When Good Browsers Go Bad -- And They All Do

April 13, 2009, 02:39 PM —  Computerworld — 

Jeffrey Zeldman must have thought he'd never live to see the day. Ten years after he co-founded the Web Standards Project, all of the major browser vendors have renewed their commitment to supporting World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards in the past few years -- and they're following through. The specifications in the latest standards initiatives are tighter than ever. Web authoring tools are generating more-compliant code. Two of the three rendering engines that underpin the major browsers in use today are open source.

And for the first time ever, the latest version of Microsoft Corp.'s browser, Internet Explorer 8, operates strictly in standards-compliant mode by default. In other words, it will support the W3C standards before it provides backward compatibility with nonstandard coding methods supported by Microsoft's previous browsers.

Those who lived through the browser wars of the '90s might think that hell has frozen over, were it not for one small problem: Users still experience plenty of problems on the Web. A recent report issued by browser vendor Opera Software ASA showed that the average page on the Web strays from WC3 page-markup specifications 47 times. Overall, just 4.13% of the 3.5 million Web pages Opera searched were fully standards-compliant when tested against the W3C validation suite.

Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world

I like it!
Close

On Twitter now

browser

Powered by Twitter
You are logged in | Sign out
Sign in and post to Twitter

What are you thinking?

Cancel Tweet sent

On Twitter now

Post a comment
The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
peer-to-peer

Esther Schindler
If the comments are ugly, the code is ugly

claird
SVG a graphics format for 21st century

pasmith
Take Chrome OS for a test spin

Sandra Henry-Stocker
Solaris Tip: Have Your Files Changed Since Installation?

sjvn
64-bits of protection?

jfruh
Android fragments vs. the iPhone monolith

mikelgan
What Gizmodo missed about the Pro WX Wireless USB disk drive

 

Where Google Chrome security fails: the password
I heard mention that the Chrome OS will have some sort of encryption available a la bitlocker. If it's possible to encrypt personal data using another password or key, then it may have potential for very secure data.... And Ubuntu has an 'encrypt home directory' option, perhaps google should follow suit.
- Dann

Join the conversation here

The Daily Tip

The Daily TipQuick, practical advice for IT pros. Made fresh daily.

Hot tips:

Want to cash in on your IT savvy? Send your tip to tips@itworld.com. If we post it, we'll send you a $25 Amazon e-gift card.

Newsletters

Subscribe to ITWORLD TODAY and receive the latest IT news and analysis.

I would like to receive offers via email from ITworld partners.
By clicking submit you agree to the terms and conditions outlined in ITworld's privacy policy.
Featured Sponsor

AISO founders envisioned a Web hosting company that was environmentally friendly. While the company employed energy-efficient innovations like solar panels, its infrastructure produced unacceptable power and cooling requirements. Find out how AISO leveraged AMD technology to overcome their challenge in this case study white paper.

In this whitepaper, Scalar explores the opportunity to change the landscape with respect to mission critical databases built around Oracle. Leveraging technologies such as Linux, high-end commodity processing power and Oracle RAC technology to architect, design, build and maintain database infrastructure that delivers maximum availability, reliability and performance at a fraction of traditional cost.

On a typical day, weather.com, the Web site for The Weather Channel in Atlanta, serves up between 15 million and 20 million page views. But in September 2004, when back-to-back hurricanes ransacked Florida, the peak traffic on one day more than tripled: over 70 million page views by more than 7 million unique visitors. Read the full success story now.

Marketplace