WWW Inventor On Microsoft's Browser Tricks 503
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.'"
Compatibility? What about standards? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Unreadable sites (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
It's only news because Microsoft did it (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Look Beyond, Look Beyond (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [nytimes.com]
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
Re:Compatibility? What about standards? (Score:4, Insightful)
a) Stood still for a while
b) Kept browser compatibility in mind
c) Didn't just base itself on the latest non-standard toy added by MS or NS
d) Wasn't developed by Committee
(Committee == A mammal with an average of 100 legs, and no brain)
OK, time for my tablets... The real-world is calling me back
Re:Hear hear (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Hear hear (Score:2, Insightful)
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...
Re:Unreadable sites (Score:3, Insightful)
Is information not surrouned by animation and beautiful shadowed icons less valuable? Does a slick candy coating make a content-less website more compelling?
Does that flash animation really give your readers a more "complete web experience"? Do different fonts make your words more meaningful? Does the color of your text say anything about the message it contains?
Does a message have to stand out to be outstanding?
Re:Let's be fair: this isn't IE specific. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Actually, that's the misquote. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Look Beyond, Look Beyond (Score:3, Insightful)
You definitely have some good points. However, I suspect that most people don't really pay full attention when they read articles. In the case of the NY Times article, the headline is pretty positive. Then again, even if you see it as negative, and even if the article is negative, it doesn't matter much. Microsoft still gets the upper hand. That is, they still get the publicity -- good or bad press doesn't matter to them. It is free and it is powerful. I stand by my posting.
Here is something else to think about. What if you are correct and there really are deeper motives. Let's assume that I am wrong. What are the deeper motives? What does this action tell us about their plans and objectives? As usual, I don't think that there are any obvious answers.
The problem is: The disintegration of invidiuality (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Education! (Score:2, Insightful)
I know clever and talented web designers for whom "standards compliance" is at best a vague abstraction. They hardly ever visit the W3C site [w3c.org], 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.
Is this even worthy of discussing? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Let's be fair: this isn't IE specific. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Unreadable sites (Score:0, Insightful)
Why HTML 1.0? HTML 4.0 would be fine. As long as pages were written by someone with half a brain, even 7-year-old HTML 1.0-aware browsers would display the pages just fine.
The only thing really lacking in old browsers is that some of them can't do tables. In most other respects, a browser from 1994 can handle newly-written web pages just fine -- unless the page's author went out of their way to make it not work.
Re:Tim Doesn't Get It (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Worthwhile Process (Score:3, Insightful)
More importantly, the post made your point well, and in so doing, it refuted your point nicely.
Virg
An Anti-Web Viewpoint (Score:2, Insightful)
Tim - If you don't like it ...INNOVATE (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Unreadable sites and poor design (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Pixel perfect (Score:2, Insightful)
Stop, look, listen (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Let's be fair: this isn't IE specific. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's the right of other browsers to compete (Score:2, Insightful)
If they combine this with bundling FrontPage with their OSes (or do they do this already? I don't have any MS OS newer than Windows 95), after a while FrontPage would become the path of least resistance.
This browser-blocking stuff, right now, only affects (affected?) MSN.. but what happens if every crappy Geocities homepage and small business corporate web site includes this code by default? Eventually, ``Web Browser'' will be synonymous with ``Microsoft Internet Explorer''... Netscape, Mozilla, Konq, (name your alternate web browser), would be about as useful for general Web surfing as Mosaic is now. (There are those who would argue that this has already happened, but I do all right for now with Opera and NS 4.7)
This would be fine, if MS would port their browser to a reasonable chunk of the platforms out there, and do a good job of porting it. (Well, it wouldn't be fine exactly, but it would be livable). I hate microsoft, but I'd use their browser if I didn't have to pay for it, and if it ran on my machines. The same goes for the company I work for: we're a tiny startup, providing 3rd-party support for Open Source software. We can't afford to pay through the nose for MS licenses, and we already get everything done in Linux, so even if we wanted to migrate to Windows, it would be a bad move (not least because all the employees would quit!)
Right now, the only way I can run MS IE is on Solaris, on a Sparc machine. Unfortunately, the Solaris versions of IE are pretty awful, especially on cheaper, slower Sparc hardware.. if I want to run IE on Intel hardware, I must *buy* a copy of a Windows OS, and run it whenever I want to run IE. Since I get my actual work done in Linux and occasionally Solaris, this isn't possible, even if I or my company wanted to (yes, our budget is small enough that we can't afford to pay Microsoft for the ``privilege'' of running their OS and browser).
So who is the loser here? Not Joe Sixpack, who doesn't know (or feel the need to know) that there's more to using a computer than clicking the Start button, and who already paid his ``Windows tax'' when he bought his PC... the small business is screwed, here. Joe Sixpack is also screwed, but only in an indirect, abstract way that he probably doesn't care about. I'm no expert on the economy, but I've been led to believe that it's bad for the economy as a whole, when the environment is hostile to small businesses. Granted, the dot-bomb crash of last year has a lot to do with this, but Microsoft is not only not helping (wouldn't expect them to, that's not why they're in business), but they're actively hurting the situation. Eventually, nobody but MS stockholders and employees will be able to afford their OS (exaggeration, but you see my point?)
It's easy enough to answer me with ``If you can't afford to pay, you can't afford to play''... but we're talking about Web standards, which are supposed to be open and usable by everyone who can afford a 'net connection.
netscape used to do this, too (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The complexity of modern-day webpages (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes, a load of people have a very layout-centric approach, but that doesn't mean that HTML is about layout. HTML 4 brought us plenty of new semantic attributes, and deprecated a lot of the presentational stuff that crept into HTML 3.1
In fact XHTML 1.0 gave us exactly no new HTML structure (it just allows for the idea of mixing HTML with other XML based markup languages). The idea of leaving the markup to HTML and the presentation to CSS is far from new, it just took the browsers a long time to catch up.
I just hope that lots and lots of gullible people believe that XHTML 1.0 is the beginning of structure on the Web, and start to use it as they should have done years ago.
Calum
--
Calum I Mac Leod [ciml.co.uk]
Scottish Borders [bordernet.co.uk]
95% IE? (Score:2, Insightful)
If I've ever visited your site you'd better ie_count--
Re:The complexity of modern-day webpages (Score:3, Insightful)
You shouldn't HAVE to use invisible GIFs. Or tables in tables in tables in... HTML in fact has no good layout controlling features. Why has HTML become so hard to use, if you want a real good-looking page? Because HTML has nothing to do with layout -- and this remains the case.
fear and loathing in the webspace (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Not the way HTML tags are supposed to work! (Score:2, Insightful)
<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
Re:Unreadable sites (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree. There are at least two ways to provide content for web browsers that don't support the latest standards. The first is to detect the browser and display for it, and the other is to design degradable pages - which is the proper way to do it, and what the w3c has been continuously trying to encourage people to do for the last ten years. (Except for a couple of looney years when HTML 3.2 was around.)
Right back since HTML 2.0, which was the first stable formal release of an HTML spec, the w3c has requested that user agents ignore what they don't understand [w3.org].
If you look properly at the HTML 4.01 or even better the XHTML 1.0 strict spec (which is basically the same thing except with an XML syntax enforced), the whole thing is rigged around building a page using only basic markup like headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on. Nearly everything to do with formatting has been deprecated, except for what was more or less available in HTML originally.
The HTML syntax has been reduced to the one for providing the actual information - or that's what the intention is, at least. All of the cool looking stuff has been moved to other specs like CSS (which is approaching version 3), that are defined externally and linked to the HTML file. With the most modern standards, it's possible to take a very basic HTML web page of marked up information, and turn it into a flashy, presentational marvel. That is for people who choose to use browsers that display those extentions. At the same time however, it doesn't prevent blind people from getting directly to the information. It doesn't prevent people using lynx.
IMHO, good web design should always put the information part on the HTML and build the presentation around it. The alternative is serving browser-specific content, but that's really ugly because your server needs to know about all the different browsers, and it needs more server hardware for the extra processing.
The time where it is useful is for web browsers that think they support a certain standard and act like they support a certain standard, but then completely screw it up. Netscape 4 does this with CSS. Some of the earlier browsers do it with javascript, and so on.
It's not just legacy browsers that don't support modern standards, it's modern browsers that don't work in visual media. For example, tell me how a speech browser would support the tabbed menu selector at the top of MSN in a way that would convey "The Microsoft Network Experience". And yet you can be sure it supports all the standards that are relevant to its media.
The thing is that it's always supposed to have been up to the user agent on the user end to decide how to present the content. That's why web servers serve up markup instead of images. I wish more managers out there would understand that. Incidently, does anyone know if Microsoft was letting in MSIE clients who had CSS and/or Javascript disabled? I forgot to check.
My feeling now is that Microsoft has just recently used some hypocritical doublespeak and screwed over a general management view of how web standards are supposed to work, stating some of the facts but ignoring the most important ideals that they're there for.