A Wider Argument | Articles | the bombsite

This last week has seen certain “revelations” about Software/Internet companies that are quite serious. Around that has gone a debate about how you educate internet users about using a secure browser without alienating them. There’s continued coverage of the “standards” debate. Then there are discussions on how designers take into account all the different browsers in use (or at least the more popular ones). And I mustn’t forget Root’s search for the “Holy Grail” of footers. No I’m not being funny. I think Root’s experiments are well worthwile, but they are connected to all the other debates, which I happen to think are all inter-connected.

The revelation that Google may be “fixing” the rankings with regard to reviews of “Fahrenheit 9/11” doesn’t totally shock me but it did surprise me how short a time it has taken as a “quoted company” for the rot to set in. I suspect that they feel any criticism from the “Bush camp” could be detrimental to their health. But wait a minute. I think they’ve missed a trick here. If they fixed the rankings so that only good reviews of the film get the top ranks and then sat back and waited for the flack from the “Bush camp” surely their popularity and share ratings would soar. Maybe Google are listening to the wrong advisors. Maybe they’re paying them too much. Anyway this kind of deception always makes me think “Microsoft”.

Microsoft is a bit of a quandry. On the one hand they actually do make very good software (security problems aside). I mean Windows is actually a very useful piece of kit. They employ some seriously good programmers. The problem with their software is the “philosophy” that Microsoft build into it.

They are a very big company and they want to stay that way, or at the very least, expand. I think what they really want is global domination in everything they touch. So some of the “philosophy” that we might want to see built into software generally is that it be useable on all platforms, that it does what we want it to do in the simplest way possible and that it does it properly. There are no doubt other things you can think of. The extra little bit of “philosophy” that Microsft thought of was “to make the user, without his/her knowledge, dependent on Microsoft products throughout the range”. So what does that mean? It means that, almost since day 1, Microsoft has designed it’s products to be so inter-dependent on each other that they have become inseparable. So we have the situation where you cannot fully remove IE or Outlook Express from your PC or Mac, you can only remove the menu entries and nominate other browser/email clients as default. And that’s more than you could do 18 months ago.

Then you have the Microsoft sites (and others) that won’t let you in if you don’t use IE. They want you to “upgrade”. Well upgrade to what exactly? A browser that is not “standards” compliant. A browser that has little or no security. A browser that will allow an active-X application onto your PC without a second glance giving loads of prats out there the opportunity of turning your computer in a living nightmare. I’m beginning to think this might give the term “upgrade” a bad name. Aside from that though you are being denied access to areas of the internet because you don’t use a particular browser. Who on earth gave them the right to deny access? Who’s internet is this? I thought it belonged to everyone and no-one. If you put something up on the internet everyone should be able to see it. Maybe I got it wrong somewhere. But wait. Have you had a look at “Longhorn” and IE7? There’s more “inter-activity” to come. Chances are that even more portions of the internet will be closed to non-Microsoft products and IE7 will be no more “standards” compliant than IE6. Why do Microsoft refuse to go along with the popular call for “standards” ?

Their problem is that they have IE and that it is so embedded into the Windows code that it can’t be removed without a total rebuild. They see other developers coming up with browsers that are far more secure and just plain better than IE and they are FREE. That’s the bit that bothers them. They have a product – IE – that stands a chance of actually losing money for them, or at least not making anymore, because if they follow the call to “standards” IE will be worthless. Microsoft don’t like products that don’t do their bank balance some good so they have the intent of breaking the “standards” and making more of the internet inaccessible in order to strengthen their built in “philosophy” of making the user dependent.

And here we are back at “standards” again. So why do we want standards? Well if there were a finalised standard that ALL browsers complied with then it wouldn’t matter which browser was being used, a web page would look and act the same way for everyone. That would solve the designers’ dilemma of trying to create pages that look similar to as many browsers as possible and put pay to Microsoft’s ambition to continue to make money out of IE. But there’s a slightly deeper thread to the “standards” argument. It has to do with standards within standards. I’ll illustrate with a simple example. Tables!!

Tables are allowed within current standards but there is much debate about “how they can or should be used”. The argument goes that tables should not be used for positioning purposes (this should be done in CSS) but should only be used for formatting data which is tabular by nature. An example of this would be the league table on my Gulls page. Very nice. Now whilst I follow the purists’ argument on this I’m not totally convinced that they have the better point. If you have a look at “The Waiting Room” you will see a page that is basically a two column layout with a header and footer. It is standards compliant. It consists of a basic table format and is very simple to implement. The purist argument says this layout is wrong and I should say that I created this before this particular argument really took a hold. My point is that a simple method of creating 2, 3, 4 or however many columns you want with a footer has been taken away from us which is where Root comes in.

He has spent numerous hours developing a template for 2 columns with footer done in CSS that people can “takeaway”. He’s come up with a solution. Excellent!! But should he have really had to? My thought is that there are many budding web masters out there who don’t know much HTML let alone XHTML and CSS. I won’t mention PHP. They will want to get a web site, a blog or whatever up and running as soon as possible. Standards should make this easier for them, not harder. When I started The Bomb Site we were back on HTML 4.0. CSS was something you added to the “head” section of each HTML page. Though I now know more than I did then I would say that in many ways validating your code and conforming to standards has made designing harder. This can only have the tendancy to alienate web beginners and thus reduce the vast diversity that is the internet. In some ways the push to “standards” could do Microsoft’s job for them making more designers think in terms of IE only, being the market leader, and, though not blocking other browsers, not worrying about how the site looks to them. I whole heartedly support standards to standardise the web but those same standards should also be as simple as possible to be as accessible as possible to all. I’m not sure that arguments over semantics are a basis for standards. I’m not saying I believe this but are the professional designers trying to make design something that is only for them? Making it so that only the most dedicated enthusiast would even bother trying to learn all this “stuff”? Mmmm…...

So where does all this get us? I’m not sure other than it is all inter-connected. I just ended up thinking about it and going round in circles. Maybe if I write it down it might coagulate? No chance. One thing is certain though; you can’t solve one problem without solving all of them. If standards are to be accepted universally Microsoft will need to have a big “philosophy” change, and standards “philosophy” needs to be examined closely too. Maybe there’s a place in standards for “security” as well. Should browsers, email clients, message clients etc. be required to have certain security features? Many of the modern applications come with security as standard. I wonder which of the most popular browsers doesn’t? Oh no!! Let me guess. No, I’m just not going to write that name again…....