Browser Tip:
Your Standards Or Mine?

by Larisa Thomason,
Senior Web Analyst,
NetMechanic, Inc.

Would you ever intentionally design a Web site that turns visitors away? Microsoft did just that when they launched their redesigned MSN.com site. For a short time, site visitors using Netscape and Opera browsers were unable to see the home page. Instead, they got a page encouraging them to download the Explorer browser.

Wouldn't You Really Rather Have Explorer?

Reaction was swift and furious from users and competing browser manufacturers. They complained that Microsoft was trying to force users to browse with Explorer. But Microsoft director of MSN marketing, Bob Visse, explained in a CNET article that the problem was actually one of "standards:"

"All of our development work for the new MSN.com is...W3C standard. For browsers that we know don't support those standards or that we can't insure will get a great experience for the customer, we do serve up a page that suggests that they upgrade to an IE browser that does support the standards."

But whose standards? Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), said in a rare interview with SiliconValley.com that the new MSN.com homepage "did not use valid XHTML and didn't meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines." So Mr. Visse must have been referring to Microsoft Explorer's interpretation of W3C standards, not the standards as the W3C understands them.

Even that explanation was a bit disingenuous. Within a week of relaunching, MSN had opened up the site to most other browsers. This suggests that MSN's designers were just taking a short cut. Instead of building pages that look good on all browsers, they told the other browsers to just go away.

Headaches For Web Developers

This isn't just a minor squabble between Microsoft and its competitors. The dispute illustrates how easy it is to design incompatible pages - and how difficult it is to make the pages work across browsers. Web developers spend huge amounts of time and money trying to produce sites that work in all browsers. It's a Herculean task: just look through our newsletter archives for proof. Almost every HTML, CSS, or JavaScript Tip contains some caveat about browser incompatibility.

Even experienced developers at large sites have trouble designing compatible sites. We ran the MSN.com Web site through Browser Photo. Not surprisingly, there were some display problems in Netscape and Opera. But it is surprising to find that even Explorer browsers had problems!

Note how much the page display depends on the screen resolution. That seems to have a bigger impact on display than the browser type or version. This is a good example of just how much screen resolution can affect your page layout. Browser compatibility is important, but always remember that other factors can break your pages too.

Version 6 Browsers And Standards

The confusion over standards affects even the newest browser versions. Microsoft's recently released Explorer 6.0 version doesn't comply completely with W3C guidelines, but it is more compliant than previous versions. Netscape put a lot of time and effort into making its version 6 browser rigorously compliant with W3C standards. But even that good deed caused problems for webmasters and visitors!

Many versions of Web pages that looked great in Netscape 4.7 are broken in 6.0. Sites that use a number of DHTML effects have the most serious incompatibility problems because the browser doesn't support either the document.layers or document.all methods to reference objects. So while the browser is more in compliance with W3C guidelines, it may not display DHTML effects that use older cut-and-paste JavaScript routines.

Explorer 6.0 offers more compatibility headaches. It introduces dual rendering engines for CSS that display a Web page according to the rules specified in the Document Type Definition (DTD). The end result is that Explorer 6.0 is becoming just as picky about CSS rules as Netscape browsers have always been. Web developers who don't comply with strict CSS standards had better start updating their sites or they could face problems.

So what's a frustrated Web designer to do? It gets more difficult every day to design Web sites that display correctly in all browsers. It's even harder to test the pages thoroughly - unless you have a good tool to help.

Browser Photo shows you actual screen shots of your Web page in 16 different browser and operating system combinations. When you test your site with Browser Photo, you get access to the resources of a comprehensive testing lab without the equipment and labor expense that a lab requires.