[thelist] What is wrong with this site?

[James Aylard]

Simon Willison wrote:

> Jeff Howden wrote:
>> again, as evidenced by the original request, the developer doesn't
>> always intend for their work to be sent as text/plain.  ie is doing
>> its best to protect the user from this mistake.
>
> "Be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you produce"
> is fine for some purposes, but in web browsers it is a down right
> liability. The reason, as I touched on before, is simple: a web
> browser is a development tool.
[snip]

    But Jeff's argument, as I understand it, is that Internet Explorer is
_not_ intended as a development tool, but instead is intended as a product
for end users. In virtually every respect, IE is designed to shield users
from the complexities and potential pitfalls of web browsing (hence its
"friendly" HTTP error messages, its simple and largely inflexible user
interface, etc.).
    Why should the average user see a blank window simply because a
server-side script failed to write a closing table tag? Why should the
average user see a stream of unintelligible html code simply because the
server isn't set to generate the correct content-type header? Why should the
user be confronted with a confusing "404 Error" page, having no clue what it
means? Microsoft's answer is: they shouldn't. And IE is a product of that
assumption.

> Most people adding content to the web are only
> testing it in a single browser - if that browser is silently fixing
> their mistakes for them, they'll think that their page is correct and
> will consider it a job well done. When a browser comes along that
> doesn't fix that particular mistake the site will be broken, but the
> original author will have no idea that there's a problem.

    So, we're back to developer laziness. There are numerous tools out there
in which to test a site and to verify the validity of its code. But since
many developers, according to your own argument, never bother to rigorously
test their sites, Microsoft has decided that the hapless end user should not
be the one to shoulder the burden of some of the more common careless coding
errors.

> This in turn leads to a downwards spiral. These days, if you want to
> write a new web browser you have to not only implement a number of
> large W3C specifications, but you also have to reverse-engineer
> Internet Explorer's thousands of undocumented "fixes" or your browser
> will be unable to render the vast majority of the web, and no one
> will use it.

    Meaningless. It is the complexity of complying with web standards that
makes the production of a modern browser so incredibly daunting, not
"reverse-engineering" IE's so-called fixes.

> It's not just bad practise, it's down right
> anti-competitive, and unfortunately the market has got to a point now
> where the situation is irreversible (browsers can't get sticter
> because old pages will break).

    You can't blame Microsoft alone for that. The smoke still rises from the
rubble of the "browser wars" in which Netscape fully participated.
Netscape's own (and arguably worse) proprietary "improvements" to existing
standards still exact a toll of hair from the heads of many developers. It
is only because IE won that war that few developers still bother with
Netscape's ancient proprietary features. That Microsoft simply does not drop
old proprietary features (as Netscape did while developing Navigator 5) is
another example of why IE is clearly designed primarily for the end-user,
and not for the developer. That's what Mozilla is for, after all. :)

James Aylard
evolt at pixelwright.com