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Pure HTML is Dead, Long Live IE? 9 July 2002 Edition
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There used to be a time, long long ago, when web pages were implemented using a markup language known as HTML.

Life was simple for web designers. Create an HTML-compliant web page and visitors using Mosaic, Lynx (and later, Netscape) could browse around without any problems.

Then Netscape decided that all these "simple" HTML web pages were pretty lame and boring -- so it decided to spice up HTML a little with a few extensions of its own.

Always keen to embrace such innovations, many web designers started using these new extensions and this meant that users of other browsers were sometimes disadvantaged.

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Now jump forward to 2002 and we find something very similar going on -- except now it's Microsoft doing the "enhancing".

As a died in the wool Netscape user, I find myself increasingly being forced to fire up my Internet Explorer 6.0 to gain access to some sites.

The reason for this is simple: the guys at Microsoft have decided that there are lots of cool things you can do to make websites more interactive, exciting and useful. Unfortunately, not all this extra functionality isn't supported by my Netscape or even my "HTML compliant" Opera browser.

But why should Microsoft or the web designers using all these "gee whiz" features care? After all, just about everyone uses IE these days so what does it matter if a handful of visitors can't properly access IE-specific websites?

Readers Say
(updated hourly)
  • IE, Netscape, Opera... - Annon
  • The IE Monopoly... - Andy
  • Browser Agnosticism... - Allister
  • Xtra network infected... - Mike
  • Netscape/Mozilla vs IE... - Ian
  • IE HTML Websites... - Me
  • The Gooey... - Don
  • Telstra Clear... - David
  • Have Your Say

    Well if the feedback I received recently regarding The Gooey is anything to go by, there are still a lot of people who do care.

    Perhaps it's because Aardvark has a fairly high level of "technically aware" readers who avoid Internet Explorer for obvious reasons -- or perhaps it's because the new release of Mozilla has drawn back a lot of people who had temporarily defected to IE -- but whatever the reason, it seems that the number of non-IE users has risen recently.

    What's more, non-IE users tend to be a far more vocal bunch than their Microsoft-enamoured peers, so when they encounter a site that is IE-specific they're more likely to say something about it.

    All of this leaves web designers in a bit of a pickle doesn't it?

    Should they use all those clever IE-specific features and build a site that rocks the client's socks off -- or should they focus instead on producing a site that is more browser-friendly and works well with Opera, Mozilla and IE?

    In the case of an a business website the answer is probably pretty easy to work out. If we assume that 10 percent of web surfers are Netscape, Mozilla or Opera users then we simply subtract that much from the projected total sales value related directly to the site.

    For instance -- a website that is expected to produce sales of $10,000 per month could be turning away up to $12,000 a year worth of business if it effectively locks out non-IE users.

    Clearly it would be easy to create a solid business case to spend an extra in order $5,000 to make that site more browser-agnostic.

    Unfortunately I doubt that many companies will do even this simple piece of math and, as a result, we can look forward to an increasing number of "no-go" areas for us non-IE users.

    What do you think? Should Non-IE users just get with the program and ditch their incompatible software -- or should web designers get a brain and learn that an gramme of agnostic functionality is worth a kilo of glitz and glamour?

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