[thelist] other browsers
Simon Willison
cs1spw at bath.ac.uk
Tue Sep 16 10:20:16 CDT 2003
Tom Dell'Aringa wrote:
> On top of all of this, there is a disturbing trend with my clients
> this year. It's called "IE5+ only development." If the project is
> under any kind of quick deadline, its always IE5+ only. Or its "if it
> works in NS/Moz that's fine, but don't put extra time into it." (as
> if writing compliant code take all kinds of 'extra time'). So I end
> up developing with IE anyway and writing IE specific code which
> doesn't even work in other browsers (which is a bummer, because the
> Moz JS debugger is sweet). Generally these are specific applications
> for intranets or installed desktops - but not always. - but that is
> another topic.
In my opinion, developing for IE5+ only is a sure sign that the company
in question has completely failed to understand one of the biggest
benefits of web technologies: thanks to well supported (if
misunderstood) open standards they offer a way out from platform lockin.
Let's talk about in-house development. A few years ago, if a company was
going to develop a system for itnernal use there was a good chance they
would develop it as a client-server Visual Basic application. VB
programmers are cheap, development is relatively quick and "no one ever
got fired for buying Microsoft". Today, a strong contendoer for
developing in house applications is to create them as a web application
available over the internet. Deployment is far simpler (simply install
the application on the web server, no need to roll out a client app as
well), support is cheaper and the limitations of an HTML interface
probably won't be a problem since most in house applications are
basically pretty front ends to a database somewhere.
Now consider Linux. 6 months ago the idea of a large company moving to
Linux was almost laughable - then the city of Munich made the switch
back in May and suddenly Linux doesn't look so silly. If you think about
it, many workers don't actually need a full PC workstation with Windows
XP, Microsoft Office and all the trimmings. If they aren't working at a
desk all day long they probably only really need company email and
access to a few custom applications that are needed as part of their jobs.
Imagine you're a big company about to open a new manufacturing plant.
You need 1,000 new PCs, but thanks to your internal software running as
a web application they only need to run a web browser and an email
client. A combination of Linux, Gnome, Firebird/Mozilla and Evolution
(an open source email client) could save you a massive chunk of
licensing fees, not to mention support costs (Linux admins may be more
expensive to hire, but some studies have shown that while you need one
Windows IT support guy for every 30 Windows boxes, a Linux guy can
usually handle upwards of 100). Of course, if your web applications were
all developed to only work with IE you're back to square one.
It's not like developing cross platform applications is even
particularly difficult - the W3C DOM is well supported by most modern
browsers and the most popular IE extensions (innerHTML and
contentEditable) are supported by recent versions of Gecko as well.
Vendor lockin is never a good thing. Until recently it has been
unavoidable when developing custom applications, but the web was built
on a principle of universal access (Tim Berners-Lee originally invented
it to allow machiens running different operating systems at CERN to
share information) and finally allows the development of systems that
don't tie you down to a particular vendor. Unfortunately, it seems the
single vendor mentality is so ingrained in corporate IT culture that
many companies are failing to realise how much freedom this gives them.
Disclaimer: I've never worked for a big company - the above is based on
common sense, talks with people who DO work for big companies and
reading far too much slashdot ;)
Cheers,
Simon
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