Closer To The Ideal

Wow. It’s been awhile since I’ve seen a “Best viewed in Netscape 3.0” warning.

Best viewed in Netscape 3.0

Tragic. There is a suite of tests that measures how much each web browser complies with web standards. IE 9, to be released next year, still measures lower than even FireFox 2.0, which was released back in 2006.

Mark Pilgrim has written a fantastic article which looks back at the conversation in 1993 that lead to the introduction of the IMG tag, and draws conclusions about the evolution of HTML. He follows the conversation over the course of several months, as several ideas for new technologies are considered and rejected. Marc Andreessen, Tim Berners-Lee, Tony Johnson and many others participated in the conversation.

After reviewing the full history, Pilgrim concludes:

HTML has always been a conversation between browser makers, authors, standards wonks, and other people who just showed up and liked to talk about angle brackets. Most of the successful versions of HTML have been “retro-specs,” catching up to the world while simultaneously trying to nudge it in the right direction. Anyone who tells you that HTML should be kept “pure” (presumably by ignoring browser makers, or ignoring authors, or both) is simply misinformed. HTML has never been pure, and all attempts to purify it have been spectacular failures, matched only by the attempts to replace it.

And then:

But none of this answers the original question: why do we have an <img> element? Why not an <icon> element? Or an <include> element? Why not a hyperlink with an include attribute, or some combination of rel values? Why an <img> element? Quite simply, because Marc Andreessen shipped one, and shipping code wins.

That’s not to say that all shipping code wins; after all, Andrew and Intermedia and HyTime shipped code too. Code is necessary but not sufficient for success. And I certainly don’t mean to say that shipping code before a standard will produce the best solution. Marc’s <img> element didn’t mandate a common graphics format; it didn’t define how text flowed around it; it didn’t support text alternatives or fallback content for older browsers. And 16, almost 17 years later, we’re still struggling with content sniffing, and it’s still a source of crazy security vulnerabilities. And you can trace that all the way back, 17 years, through the Great Browser Wars, all the way back to February 25, 1993, when Marc Andreessen offhandedly remarked, “MIME, someday, maybe,” and then shipped his code anyway.

For much of the last 3 weeks I’ve used Windows laptop running XP (instead of my usual Ubuntu Linux machine) which gave me a chance to try out some of the browsers that have no Linux version.   One of the greatest aspects of the current web development scene is that most of the surviving browser projects are competing on how well they can implement web standards and HTML5 (contrast the current scene with 1996, when Microsoft set out to break the web, with its “embrace, extend and exterminate” strategy).

I’ve already noted that FireFox seems to have surpassed Internet Explorer, in terms of usage. Microsoft will hopefully soon kill Internet Explorer and replace it with something else.

I admire much of what Brendan Eich has done. And for the last several years, FireFox has been my web browser of choice. But FireFox drives me crazy with its demand for resources. Compared to any other browser I’ve tried, it demands more RAM. With just one window open, it will grab 60 to 90 megs of RAM (compared to, say, 14 for Chrome). With several pages open, which is normal for me, FireFox will grab 200 to 250 megs of RAM. Chrome might grab a 3rd of that. (These statements are true for FireFox 2 and 3, and Chrome 1.)

FireFox allows plugins, which is the main reason I use FireFox. The Firebug and Session Manager plugins are essential tools for me. However, FireFox doesn’t police the resource usage of these plugins. They can crash any machine: Macs, Linux, Windows. (Those of you who want to claim “Linux never crashes”, please note that a process can use up most of the memory on the machine, and then the machine becomes unresponsive. For the user, this is the same as a crash, even if in some hair-splitting way it avoids the technical definition of a crash.)

Chrome has the kind of plain, minimalist design that is a signature of most of Google’s products.  I like it a lot, though it has many annoyances. Yahoo Mail normally auto-suggests email addresses as I start to type them, but this doesn’t happen when I use Chrome. Also, when using WordPress, Chrome embeds inline styling, whereas other browsers do not. Also, again with WordPress, Chrome erases all line breaks every time I update a post, so that the text is reduced to one giant paragraph. Basically, most of the Javascript that is out there was not written with Chrome in mind, and Chrome has some kind of conflict with it. Also, surprisingly, I’m not able to log into some of my favorite forums with Chrome.  I get no error message, but I am not treated as logged in, even after giving the correct username and password (I have the same problem in Safari, but not in FireFox).

Scrolling a web page, using the arrow keys on the keyboard, is important to me. I read a great deal online, and for me it seems natural to want to use the arrow keys to move down the page as I read. Here is one area where Chrome is especially good. It scrolls smoothly. FireFox is usually broken in this regard – it tries to move the cursor down the page, but if the HTML is laid out in a way that allows the cursor to skip the main text of the page, then FireFox simply drops to the bottom of the page. This drives me crazy.

Safari 4 seems to be in between Chrome and FireFox in terms of resource use. It is wonderfully standards compliant and leads the way in supporting HTML5. I admire it for that, though until more browsers support HTML5, I can’t imagine using any of the new tags on a commercial web site.

Right now I can see using FireFox when I want to use my favorite plugins, and I can see using Chrome when I want a fast web browser, but I’m not sure what would cause me to use Safari.

I’m comfortable making this prediction: IE will continue to fade, and Microsoft will continue to fade, and FireFox, Safari and Chrome will all have more browser share a year from now than they currently do. So it is time for designer to start checking their designs in all of these browsers.

This project is tracking all the new upcoming web technologies, like CSS 3, which will allow us to have rounded corners without having to use images. Also, elements such as Canvas. Also, other technologies, such as transparency in PNG images.

Right now, none of these technologies are usable because at least one major browser doesn’t support them. But clearly, over the next year, most of these technologies will become usable in all major, newer browsers. Then the question becomes, at what point do these features have enough market share that you’d want to use them on a commercial site?

The reality that a new version of HTML will soon come out makes me aware of how stagnant things have been for the last 6 or 7 years. Compared to the incredible speed with which things evolved during 1994 to 1999, the last few years have been one of consolidation:

I’ve younger friends who’ve become web designers in the last 4 years and who’ve never seen an evolution of the technology. They learned CSS 2 and HTML 4, and that is what they are still using now.

Universities now offer classes in something called “web design”.

There is now a profession called “web design”.

This profession is now in control of the standards around which the profession does its work.

The usual  balance-of-power conflicts between for-profit corporations and the professions, have become normal for the field.

Consolidation has been the rule. Perhaps it was necessary.

The web is in desperate need of new element options. My friend Chris Clarke likes to joke that HTML 5 will bring web forms up to the level of interaction offered by Visual Basic 1.0. I am hopeful that this next year will rekindle the forward momentum of innovation.

A very interesting post by I Am El Gringo:

For the time-constrained, I submit to you the results of my highly scientific research:

• Yahoo: Minimal Use of tables. I found a picture of Hugh Downs horizontally aligned with it’s caption in a table
• Google Home Page: Not only does Google use tables for it’s iconic home page, it embeds styling in the <td> tags. The horror.
• YouTube: Uses tables for of layout of videos
• Windows Live: Uses tables for footer layout
• MSN: There is one table, but it’s only for stockquotes which is tabular data
• MySpace Semantically pure. MySpace. Whoda thunk it
• Facebook: Does form layout with tables
• Blogger: No tables anywhere on the front page
• Orkut All tables all the time
• Rapidshare: A table with a single <td> for header placement. And again a single <td> table for the central “browse” section. Tsk tsk
• Microsoft: Navigation bar is a table. What did you expect? Unicorns and rainbows?
• Google India: It’s the same Google layout. I wonder if they used copy and paste for the template?
• Ebay: Tables, tables every where
• Hi5: Tables for every thing, pretty much. BTW, I didn’t even know this site existed until last week. Alexa rank 14!?
• Photobucket: Tables for photo gallery layout
• AOL: AOL’s layout is semantically pure! Friggin AOL?
• Google UK: Same GOOG layout. I’m now sure the copied an pasted their html
• Amazon: Now that’s just silly
• IMDB: They used tables for their 3 column layout. What! No CSS framework?
• Imageshack: Semantically pure as the driven snow.
• Finally, even though it’s not on Alexa’s top 20, log in to your Gmail account and look at
  the use of tables

My Hypothesis: Pure CSS design == overcompensation

So, the five companies that use CSS are the web powerhouses–MSN, MySpace, Blogger, AOL and Imageshack. MSN, MySpace and AOL have been maligned for years throughout the web savvy community. My hypothesis is that these companies are overcompensating for the crap that they’ve taken thoughtout the years by designing their site in pure CSS.

Other companies that have more web street-cred like Google and Facebook don’t really have to worry about how the web design community sees them. This leads to things like Google making extensive use of inline styling on their homepage instead of putting it in their stylesheet. I’ve never heard anyone claim that the Google folks are slouches at the web design/development thing. Why is that?

This article is old, but the issue is still current. Way back in 2002, Drew McLellan wrote an article for A List Apart explaining how to embed Macromedia Flash movies in valid XHTML web pages (his method was called Flash Satay). This is a sticky issue, because most of the examples on the web show you techniques (for embedding Flash on a page) that are invalid. The main issue is the use of the EMBED tag, which is often still used for backwards compatibility, but which is not supported in XHTML. We’re still cleaning up our own incorrect use of the EMBED tag over at our new iHanuman site.

In 2004, Drew wrote a post on his weblog, complaining that developers still had to jump through hoops to get valid markup while delivering a smoothly functioning Flash movie to users.

The juicy part is the conversation that breaks out in the comments. John Dowdell of Macromedia asks what data would justify an investment of effort on Macromedia’s part. To which Drew responds:

Pretty much all I’ve ever heard from Macromedia on this issue is where’s the hard data? over and over again. That’s understandable. It’s an important issue, and it affects an awful lot of Macromedia customers. If Macromedia Flash were my product, earning me thousands (millions?) of dollars each year, I would be looking for answers to those questions.

But it’s not my product – it’s yours. I don’t have QA engineers, test facilities or experts in every aspect of the technology on hand. It’s not in my interest to make sure Flash can be used with liveconnect or wmode in modern web sites – only whether I can accomplish the task I need to accomplish today for the audience I’m targeting. Simply put, it’s not my problem. It’s yours. Can your product remain viable in a world where the standard mark up language excludes its use?

You guys tell me, John – have you got any hard data? I think your customers would like to see it too.

John Dowdell responded:

“But it’s not my product – it’s yours.” Actually, no… you’re attempting to describe how the various browsers invoke extensions. Going to the browser-makers’ documentation is the first step. Testing their various implementations is the next step.
…
The core, underlying problem has been that the W3C’s HTML group set their EMBED-denying spec late, a few years after the browser manufacturers and the web-development community had been using EMBED and OBJECT to invoke extensions, and the W3C never supplied a path for the real world to join their ideal world. It is a messy process to suddenly tell the real world that it is wrong.

To which Drew responds:

You mean When will it become safe to continue using Flash? ;)

I don’t believe this is purely a browser issue. Macromedia are selling a product and recommending its use on the web. Isn’t it due diligence to test it in that environment? And to keep retesting as the environment changes? There seems to be some complacency that as Flash worked fine in HTML4 pages back in 1997 it’s fine to carry on that way. I personally don’t know of any professionals build new sites using the HTML4 of 1997.

John Dowdell responds:

What you’re trying to address now is the W3C’s sudden deprecation of an existing tag. If you recommend to others that they shun EMBED, then it’s good to first test what the actual results are.

To which Drew responds:

There’s very little about the adoption of XHTML that is sudden. The recommendation itself is four years old. The fact that professional developers have already adopted XHTML means that no one is recommending EMBED be shunned. It’s been shunned. Flash is already out in the cold – we’re just looking for ways to let it back in.

Bruce Collier then sums up what is my own reaction to the debate:

I have to second Drew on this point. It’s a little surprising (and disconcerting) to hear a Macromedia employee asking the community to provide data on browser support issues, and even more surprising to think that Macromedia isn’t constantly testing these issues for themselves. “Due diligence” is a very good way to describe it.

Pointing the finger at the W3C and browser makers and saying it’s too hard isn’t really an answer either. On behalf of developers out there creating and publishing Flash content every day, please please work your butt off to improve how Flash is implemented… so we can have faith that Flash has a future on a standards-based web.

It is really worrisome that an employee at Macromedia (now Adobe) would seem so unconcerned with the issue of standards.