Compatibility Woes Forever

If there's one thing that Web developers bitch about more than any other, it's browser compatibility. As we all know by now, a Web page can look totally different on two different platforms, and can look totally screwed on certain platforms even if the HTML is perfectly correct. In fact, this unpredictability has scared some folks away from the Web altogether. In the early days, some corporate execs, used to dictating the layout of their pages to the millimeter, declared that they wouldn't use the Web at all, because they couldn't accept the loss of control over the corporate image (they were all fired later, of course). And every Web developer has a horror story or two about a client who simply refused to believe that it wasn't possible to design a page that looked the same on every computer, and insisted on wasting huge chunks of time and money in futile attempts to do so.

So, now that we've a new millennium, these compatibility problems will disappear, right? Wrong! In fact, they're just beginning. The two main browser makers remain a source of confusion. With Netscape now open source, and Internet Explorer being woven ever more tightly into the empire of Microsoft products, you'd think we'd have the ultimate browser by now. But neither of the major browser makers can quite bring themselves to support all of HTML 4.0, much less "esoteric" stuff like JavaScript, SGML and XML. These days, however, nobody seems to care much anymore, for a couple of reasons.

Traditional browsers are no longer the only software being used to access the Web. In the stock-quote application discussed above, all the action takes place in a Java applet window. The Web page is just used to log in and start the applet. More and more content is being delivered by streaming media viewers, Java apps, and from within desktop applications - plain old browsers are becoming less important.

Also, thanks to open-source Mozilla and the Gecko Layout Engine, you can basically build your own browser, or incorporate a way to browse Web content into a desktop application. Of course, applications have included links to the Web for some time, but now they're doing so in much smoother ways, and transferring more of the overhead to the network (Web-only Help files, for one mundane example). Apps are becoming Web sites, and Web sites are becoming apps. In spite of, or because of, all this convergence, proprietary standards and compatibility nightmares are more common than ever!

America Online (AOL), which Web developers love to scoff at, isn't going away. On the contrary, they've become a bigger player than ever, and a market that e-preneurs can't ignore. Like everything else, AOL has improved greatly over the years, but they still have their traditional "closed shop" mentality, and there are some serious compatibility issues, even for users that are using a Netscape browser with AOL. For the quality-conscious Web developer, it's yet another platform that needs to be supported.

But the real story is non-PC devices. The gadgeteers assure us that we're in for a flood of gadgets that can access the Web, from washing machines to watches to tie pins. Once you get past some of the nuttier ideas, there are a lot of such applications that will be quite useful and popular, from the glamorous (checking stocks while skydiving) to the mundane-but-profitable (monitoring utility meters). The trend is clear, and Web developers who want to do commercial work will need to know how to format content for a wide variety of screen sizes and data formats. If you thought designing for Netscape, Microsoft, Mac and AOL was bad, try supporting the Palm Pilot, WebTV, WRAP (Web Ready Appliances Protocol), and a dozen others.

The current way to handle this sort of thing is to have a script that detects the user's platform, and either directs them to a special page with appropriate formatting and duplicate content, or (better) simply builds a page dynamically using an appropriately-formatted template. A recent WDVL article explained how to do this for WebTV. But what is really needed is a universal standard for defining content, so that any and all devices can simply read the content and do the necessary formatting on the client end. Instead of making the poor Web developers keep track of an ever-changing jungle of browser standards and non-standards, let the client access the content of a site, together with as much or as little of the formatting as the client can handle.

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