Web Standards for Dummies

Next article: Blinded by the Sun
Previous article: Stuff ‘n’ Stuff

Share with your friends and followers:

AOL has a conundrum. They keep shipping beta versions of their software with the Gecko engine embedded, but Gecko never seems to make production AOL code.

My guess is that too many users complain about pages breaking in Gecko. The problem is that pages written specifically for Microsoft Internet Explorer, using Microsoft proprietary extensions, will break in Gecko-based browsers, like Mozilla and Netscape. This is because these pages break the standards for web pages set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and other standards bodies. While Mozilla hackers and a few web developers like myself might care about this, users do not.

So how do we make them care? We must ship an evangelist with Gecko-based browsers, like iCab does. Only immediate feedback to the user will communicate that the page is the problem, not the Gecko browser they are using.

A rather suboptimal start would be a button that simply passed the page along to the W3C validator or listed the JavaScript errors, something like these bookmarklets: Check Page, and JS Console. (To use as bookmarklets, right click on either link, and choose “Bookmark This Page” or “Add to Favorites.”). However, as I said, this would be a rather suboptimal solution. The real solution needs to provide immediate feedback to the user that the page itself is borken. Bug 6211 asks for something like this. It’s too bad this bug is so old. That means that hackers don’t care enough to bang the code.

It’s also suboptimal because the information in the JavaScript Console and the W3C validator are aimed at developers. Users need information that is directed at their level. Users don’t grok “Error: window._content.document has no properties.” It’s worse than garbage as far as they are concerned. They need something as drop dead simple as: “This page is broken. The guy who wrote it is a moron.” This has the added feature of convincing developers to use web standards, since they likely don’t want to be identified as monkeys.

Share with your friends and followers:

The URL to trackback this post is:
http://kevinbasil.com/2002/06/18/web-standards-for-dummies/trackback/

Comments are closed.