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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?
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.
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
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"
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.
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.
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)
"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
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.
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
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.
I thought Al Gore invented the internet.
I am Slad.
> ... 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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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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