Browser conflicts tax Web designers
Internet Seybold speakers bemoan incompatibilities of standards.
On the opening day of the Seybold Seminars conference in Sanrds. Francisco last week, representatives of the Web standards community called on browser vendors to put more effort into supporting emerging internet standards.
Conflicting implementations of standards in browser and server products are needlessly complicating life for Web designers, said speakers.
Differing implementations of standards such as HTML 4 and CSS 1 (Cascading Style Sheets) force designers to test their Web pages with all browsers - including older releases of Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.
Often, they have no choice but to develop different versions of the same page for different browsers, or to forego features such as CSS or dynamic HTML altogether, claimed the vendors
'Creative people who should be spending their time on design are being forced instead to spend time on compatibility testing,' said Tim Bray, a Web publishing technologist at Textuality and member of the Web Standards Project steering committee, formed in August. Bray was speaking at a panel discussion at Seybold on evolving Web standards.
He added: 'It is totally inexcusable that at this point, CSS implementations are still different across browsers.'
The Web Standards Project presents itself as an international coalition of Web developers, dedicated to promoting a worldwide standard for Web and browser design.
Hakon Lie, who heads the W3C Style Sheets activity, demonstrated that next-generation browsers will do a little better. He showed how early versions of Internet Explorer 5, the Opera 3.5 browser and Netscape's new rendering engine all render the same richly laid out Web page in virtually identical fashion.
'HTML 4 has been mostly implemented,' said Lauren Wood, who heads the W3C workgroup developing the document object model (DOM) standard. 'But it's a fairly loose interpretation much of the time.'
Wood said differing implementations of dynamic HTML (DHTML) are seriously limiting Web designers' ability to use this technology. 'Simple things work in both browsers but the really interesting things don't work', she said. The DOM effort is meant to address this issue.
Bray called on Microsoft and Netscape to stop adding features to their browsers before they finish implementing existing standards.
'They should implement the standard as it is written and stop releasing browsers until that's in place,' he said.
Further complicating the task for Web developers, added Bray, is the fact that there are still more release 3 browsers than release 4 in use. 'Vendors have failed to motivate users to upgrade,' he said.
Bray also called on Web developers to 'vote with their RFPs' and refuse to buy products that do not fully implement standards.
'The reality is that we'll be shipping out plain old HTML for a while yet,' he said. He added that the smart option for Web designers is to create documents using extensible markup language (XML), but use these documents to generate standard HTML pages that can be read by all browsers.
Will information and content exchange (ICE) change the face of Web publishing? On day two, speakers at the Seybold San Francisco Publishing 98 conference seemed to think so.
In a session provocatively called ICE: The Next Really Important Thing, members of the ICE Adhoc Working Group talked up the technology which aims to standardise business-to-business information exchange.
ICE is a proposed standard for exchange of information between Web sites. If a designer wanted to include content from a certain provider - news headlines, weather reports or stock quotes, for example - ICE would provide a standard way for setting up and managing such a relationship.
The ICE Adhoc Working Group was formed in February and members include Microsoft, Sun and Vignette. Last month, a draft of the ICE specification was handed to the ICE Advisory Council, which counts about 50 members.
The Council will provide feedback that should lead to a definitive specification later this year. It will be submitted formally to a standards body - probably the Web governing body W3C - by the end of the year.
Today, many different formats are used for setting up a subscription to Internet content, often manually. This makes it more difficult for companies to license content from syndicators and integrate it into their Web sites.
ICE could make it much easier to bolster an intranet or internet site with information licensed from one of the many content aggregators. The specification controls frequency of updates, limitations on the use of information and the correct display of copyright information. It supports both pull and push for Website updates.
Phil Gibson, director of interactive marketing at National Semiconductor, said the company intends to use ICE to feed National Semiconductor product information to its partners' Websites.
ICE is based on XML. This, said Gibson, will save customers time and increase the number of channels that can resell National Semiconductor products.
'ICE will allow everyone to get into the syndication business,' said Andrew Worth, vice president of software infrastructure at CNET, another ICE contributor. ICE transfers information between Websites in the form of XML documents. It also provides the protocol to control information exchange.