Web Standards on Mars

I am unable to do my online banking using Camino, my browser of choice. I need to use Firefox in order to view the site correctly. Let me tell you how this is all relevant to Internet Explorer.

Last week Joel On Software published an excellent article "Martian Headsets" about the Compliance issues confronting the team behind the upcoming Internet Explorer 8 which has recently been released in Beta.

The heart of the issue is that Internet Explorer is both popular yet badly behaved. Whilst browsers such as Mozilla Firefox are gaining market-share, Internet Explorer is still the preferred browser by the majority of users. Internet Explorer is a standard feature of Windows and for many users the terms "Internet" and "Internet Explorer" are entirely synonymous.

Each web-browser interprets the HTML and CSS code behind a website slightly differently. The W3C publishes the "rules" for how the web-browsers should behave but each browser still interprets the rules (standards) differently. In the case of Internet Explorer (particularly prior to Internet Explorer 7) some of the rules aren't followed at all. The impact of this problem is that web-developers simply cannot use the W3C standards to code websites.

Websites need to be tested in various browsers to ensure that they display consistently, and "hacks" need to be implemented to ensure that they display correctly in Internet Explorer. To their credit, Microsoft has recognised this problem and plans to use Internet Explorer 8 to change it all forever. But here's the problem: almost all current websites use Internet Explorer specific "hacks" to ensure that Internet Explorer displays websites correctly. Many websites only display correctly in Internet Explorer because the web-developers didn't initially code to standards compliance. When Internet Explorer 7 was released many websites appeared to "break". With Internet Explorer 8's stricter compliance to Web Standards the problem will be even worse - if the feedback from the Beta Testers is anything to go by. How will IE8 respond to the IE-specific "hacks" necessary to force IE6 and IE7 to behave? And what will be the impact of the hundreds of websites coded specifically for IE6 and IE7 suddenly not working correctly?

There is no simple solution to this problem. Microsoft can build IE8 to interpret the old websites as if it were IE7 perpetuating the problem of inconsistent implementation of standards, or IE8 can more strictly comply to the Standards forcing many websites to be re-coded. The best web-developers will code to standards but there's no way to anticipate how IE-specific "hacks" - necessary to make the old versions of IE behave - will be interpreted by a new version. The beta-version of IE8 contains an IE7 emulator allowing users to switch it into IE7 "mode". If the IE8 transition problems are widespread, I foresee this becoming irritating. IE8 behaving like IE7 by default becomes a very tempting "solution".

This is a complicated issue. If almost everyone uses the same browser then it's easy to ensure that a website will display correctly for the majority of users (but those in the minority using an alternative browser may get completely unexpected results). With so many alternatives out there, far more cross-browser testing is required to ensure that all users can view your site correctly (but if both browsers and web-developers conform to standards the testing and problems are both minimised).

Whilst Firefox is far more standards-compliant than IE it isn't perfect and the standards themselves are so extensive that problems with interpretation may always arise.

Here's where my banking problem comes in: my bank's website was built to work in Internet Explorer and in Mozilla Firefox. Whilst I'm happy that I'm able to do my banking on my Macintosh Computer - at all - it's disappointing to see that the website has been built for specific browsers rather than coded to standards. With a Monopoly of one or two browsers it's much easier to code for the majority, and very frustrating for the minority who are unable to experience the web to the fullest.

These problems won't be solved in the short term; while one or two web-browsers account for a large proportion of web-surfers, users who use the minority browsers will suffer. Until those same browsers comply to standards, web-developers will be unable to anticipate how future websites will interpret their code. The choice is between building a website which will work now (but might break in the future and/or minority browsers) or... well, it's not much of a choice, really.

In the short term I'm stuck with switching browsers to do my banking. But I hope that if the Web Browsers continue their trend toward consistency and Web Developers make cross-browser compliance a high priority, future versions of Web-Browsers won't continue to rattle the web-development community and users will be able to choose a browser based on it's features - not on whether it allows them to do their online banking.