What happened to WORLD Wide Web?
Monday Aug 09, 2004
It was about half past forever o'clock last night. My wife was beginning to design a patchwork quilt. Her quilt software was built for Microsoft Windows 3.1 but was compatible with newer versions. So I brought our windows 98 machine out of storage, dusted it off and hooked it up. I reluctantly asked if she needed it on the web. I was dreading the number of reboots that would be required to install every security patch since the machine was last powered up. No, she said she would look up what she needed to on the Powerbook. So I left the appropriate air gap between the Windows 98 machine and the broadband modem and continued reading "The Far Side of the World." Only minutes later she encountered a problem. "It says 'This website must be viewed with Netscape 4.7'" What?! I've encountered dozens of websites which only work properly with Internet Explorer, some which refuse to work without a specific version of Macromedia Flash (not the newer version that is on the Mac) and a few which refuse to work on anything but Windows 98 running a specific version Internet Explorer. I've even encountered airline websites with browser specific bugs in its leap year calcuating code. But this is the first time I've encountered a website which required a version of Netscape from the previous millenium.
Can we agree on this one thing?
I hope users of Apple OSX, OS9, RedHat, SuSE, Debian, FreeBSD, Solaris and the various versions of Microsoft windows can agree that the world wide web should be as open and accessible as possible. As far as I'm concerned, websites which are hard-coded to a particular distribution and/or browser are broken. Whenever possible I try to gently notify webmasters of these problems. I hope others do the same. In most cases they are happy for the feedback. Most well run businesses strive to be accessible to as many customers as possible. Now that people are beginning to switch from Internet Explorer to more secure and powerful browsers such as Mozilla, Firebird and Safari, we need to encourage web designers to use tools such as Bobby to indicate whether a website meets accessibility and W3C standards. We don't design our roads for a particular brand of car, nor do we design our telephone, television, or radio communications to be brand specific. Wherever possible, the world wide web should also be a standards based platform neutral communications medium.
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