There's A Storm a Comin'!

Just like in the old Western movies where someone announces the story conflict with those archetypal words, the Web design world is about to enter a tempest that shakes up tradition going back more than a decade.

Until now, progress has been pretty linear on the Web. HTML debuted and browsers were launched, and they both developed into version two, version three and so on. If you started writing to the HTML 4 standard, you were writing better markup than before. If you were using Netscape Navigator 4, that was a better browser than version 3, and so on.

All that may be about to change.

We teach in the Intro to HTML class that browsers ignore tags they don't understand. This was a neat feature of the early Web. If you happened upon a Table with Netscape's second browser it didn't cause your computer to lock up, sending a little trail of smoke out the back of your monitor. You still got all the data, all the information, from the Web page you were looking at. It just wasn't in a tabled format.

Now, you could argue that they weren't doing you any favors with this, because reading tabular data without a real table is a bear. But at least the information was available. This was the promise of the future. If you ever found yourself in 2011 with only an old Pentium-II laptop that only had Internet Explorer 5 you could still order floor mats for your flying car online, because IEv5 would ignore all of the 3-D tags in HTML 7. Or so we were told.

This is the part of our story where the freckle-faced little girl climbs up on the rail fence, looks to the horizon and squints, shielding her eyes with a childlike salute and announces, "Storm's a-comin'!"

Netscape lost the lead in the browser market because time and development stopped at Navigator 4 for too long. Microsoft rolled out their version 5 of Internet Explorer and quickly capitalized on that with version 5.5. Internet Explorer came along 6 comfortably within three years. Netscape had a good start on a bad browser with Navigator 5 and abandoned it, refocusing efforts on Navigator 6 but by the time it arrived, the Browser Wars were over. The remnants of Netscape will disappear at the end of this month.

So Microsoft won, if that's the word, the Browser Wars. And they celebrated by de-emphasizing development of their browser, Internet Explorer. The lesson of Navigator 4 was lost and Internet Explorer 6, which shipped in October of 2001, was still the original-equipment browser in October of 2006. During this time we saw the rise of Opera and Safari and especially Firefox, an open-sourced browser with excellent standards support.

Microsoft finally responded with IE7, in October of 2006 and to their credit they fixed a number of errors in IE6. But in fixing the browser so it finally adhered to standards published more than a decade before, Microsoft actually broke many Web sites built by people who had learned to work around the shortcomings of Explorer 6.

Now Microsoft are scrambling to avoid the tyranny of the installed base. They are the most-used (I can't quite bring myself to say "most popular") browser by far. And their most-used browser was out there with all of its flaws for five years and every day another… what, hundred? thousand? Web sites were published?

So Microsoft's feeling is that they are doing us all a favor by freezing things, now. Unless you include a special line of markup in all of your future Web pages, their upcoming IE8 is planning on rendering pages as though it was IE7. In three years, or five years, or whenever, IE9 will render those same pages no better than IE7 did on its best day. And IE10 will render perfectly-formed, standards-compliant Web pages just like (wait for it…) IE7, too. In order to get the improved rendering we expect is still on the way from Microsoft, we have to opt-in, with special versioning codes.

They say they don't want to "break the Web". They say that heads-up developers who lean on the standards are the ones most likely to keep up, most likely to learn to include this one extra line. Your typical bowling league webmaster probably hasn't read anything on HTML since "Learn To Make Web Pages In A Day" back in 1999, and is thus out of the loop.

Damnit, I can see both sides. And this might be easier, on some level, but really it only just prolongs the agony. Microsoft intends to pull of the IE6 Band-Aid™ over the next twelve or fifteen years, rather than turning out a browser that, by default acts like the best browser a skillion-dollar company can come up with.

I don't like the precedent. I don't like the idea that the next browser company can get a line on every Web page, too. Or that Microsoft may change its corporate mind in three years and we'll end up including three or four or twenty lines of markup in every new page, just to get browsers to act they way they should have in 2000.

It's not a war. We don't have to take sides. There's a storm coming, though, and someone is going to get wet.