T w e n t y S i d e d

I’ve never really paid any attention to web standards until recently. I dabble in HTML and use half-assed CSS when I’m forced to, but I’m an old-school guy who began by coding HTML by hand in 1994. (Boy I wish I had some of those early pages, they would be hilarious.) I was aware of standards in a distant way and in the past I even poked fun at them as needlessly pedantic. I was aware that there was a standard, and that browsers complied with it to varying degrees, but I always attributed the differences to the usual culprit: Software sucks. Now that I’ve read a bit about it and I see how complex the standards are, and that compliance is more affected by business and politics than programmer time and talent. It turns out that some browsers suck on purpose. Or at least, the fail to not suck on purpose. Now that the problem is no longer a matter of fixing bugs, I’m intrigued by it.

The paradox facing IE is the most interesting. For many years it was both the most popular and the least standards compliant. Looking back, I can see why IE was so singularly infuriating to web developers. They would make a “correct” page, and it would work just fine in all browsers except for the ubiquitous IE6. They would find hacks to correct these flaws in IE without breaking the page elsewhere. Then IE7 came out, and pages broke in a completely different way, requiring an additional layer of hacks on top of the old one. Sometimes hacks are (shudder) nested. I’ve seen some example code of this business in the last few days, and makes quite a horrifying mess of what should be very straightforward CSS. I can understand why web developers feel such animus: If my job was complicated by this sort of business I’d most likely want to visit heinous damage on the people responsible.

Again, I wasn’t really paying attention to this drama at the time. My HTML has always relied on tables for layout and my CSS was too simple to run afoul of any of the dozens of quirks, issues, ambiguities, or broken behavior. It just didn’t affect me. (Well, once or twice. But I never had to deal with the sort of headaches that web developers deal with on a regular basis. I certainly never used any browser hacks.) I was aware that web developers had some ire towards Microsoft, but Microsoft’s foes are legion and I didn’t realize this was something other than the usual ambient level of hatred the company seems to maintain.

What Microsoft is facing now really does seem to be a certain degree of comeuppance. You can brazenly ignore standards only so long as you have absolute dominance over the market. If you lose your grip on the system, your deviations from the norm will become a great liability. Lose enough ground, and the cycle will begin to feed on itself. Most people will be making webpages that look good on their browser of choice. Only the responsible ones will bother to check other browsers, and only the diligent will go to the trouble to use the hacks. More pages will emerge that don’t work right in your browser. More people will switch. The system will bottom out once you get to the dregs – the people who don’t know how to switch or aren’t allowed because they don’t own the computer.

Is this happening now? I have no idea. The conventional wisdom is that IE has been losing market share at a good clip. I know my site isn’t exactly representative of the web as a whole, but check out the browser usage among the visitors here: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Catching up with Web Standards”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.