By Rachel Chalmers
Developers believe the web could fall apart. According to developer group, the Web Standards Project (WSP), key web standards remain incompletely or incompatibly implemented, making it necessary for two-thirds of the top 100 consumer web sites to exist in multiple versions to support different browsers. In the WSP’s first State of the Web report, leader George Olsen says: The sad thing is that the browser makers who helped W3C [World Wide Web Consortium] develop the standards are the very ones who’ve repeatedly failed to implement these standards.
These standards are crucial to the future development of the web. As Olsen puts it: Unfortunately, each new browser release without full support for these standards means the web’s foundation becomes increasingly jerry-rigged – and creates needless expense for anyone doing business on the web. The WSP points out that if this lack of support for web standards continues, the effects will be felt not only by web developers but by anyone with an investment in the networked economy of the future. The impact on e-commerce alone will be staggering, Olsen says.
The WSP acknowledges that both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape’s Navigator have improved their support for web standards in the last few months. But the group says the vendors are moving too slowly to keep pace with the demands of the web. IE 5 still falls short in its support for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and the Document Object Model (DOM), while Netscape is still in its 4.x releases, which even the company admits falls far short of what’s required. The browsers which support standards best – Opera and the Macintosh version of IE 4.5 – account for about 1.5% of traffic to a popular site like the HotBot search engine.
Which leads to an interesting question: could it be that the market just doesn’t care? On the same day the WSP published its State of the Web, a site called WebSideStory reported that IE has increased its lead over Navigator. San Diego, California-based WebSideStory found that 68.75% of computers on the web run IE, compared to 29.46% that run Netscape. On the web as on the desktop, could Microsoft end up setting the standard by default?
Never say never, Olsen told ComputerWire, that could happen. But so far, there has been a somewhat even split between the two browsers. The stats seem to vary depending on who’s doing the survey. Besides, Olsen says, the WSP is concerned about two problems. One is that the market is dominated by two major players and they have incompatible implementations, he concedes, but the other is actually that there is a real standard which both vendors should be following, regardless of whether or not the other is there. Netscape or no Netscape, the WSP intends to stay on Microsoft’s case. รก
