Web Standards Project: Beyond the Browser Upgrade Campaign.
It should be clear by the tone of this page … that the campaign was a success. The techniques promoted for the campaign were deployed on thousands of web sites reaching hundreds of thousands of surfers.
… Now that the playing field is more level, it is time for site builders to make more of an effort to educate themselves on ways to take advantage of the gains that have been made.
However, the final straw was this (from the old Browser Upgrade Campaign page):
Note to spam recipients: If you are visiting this page as a result of an unsolicited email message we apologize. We have never sent any unsolicited bulk mail, and in fact only rarely do we use any email address in the webstandards.org domain. More commonly, our members reply to mail sent to webstandards.org email addresses using their own, private, email accounts. If you receive unsolicited mail claiming to be from this domain, the sender is almost certainly forged. Read more about why The WaSP Hates Spam and Viruses.
That’s right, folks. Scumbags were setting up web sites, spamming millions of people trying to sucker them into clicking through to said web sites, and then immediately redirecting them off-site to get them to upgrade their browser first before allowing them to be suckered. Various people at the Web Standards Project have been spending several hours per week dealing with irate suckers who think someone is spamming them to sell them on web standards.
The depths of human stupidity never cease to amaze me.
In all respect, I think the Web Standards Project has given up on their Browser Upgrade Campaign.
Sure, the web is better than it was in 2001. Netscape 4 has been basically mutilated. Now, in its place, we have Internet Explorer for Windows. The battle is still not over!
OK, so Internet Explorer for Windows is better than Netscape 4 was in its time. But it is still limiting the usage and future development of web standards just as much. People still aren’t using things like child selectors and properties such as :first-child, etc. And–besides the numerous CSS rendering quirks–selecting and editing text on absolutely-positioned sites is still problematic at best in the latest version of Internet Explorer for Windows.
So, I’d urge people not to give up on the mission. I’m not sure whether the solution would be to become more vocal toward Microsoft, or to support alternative browsers more, but I wouldn’t give up just yet.
Comment by Basil Crow — Monday, April 21, 2003 @ 9:26 pm
“I’m not sure whether the solution would be to become more vocal toward Microsoft, or to support alternative browsers more, but I wouldn’t give up just yet.”
While I’m not sure how much it will actually help the only real option is to be more vocal towards Microsoft. Telling users to switch from Internet Explorer 5/6 to something else because its a headache for designers isn’t going to work.
Users aren’t concerned with what is going on under the hood. The vast majority of pages work fine in their browser (whether they are standards-based or not) so why would they upgrade? To make the job of web designers easier?…boo hoo…
Promoting Mozilla/Opera’s pop-up blocking feature is far more likely to get people to switch than the idea of standards.
Comment by MikeyC — Monday, April 21, 2003 @ 9:45 pm
Agreed, MikeyC. I never understood how or why the proverbial “grandmother on Netscape 4″ was going to rush to go download and install a new browser based on the say-so of some random web designer. On dial-up, no less.
Not to mention that while some of the “upgrade your browser” messages tried to be polite, others were brusque or even downright rude.
I say yay for pop-up blockers! Everyone I’ve shown that feature to *loves* it. Sneak in the other stuff under the covers, and forget about haranguing the users about standards. The ones who would understand the haranguing would be upgrading on their own anyway.
Comment by Evan — Tuesday, April 22, 2003 @ 12:39 am
I’m glad the end of the “Browser Update” campaign is near. I never liked the forced redirection solution, not to mention the number of people who believed that downloading a recent copy of Mozilla or Internet Explorer was actually cost free. Both those points out-weighed and clouded the real issues of the campaign, especially on a world wide scale.
The new philosophy towards web designer education looks extremely positive, and I’m all for it. Now with the new additions to the WaSP team, including yourself and Matthias Gutfeldt only enhances the stature of WaSP in my eyes.
Comment by Isofarro — Tuesday, April 22, 2003 @ 5:49 am
Browser manufacturers seem to be moving in the right direction of their own volition now. Internet Explorer is behind the other browsers in standards compliance because product releases are rare. If Microsoft adopted a policy of incremental upgrades like Mozilla and Opera, things would probably be better right now.
My pet peeves with IE are the lack of support for and position: fixed on elements other than the body.
I think WaSP has done a fantastic job over the years, and the time is definitely right to move toward educating designers and developers. I totally support the new direction.
Comment by Simon Jessey — Tuesday, April 22, 2003 @ 8:04 am
Mark said a while back that “IE 5 is the new Netscape 4″, and he was right. I spend more time trying to fix my CSS in IE5 than I do building it in the first place! It’s not just the dodgy box model (which is a solved problem), it’s all the other freaky bugs that crop up unexpectedly. At the moment I’m trying to fix a form with a textarea set to width: 95% - in good browsers it just works, in IE5 the page stops rendering completely just before the textarea leaving it unusable.
IE6 is pretty bad as well (I still haven’t forgiven it for adding a horizontal scroll bar to pages with italics on them). I live in mortal terror of IE7 coming out and not being an improvement - or worse, only being available for WinXP leaving all those Win98/ME users stuck with their current shoddy browser.
Comment by Simon Willison — Tuesday, April 22, 2003 @ 8:15 am
I think that WaSP should have a pointer someplace to a maintained review of compliance of the various browsers. (e.g. specific CSS bugs) - the 2 below are not very current….
http://archive.webstandards.org/css/#The_Top_10_Lists
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/#support
Comment by BillSeitz — Tuesday, April 22, 2003 @ 10:05 am
I’m not a fan of the forced redirection thing anyway, but using @import to hide stuff from Netscape 4, and leaving invisible messages (the BUC’s second option) is still pretty sweet.
Comment by Raena — Tuesday, April 22, 2003 @ 10:23 am
I can certainly appreciate the comments that mention “convenience of web designers” and that talk about promoting features like pop-up control.
But the “inconvenience” experienced by designers translates very quickly into real dollars whether they are explicitly accounted for or not. The imputed incremental cost of the Web as a result of browser bugs is enormous even if it is incalculable in a practical way.
The browser upgrade campaign should probably be maintained but refocused on large organizations (such as the Government of Canada in my part of the world) that either persist in supporting NS4 our of inertia or indecision OR simply don’t manage their internal browser environment at all out of neglect and irresponsibility.
And the skill level of most end users with respect to browser configuration features is also terrible. Let’s not even get into security settings; what about other things like default fonts size and style or using keyboard and tabkey navigation.
Is this another campaign I see before me?
Comment by ed nixon — Tuesday, April 22, 2003 @ 11:50 am
What will become of the thousands of websites with redirects or CSS invisible links to http://www.webstandards.org/upgrade/ ?
There are many many websites I’ve worked on that will link to this page for people to upgrade, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who can’t access those websites built a while ago for old clients.
I think the page should still be updated and continue its purpose. I was just about to ask the WASP to french and other language versions for thos non-english type of people.
Comment by dale. — Tuesday, April 22, 2003 @ 1:13 pm
The page will continue to exist; what you see there now is its final form. But the campaign to advocate that site authors direct people to that page has ended, for the reasons stated.
Most people still using old browsers can’t help it; pretty much everyone who can help it and is a position to do so, has done so. There are still many government and institutional organizations that are using Netscape 4, and these will simply be left behind. Hell, even ESPN.com won’t let them in.
We are an all-volunteer organization with finite resources, and we will get more bang for our buck by devoting our future resources to education.
Comment by Mark — Tuesday, April 22, 2003 @ 1:22 pm
I cannot help but agree with comment #1. It certainly feels like they are throwing in the towel, when I seem to spend at least half my development time working around IE bugs. It’s not just IE5 either - IE6 has plenty of bugs - how did the guillotine bug or the PNG bugs get past QA? Is it just because there aren’t enough websites out there using PNG and CSS2 to care about?
Comment by Anonymous — Tuesday, April 22, 2003 @ 3:20 pm
A few things to note before war erupts in Mark’s comments :)
* The upgrade campaign in its just retired form needed to go. Its methods served little real purpose other then to deal with NN4 users. It didn’t in any way address the current state of the web - it was just a few old techniques dreamed up for the world that was 2+ years ago.
* The WaSP isn’t throwing in the towel. Our interest is still in increasing the level of compliance among browser manufacturers. We just realized that the current campaign didn’t serve much of a purpose anymore and was being abused more then it was being used so it should be killed now rather then wait for a follow up of any sort (no, not a ditch MSIE campaign) to be fully developed.
/speaking for others
The world is a buggy place, and the folks on the bleeding edge will always be able to find bugs in any browser. IE/Win may be the culprit of the moment, but its not abandonware (at least not yet) and Gecko, KHTML/Apple WebCore & Opera all have their bugs that I hit on a daily basis, too.
Personally I think trying looking for the next target to drive users away from is premature. The folks on the bleeding edge will never be happy, me included. But picking on MSIE right now would do little more then spark the “worst browser at the moment” campaign which wouldn’t really serve anybody except the PR folks at the browser that wasn’t who we were picking on. Especially when taking into consideration the active browser development we’ve seen in the last 6moths to a year.
So, while I don’t think the pressure should be off any vendor, I can’t say that one sucks *so* bad as to make me want expend the energy needed to actively campaign against it, as the BUC did with NN4 and other older browsers. Not when there are so many designers not taking advantage of where we are already, and so many tools vendors lagging behind that deserve a kick in the rear too.
As one of the other recent additions to the WaSP lineup I’m happy to see the BUC go, and I’m happy with the direction I see the group going (even if its slow to make it out to the public).
Comment by Chris — Tuesday, April 22, 2003 @ 4:06 pm
“Personally I think trying looking for the next target to drive users away from is premature. The folks on the bleeding edge will never be happy, me included. But picking on MSIE right now would do little more then spark the ‘worst browser at the moment’ campaign which wouldn’t really serve anybody except the PR folks at the browser that wasn’t who we were picking on.”
True. It doesn’t make much sense to drive users away from Internet Explorer for Windows, since it is currently so widespread and dominant in usage. But still, I don’t think we should sit back and do nothing about it. Standards such as CSS1 (17 December 1996), CSS2 (12 May 1998), and PNG (1 October 1996) may be the “bleeding edge” in terms adoption, but there has certainly been enough time for vendors such as Microsoft to implement these standards.
In many ways, a buggy implementation of web standards is worse than no implementation at all. Internet Explorer for Windows has caused so many problems that numerous CSS hacks and workarounds have been developed to work around it. With the possible exception of the box model hack, I think these CSS hacks are not for the better. They seem to be slowly polluting our code more and more that it reminds me of the HTML tag soup of the Netscape 4 days.
It is definitely hindering the web’s progress when the dominant browser still cannot support basic web standards dating over 5 years.
Comment by Basil Crow — Tuesday, April 22, 2003 @ 10:31 pm
MSIE 5.0 was released in 5/1999. Our company finally pushed the upgrade in 4/2001. Since MSIE 6.0 was released in 6/2001 all new PCs have it installed, but with the economic downturn our brick’n'mortar company still has over 80% of its PCs with 5.0 on it.
(1) Is it any wonder that “basic web standards dating over 5 years” are still going to be difficult to implement for another 2-3 years?
(2) If you consider we are probably indicative of the current business internet user, you can see the folly of a MSIE browser upgrade or browser switch campaign.
Keep the pressure on MS to improve on standards compliance for MSIE 7 whenever they release it. But don’t expect a significant change in the browser breakdown for another few years.
Mike Davidson of ESPN.com said it well in his interview with devedge [commercial websites and compliance]:
“It is probably smarter to view validation as a ideal and not as a requirement when it comes to working on presentation-heavy, Flash-heavy, and JavaScript-heavy sites like ours….It’s just that complete compliance often isn’t possible without making unacceptable sacrifices. I’d say that if a site is 95% compliant and it uses the other 5% to create a better user experience, then that’s just fine.”
Comment by DD — Wednesday, April 23, 2003 @ 12:00 am
“In many ways, a buggy implementation of web standards is worse than no implementation at all.”
Absolutely. For this very reason many view Netscape 3 to be superior to Netscape 4 in that it completely ignores CSS which is far better than what Netscape 4 manages to do with it forcing most sites to use @import instead of linking to CSS or using the style attribute.
This is how it was designed to work, either support it or don’t…halfway implementations do noone any favours. Perhaps a little naive on the part of the working group, as browser-makers would rather claim CSS support and sweep the bugs under the table than offer no support whatsoever. There is no shame in not having CSS support, as CSS is only meant to offer “presentational hints” anyways. I’d have much more respect for a browser without any support than one with a very buggy implementation.
Comment by MikeyC — Wednesday, April 23, 2003 @ 12:57 am
DD,
I believe IE5.0 has been EOLed, with security holes present in it. If people are surfing the public www in it, they are wide open.
MikeyC,
This is one of the reasons I am against browsers starting to implement CSS3 in a piecemeal fashion - if they want to work on it, then only leave it in the debug builds, not what you give the public.
Comment by Anonymous — Wednesday, April 23, 2003 @ 9:32 am
You may be right… I’ve been on MSIE6 on both work and personal PCs for well over a year now.
At home I primarily use MSIE for convenience sake. I do ASP programming and my test machine has VMs set up with various versions of several browsers.
At work I’m at the mercy of the corporate infrastructure team. Generally most machines are now MSIE5.01 on W2K SP2. No plans to upgrade to XP due to licensing and nothing yet in the works for MSIE5.5 or MSIE6 since deployment over the WAN has many kinks… AFAIK some 60-80 machines still have either Win98 or NT4 running!
It’s this last point I was trying to make. As an ASP developer of both intranet and extranet sites I’m rather similar to ESPN.com in that I _must_ take into account MSIE4 and NS4.7. It was a battle to get infrastructure to commit to progamming against MSIE5 internally.
Weblog sites can certainly program against standards 100%. ESPN may get away with blocking 2%. My shopping cart site simply cannot be that forceful.
The ‘war’ for upholding standards compliance has been extremely successful. What remains now is two ‘battles’. First and foremost, keep up the pressure on browser makers to be 100% compliant. Second and eventually, sit back and be patient with those business users that won’t be able to upgrade until their software support people allow them to.
This standards argument has begun to remind me of a few college professors I had. You know the type…. in theory they know their shit about management or programming or whatever, but you just know how poorly they would adapt to the real world. In this ‘real world’ 100% compliance must still only be an ideal. A battle worth fighting? Sure. A battle to demand perfection? Particularly in these econmic times, no. JMHO.
Comment by DD — Wednesday, April 23, 2003 @ 9:57 am
Oh for the days of Mosaic and Netscape 1.1 :)
Comment by Adrian — Thursday, April 24, 2003 @ 11:59 am