegal.
Ultimately, it's about freedom. Do I have the right to do as I wish with a general computation device that I own? The DMCA says no. Hollings say s no. Microsoft says no.
I think the industry has done just fine without massive regulation so far. We are entering an age where "the little guy" can do something equally as interesting as a large corporation. Clearly, they can't have that. Campaign contributions are dangerously close to ensuring that "they" succeed.
Who is "they"?
It is the RIAA. It is Microsoft. These companies believe their right to control the ultimate use of their products is more important than YOUR right to live and think in freedom.
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
I just added www.msn.com to my firewall's filter list, now all my browsers work exactly the same on that site.
I know clever and talented web designers for whom "standards compliance" is at best a vague abstraction. They hardly ever visit the W3C site, and probably never run their pages through the validator (it hurts). There's a kind of pisoner's dilemma at work here: why should I be the first one to comply, when no one else is, not even the big guys?
The solution is the same as it is for lots of things - get to them when they're young, and help them understand and value openness and robustness. The key to making openness work is a strong community-developed standards process, which only works if you comply.
This is going to take at least a generation.
Helium balloons want to be free.
You're right. But it's not a problem. It's just that the initial view of HTML and the web was very shortsighted.
You can do a lot of stuff with just words and numbers, especially with server side code to back it up.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I hate to join The Army of the Damned(tm), but is this really so news-worthy? Last time I looked, there were 'members only' sites all over the internet. NY Times has free registration. Since IE is a free download, isn't this just more of the same? I tried to help my girlfriend with her cable modem, and when I went to their tech support website, it wouldn't let me in because I didn't have a Rogers @Home browser. Are they evil too? The fact is, you can get your news from any other 'free' news site. If you really need your MSN, which is a free service, then they have every right to ask you to do something for them. We register for free at NY Times to use the service. We get ad banners from damn near every site on the web. So if MS says 'do this for us and we'll give you free content', either download the free browser, or go elsewhere. It's not anti-competitive behaviour. They're not telling you that you have to use IE for ALL websites, just theirs.
do not read this line twice.
The two problems with this are that A) Mozilla (and certainly W3C's own reference browser, Amaya, which was also blocked) is arguably at least as standards-compliant as IE6, and B) MSN's site wasn't standards compliant anyway.
After changing my User-Agent string, I was able to access MSN's site with the latest Mozilla nightly; to my eye, it rendered MSN identically to IE5.5, a fact of which MS must surely have been aware. Toss in B) above, and it becomes obvious that the whole standards claim was a smokescreen.
The browswer lockout, IMHO, was simply a piece of the Microsoft package. With all the links in WinXP driving users to MSN, the next step is to cajole, encourage and lock all this new traffic into Internet Explorer. If everything from Office to IE to Windows Media Player to keyword searches to online help is going to throw MSN up on my screen, only to remind me how inferior my current browser is, I can either figure out how to decouple XP from MSN (a hopeless quest), or simply ditch my browser. No rocket science here.
Sigh - it's really a shame ppl lose sight of the real issue - Sure, other companies play vendor lock in games. But very few of them enjoy a virtual 90% monopoly power position to leverage. Some pissant startup tries to lockin customers may just lose it, ala netscape. Other's are handed a monopoly on a silver platter from IBM which they can use that to push their products, regardless of quality, and certainly overriding 'consumer choice'.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I thought Al Gore invented the internet.
I am Slad.
Sending the user away from the page means that they aren't generating revenue for my client. We're not interested in improving the web, we're interested in improving their bottom line.
If it works in my Mozilla browser, terrific, if not, oh well. If and when Mozilla/Netscape 6.x provide enough of a reason to make the site compliant, we'll work through their bugs.
It's annoying, but IE/Netscape 6 conversions should be easier. I don't mind (too much) writing two stylesheets. They don't take that long. It's making two versions of the site (a legacy one for Netscape) that is annoying me.
I test in IE because thats what the users are using. I'll develop for Netscape 6 when the platform is available.
The central codebase is the same, I just need to write different HTML renderers...
Sigh, one of our projects is to write our own XML language that was a content/display combo that wasn't HTML. Then we'll just write three renderers, IE/Netscape/Mozilla. Oh well, one day.
Alex
> ... but the owner of a website can decide at ANY TIME who will get access to which data, not Tim.
That sounds obvious, but let's look at it more closely.
First it isn't necessarily true; there are limits under the law for the actions that parties may take; e.g. a monopoly that has been convicted of monopolistic practices may not be allowed by law to restrict accesses that are likely to extend their monopoly in an illegal direction.
Secondly, Microsoft wasn't restricting the users that access their site, they were restricting the software that they accessed it with. That's quite different.
Finally, we want a person on a standards commitee to be fairly unpragmatic. He needs to come from a point of view that competitors should actually cooperate together; this is not a natural position that competitors take- even when to do so would often be to their mutual advantage.
Actually, I think Tim gets it exactly. He's not exactly stupid.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"The most ironic part of this message is that you spent the whole post talking about how presentation is so important, and yet you presented the whole thing in a single typeface without HTML tags of any kind, and the only formatting you used is positioning.
More importantly, the post made your point well, and in so doing, it refuted your point nicely.
Virg
I just tried out MSN on NS 4.77, IE 6, Opera 5 and NS 6.1. It looks acceptable on Konqueror, as well. All work just fine -- passport even works.
As a Web developer, I can tell you from experience that Netscape 4.x series browsers have chapped my ass far more than any version of IE ever has.
I agree that if everyone used Lynx and only geeks used the Internet we might have Nirvana. Unfortunately, the medium of the World Wide Web has gone through the same evolution every other mass medium has -- from a tool for hobbyists to a mass (and therefore commercial) medium. Just like radio, however, if you pine for the days of vacuum tubes and cloth-covered wiring, you can always roll your own...
I disagree about Flash. I really wish web developers would have the courtesy of not using things like this. The web protocol and most browsers with them, is really slow. It's also not innovative except in allowing people to pass whole words in the form of tags when they could pass symbols and save bandwidth. We don't need to make it any slower. So if using a standard such as Mosaic 1.0 saves bandwidth by cutting out the fancy crap, I'm all for it. I don't use the web for pretty pictures. I use it for research, and people who insist on developing software for the the absolute slowest GUI available.
The values of whether or not the useragent should do additional processing, vs whether or not pages should be created according to standards, are totally orthogonal. They are completely independant variables. Thus, there is no irony at all. A person can be smartlinks-tolerant and MSN-hating, smartlinks-hating and MSN-hating, smartlinks-tolerant and MSN tolerant, or smartlinks-hating and MSD tolerant. None of the four possible positions contains any inconsistency. (Of course, three of the positions are still wrong, though. ;-)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The stateless, text-oriented, forms-supported model had its day but that day has passed. The only way Microsoft, AOL, and other comapnies can offer vastly richer experiences is to either turn their entire site into a Flash sequence, or to develop proprietary protocols.
Seeing how Microsoft would be insane to factor out the most interactive aspect of the online experience to a third party vendor like Macromedia, I am not surprised at all to see them making the moves they are making.
The W3 could have done something about this though - once upon a time they understood that HTTP needed to be overhauled, but the HTTP-NG spec was never refined. More or less they just decided that HTTP 1.1 was the last HTTP spec. Well, guess what happens in an innovation vaccum at the open, standards-based end? Yup, closed proprietary extensions.
Within five years the "open" web will be a second-class network and AOL and Microsoft will own 95% of online traffic on their closed, enhanced networks.
If the total cost for the license was $0.01 or $1.00 (e.g. enough to make a contract stick)?
How much does the GPL cost? That's a license, isn't it?
Major web sites work from server logs, useage stats, competitive metrics and other metrics to devise their site design.
And frankly the interest group you represent is so infinitesimally small that they would be idiots to listen to you in the first place (and they know it).
Amaya is NOT blocked by MSN.com - at least the 5.1 version isn't.
I was able to load MSN.com...
Only problem - it didn't interpret it correctly, probably because as he pointed out, they do not use proper XHTML formatting. Screenshot here.
What is REALLY funny is you get something different every time you reload :).
quis custodiet ipsos custodes - Juvenal
Yes. Yes. Yes. Do get angry at these web people. I used to be able to dial directly into my bank and download my transactions, and pay bills, all without a web browser. And it was faster. I don't care what you web people say. Life is faster when you don't spell everything out in plain text and use pretty graphics and javascript and such.
Yes. Get rid of the excessive javascript, or even better, don't use it at all! Get rid of the excessive pictures. Don't put a back picture when I could use my back key! Don't create popup menus, just use links. Don't put up ads on bank account pages, especially after the customer has paid you $6.95 per month.
And give the information! Don't make us email you for it. Don't make us call some 800 number and talk to a salesperson. If you have prices, put them up! Don't hide them unless you're ashamed of them.
Have honest links. If you have a download link for an application, for instance, don't make us go through 10,000 slow, image laden web pages just to download the thing. A download link should take us to a downloadable file! (Or a page with the OS selection and such). Forget the mirrors crap. Just ask us a location and direct us to it.
To the web developers: Make life simpler, and faster. Not slow and annoying!
Remember also that a lot of sites, especially the big corporate ones, like to program things down to the pixel, instead of relying on browsers to render the theoretical page layout tags. That raises the difficulty quite a lot on rendering.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
In reading about the latest stupid move MS has taken to try & turn the the internet into their own proprietary .NET I find myself hoping that the new judge is watching. OK, sure, breaking up the company doesn't look feasible any longer, though it would have been nice to separate their OS from their Office Productivity from their .NET/MSN ventures. Not gonna happen though. SO, what structural remedies can be taken?
I think our best chance lies in a judically mandated opening of all IE & .NET software & protocols to allow anyone & everyone to use it. This directly prevents an MS takeover of the net, let's them keep their precious OS monopoly, and adequately punishes them for the underhanded methods used to gain browser superiority in the first place. It also makes sure that this major piece of software most people use to surf the net is out in the open, without any hidden dirty little secrets.
It'd be nice to make them open up the OS too, but it won't happen. Outside of /. too many people like Windows & are mystified by Linux to want it in anyone else's hands. Maybe we could try for opening up the MFCs, a long time wish of WinX programmers everywhere, which would go a long way toward making all programs better. For any lasting remedy though, something has to be done to thwart the development of proprietary internet protocols. Each individual has a part to play too. Do NOT use Passport / Hotmail. Do NOT patronize any .NET-using service. I now run XP, and despite the hype, it's completely possible to use this OS without involving yourself in any of that crap. Long term, write your congresspeople to demand laws mandating all internet communications protocols be open and available for even the individual user to make use of.
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
You're all overlooking something very important, something absolutely critical to the game:
Microsoft is not interested in playing nice. Everything they do is geared towards locking in more customers to gain more control and thereby more money. They pay lip service to standards and open-ness when it doesn't hurt them, but they have absolutely no hesitations about violating standards, breaking the law, or otherwise Not Being Nice when it suits them to be.
The sole and entire purpose of Windows XP is to lock people into using the msn.com web site for all their needs, and to force them into using Windows Media Player for video and audio files. Their goal is divisiveness and incompatibility from anything that's not Microsoft-made. They want to leverage the Windows market share to make their standards and their services so necessary that people will have to be able to access the msn.com web site, and so therefore it'll just be too much trouble to bother using any browser other than IE, or any media player other than WMP. MP3's will be too much of a hassle because Windows XP doesn't support them nearly as nicely as it supports WMA files. (XP's media player has crippled MP3 features, including limiting the bit rate at which the MP3 codecs can record music.)
Stop trying to make sense of Microsoft's actions in terms of what's best for competition or for the web. Microsoft doesn't care. They will play nice when it benefits them; they'll play dirty when it suits them; and there's nothing anybody can do about it, because they've shown they're capable of tying court cases in knots for years until long after they've won the battles in question and crushed their opponents into oblivion.
Notice, by the way, that they're doing their best to make absolutely certain that they own all the file formats they're using; they only push for open formats when they don't own the market in question. You can bet it'll be a cold day in hell before Linux users ever get to use Windows audio and video file formats without getting sued by Microsoft, and the formats which Linux supports will continue to be deprecated in Windows -- thereby relegating Linux to become an 'incompatible' operating system which even fewer users will have an incentive to use.
Microsoft's actions are extremely bad for the industry and for the future of computing. They have far too much power and there's no clear way to stop them.
Your opinion is all well and good until the owner of the site you develop for hires a vision-impaired person for a position requiring access to your pages.
:-)
In the U.S., at least, employers are required, by federal law, to make "reasonable accomodation" for their employees disabilities. For the visually-impaired, this usuallyhave seen one such person who used a systray-installed "display magnifier program.
My own opinion is that openness is the better path. My webpages may stike some as *BORRRRING* but they are best viewed with NS2 and above, IE 2 and above and/or Lynx. What I give up in neat tricks like pop-up menus, I try to make up for with meaningful content that can be read by all.
That's my $0.02. No one is responsible for my opinion but me, and sometimes I'm not responsible for it either.
utter rubbish
Everyone should remember that loveable Netscape used to block foreign browsers from their site as well. This was back in the days when Netscape had 90% market share and thought it could bully everyone from AT&T to AOL. How times have changed...
Every time there's a thread about the anti-trust trial against Microsoft, I am astonished to read posts on Slashdot by people rushing to their defense. One of the common claims is that the efforts to destroy Netscape have created no disadvantage to consumers.
Well, here you are: an Internet based on open standards is a benefit to consumers, because the browser vendors have to compete by delivering better quality against a common standard, but can't drive anyone out by introducing incompatibilities (which are completely superfluous to any consumers' needs). The more competition, the better the software, and hence greater quality at consumers' disposal.
Now that Microsoft has gotten away with their crime and have succeeded at demolishing Netscape, leaving no meaningful competition in the browser market, it was only a matter of time before things like this would begin. With dominant market share, they can seek to eviscerate standards and leave behind an Internet that only operates on M$'s rules. Great benefit to Redmond, nothing but disadvantages for consumers.
But even in this thread, people are claiming there's no problem! This is a sign of people completely locked into libertarian ideology, which simply cannot countenance the existence of a monopoly like M$ doing the things that they do. Evidently, denial is their only way out.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
Please point me to the part of the table standard (or even the CALS derivation that spawned it), that say you should not use tables for presentation or layout.
Strange...I tested Mozilla with captions and it displayed the text just fine. You aren't referring to ALT attributes on IMG tags, are you? ALT attributes are not meant to be used as captions, you know. For user agents that cannot display images, forms, or applets, [ALT] specifies alternate text. Yes, IE will display a tool tip with the ALT content when you hover over an image, but that is NOT a standard implementation or use of an ALT tag. A decent screenreader should know how to interpert ALT tags in pages.
;)
What do you mean, IE has a better UI than Netscape 6.1? I'd prefer Mozilla's UI to IE's any day. Netscape 6.1 is not much different. UI is a subjective thing...what you really mean is that you like IE's UI better...
DennyK
Until the terrorist threat has passed, the government is totally preoccupied and won't touch MS significantly at this point.
If 95% or so of people use IE, then doesn't IE become the standard, putting the W3C into a state of noncompliance to the standard?
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..
This is classic FUD!
The main problem here is that Joe Newbie will take it at face value. He won't realize that Mozilla, for instance, is more standards compliant than IE and that MS is breaking their web pages by using MSHTML and blocking the better browsers on purpose. He won't realize that you can change the browser string by just one letter and view the web pages with no problems. He will instead think that these other browsers are inferior -- the opposite of the truth.
Whomever claims that "95% of the clients are using IE", how sure are you that they aren't simply setting their mozilla or lynx USER_AGENT string to "ie blah blah" in order to ignore those sites lame enought to try to target specific browsers?
:)
If I've ever visited your site you'd better ie_count--
Usage: fortune -P [-f] -a [xsz] Q: file [rKe9] -v6[+] file1
That's right, except that the IE bug was actually worse than that: you couldn't download many useful things. Netscape eventually came up with a split download feature that survived IE.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
This site is almost entirely a one-hit wonder. You hit the site, sign up, and leave on your way. We're trying to focus on the users hitting our site. The standard site is CSS/HTML compliant (some IE additions, but it should gracefully degrade).
We're looking into cleanup options to make it cleaner and therefore run on Mozilla, but Netscape needs a custom solution. Maybe I should get a WebTV system and try it out, we'll see.
Talking at a Unix User Group in London last year, Vint Cerf corrected an attendee
who made a similar jibe about Al Gore.
Cerf paid tribute to the work that Gore had done to help create the modern internet
and expressed regret that the comment had become such an albatross for the (then)
presidential candidate.
"Please point me to the part of the table standard (or even the CALS derivation that spawned it), that say you should not use tables for presentation or layout."
Here you go.
From the HTML 4.01 Specification, Section 11.1: Introduction to Tables:
From the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, Guideline 5. Create tables that transform gracefully.:
So I'm not sure I get it. If Tim Berners-Lee is all about a free and open Web can be viewed by any software running on any hardware, then why start a company based around a proprietary language where the business model is to charge companies for the amount of content they serve? To quote Pamela Hart, Curl Corporation's controller:
"Curl is in a strong financial position. The company has prominent investors who believe Curl has the ability to change the way people use the Internet. I am committed to expanding and strengthening the company's financial position and long term success."
Hmmmm.... that doesn't sound a lot like a philosophy of "openness." And as far as running on any software and any hardware, let's see what the Curl press releases have to say, circa July 2001:
"The Surge(TM) 1.1 software environment, which includes the Surge(TM) browser plug-in and the Curl(TM) content language, is available immediately for Microsoft® Windows® operating systems (Windows® 95/98, Windows NT®, Windows® ME and Windows® 2000). Support for other platforms will be announced later this year."
Whatever Berners-Lee says, I think his company's statements speak for themselves.
Breakfast served all day!
Microsoft does this because they are afraid they can only remain a powerful company through these closed minded tactics and not by being open and fair.
I am not saying that whizbangery will make your message more meaningful. However, well applied whizbangery will make the message easier to receive.
There are lots of articles and websites that are truly informative, but that i still have a hard time getting through. These snippets of information are so dull and drab that I just yawn and develop an immediate urge for Stile.
Folks - use those css to make your site more readable and more enjoyable. Increase the line spacing to 120%, adjust the margins and work the colors. Pick a nice font, but make sure it looks ok in the fallback that you naturally supplied. Subtle mouse-over effects are also nice. Experiment. Have some fun. Be creative - I know you really are, for coding is also an act of creativity.
Feel free to use Flash and java applets and whatnot. Howver, make sure the fallback is acceptable. The web should not be a static technology. It can, it will and it should continue to improve.
Oh - and don't forget to have a message to deliver. Empty whizbangery is Hollywood's specialty, not ours.
Stop the brainwash
The post was serious, and the lack of vast multimedia features only goes further to prove my point. His point was that we need these snazzy features to get a point across well, but got that very point across well without them, hence the irony.
Virg
And the problem is?
The problem is that Windows XP redirects users to MSN is all sorts of situations. I guess that's why MSN was 'relooked' on the very day Win XP was released.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
TBL: It's fair to note that no browser implements all W3C standards perfectly.
That's because the W3C standards today are nothing more than an attempt to document the stupid proprietary browser tricks invented by Netscape and Microsoft during the "browser wars". No wonder no one browser complies with the whole standard. The W3C rubber stamp means nothing anymore.
Microsoft has only themselves to blame for not being able to "guarantee a good experience".
Edith Keeler Must Die
Web designers have a standard it's called HTML 4.0
if the webpage does not conform to that simple standard then the person writing the code is a shoddy programmer (Strike that, HTML is NOT programming it's typesetting) and is a sloppy or half assed attempt at writing a webpage.
The problems with the webpages out there lies soley in the hands of the writers. You web writers! quit baing lazy and sloppy.. write html Compliant code!
and people wonder why cross platform languages fail, it's because the programmers are too lazy to write the software correctly.
(Moderate -4 Flamebait)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
> use those css to make your site more readable and more enjoyable
Why do you use css to make the sites more readable? You know your reading situation; your monitor size, your vision, your favorite fonts.
Do you not read books? So many times I've curled up with a several hundred page book (with a drawing per chapter, if that) for several hours. I can't ever have remember saying that having things suddenly change while I was looking at them (mouse-over effects) would be nice. Nor can I remember wishing for more animation or even art.
I am creative, but I'm not an art student. If I had a problem with pages of pure text, I wouldn't be in compsci.
<applet etc...>
Sorry, your browser doesn't support Java. Click here to go to the less-enhanced version.
</applet>
But few people did this. Some people were left staring at blank screens because their browser wasn't cutting edge enough and because developers didn't feel like worrying about those browsers enough to provide alternatives.
HTML works in the sense that if all the HTML creation tools and people writing raw HTML decided to consider the case of the two-versions-behind browser, the content would at least display. Maybe not perfectly, but the content would display. Of course, this assumes that the format of the content is secondary -- and this is increasingly not true. For cases in which perfect formatting is crucial, use PDF, etc, not HTML
BEN
Mozilla is only supposed to attract attention from developers and testers -- it's not supposed to be an end user browser. That's what Netscape is for.
Note that Netscape 6.x wasn't blocked -- that indicates that there was no great consipriacy towards the #2 browser (or it's dev branch).
More like some marketing shmo said "There's this thing called Mozilla, I have no idea what it is, but we don't have time to test it, so let's block it." Typical stupid decision you see all the time when you get non-technical people making technical decisions.
(To some extent, mozilla.org brought this on themselves by holding the pretention that the Mozilla browser is something entirely disconnected from their employers over at AOL/Netscape. If Moz sent a Netscape 6-like user-agent string, they wouldn't have had this problem.)
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
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.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
MS didn't just block Mozilla, Opera, Netscape, and all its other browser competitors. It also blocked its own version of Internet Explorer for Pocket PC 2002. That is the brand-new version of the Pocket PC operating system which it just released last month. The lack of internal co-ordination at Microsoft on this is stunning... I thought they were a better organized company than this. Read the story here
It was fixed in IE4 IIRC :)
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
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.
They're being assholes. I set Opera to identify as IE and it handles the site just fine. I didn't bother to try with Mozilla, because I'd have to edit the config by hand. In a way, I'm glad to see that Mozilla makes it somewhat of a pain in the butt to spoof the identify, I want ea to know they're driving away traffic and why.
I seriously doubt Mozilla will have any problem with the site.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
So, if you actually want or need anything IE-specific (I don't), run a late Konqueror with the WINE-assisted ActiveX-running code and tell it to impersonate IE.
So Microsoft want people to put IE-specific code on their sites? No worries! Can do! If the browser ID says Exploder, add a banner warning them about their vulnerable browser. If it says Windows, do the same for their OS. Piece of the proverbial in PHP...
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Eh? The typical M$ EULA is a Sales and Marketing contract!
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Whaddaya on about? They can't ensure performance or ``a great experience'' on software which is totally under their control, after over a decade of effort, so obviously either their aim is not to ensure a great experience, or they're completely incompetent. Take your pick.
My personal take is that their aim is to line their own pockets and win some prizes rather than to discover and deliver what people actually want. MCS is a bit of an anomaly, and makes me wonder.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Or simply not allow them to enforce any patent or copyright which applies to a technology in which they have a majority market share, including a grandfather clause to protect competing software created during that window of opportunity.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
That would be true if all potential visitors to MSN had previously agreed to use IE. As it is, MSN is a significant (nothing like a majority) purported participant in a set of public standards (HTTP, TCP/IP and HTML), and yet they are preventing legitimate users of client software employing those standards (and if you whine about how much of those standards, Exhibit A is Mozilla, which easily trumps even IE for the Mac in this arena) from accessing their purported service.
If Microsoft want to apply their own standards, they forfeit the right to call http://www.msn.com/ a website. Let them use their vaunted SMB/CIFS, if they dare.
IIS already sends SMB responses to HTTP connects, did y'know? If the host ISP is stupid enough to let SMB out, PortSentry at the client gateway blocks the website because it ``attacked'' the PortSentry'd gateway via SMB.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
<OBJECT type="image/ppm" src="tux.ppm">
(o-
//\
V_/_
</OBJECT>
[These extra words were added to satisfy that never to be sufficiently condemned lameness filter.]
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing