10. This document is best viewed with…

Back to contents of State of the Net issue 16

Remember the browser wars of the 1990s? No? As Microsoft and Netscape fought to dominate the PC web browser market they added new, non-standard features to their browsers. Websites often had notices saying that they were “best viewed with” one browser version or another. It was frustrating for users and maddening for web publishers who had to create several browser-specific versions of a site. Web standards promise to end those problems.

One piece of good news is that Google is winding down support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. From 1 March, key functions in Google Docs and Google Sites will no longer work with IE6. The need to cater for non-standard features of IE6 has long been a pain for web publishers.

Flash bashing

And there’s Apple. Its much-hyped iPad does not support Adobe Flash. (Neither do the 44 million iPhones out there, but people expect pocket devices to behave a bit differently.)Flash is extremely widespread on the Web, to play video and create animation and interactivity.

It lies behind the rise of YouTube and the success of the RTÉ Player. Flash is proprietary to Adobe. It is not an official web standard, but it is close to being a de facto one, or was. Apple’s move essentially demands that publishers recode sites that use Flash to suit its technology.

This will matter less as the latest web standards are adopted, such as HTML5, which allows video to be included in web pages without requiring Flash.

Standards-based

Now more than ever, publishers cannot assume that their audiences are sitting in front of a computer monitor, with a keyboard and mouse to hand.

To succeed, online communications will have to:

Be user-focused
Cater for mobile users
Use web standards to the greatest degree possible
Avoid browser wars

Here’s to HTML5 and a standards-based Internet!

Back to contents of State of the Net issue 16