Interviews

We asked... the web geeks responded. Check back for periodic interviews during the conference.

DAILY REPORTS:

Jennifer Fleming
Edward Piou
Brian Dame
Sara Fleming

Jeffrey Zeldman: "If the Web breaks, nobody wins."
 
 
 
 
 
 

Steve Champeon is giving a talk Wednesday evening.

Fighting for Standards: An Interview with George Olsen, Jeffrey Zeldman, and Steve Champeon

Asked to define a web developer's biggest headache, most of us would probably say browser compatibility. Making sure your site doesn't break on older (or newer) browsers is a time-consuming and frustrating business. Boy, it's too bad we can't do anything about it. But wait—someone is doing something about it. Well whaddya know.

That's where George, Jeff, and Steve (and a whole mess of other folks) come in. These developers formed The Web Standards Project (WSP), an organization whose mission is to work toward the universal acceptance of browser standards. Anchor caught up with these three WSP members to find out what they've been up to.

JZ: Anyone building the Web knows how fragmented it's become. In the beginning, there was basic HTML. No worries, and not much room to create. Then for a brief while, if you knew the latest Netscapism, that was all that seemed to matter. Once Explorer came on the scene and began grabbing market share, it became harder to predict how much of your site people could actually see. Instead of one company ignoring the notion of standards, there were now two companies doing so. Their innovations were often wonderful, but nearly always incompatible. We started spending more and more time testing and debugging (or building multiple versions of pages), less and less time actually creating. And as the browsers continued to develop, so did the incompatibilities. It's nearly intolerable now, and it's going to get worse unless we act.

About two months ago, George Olsen of 2 Lane Media got mad as hell. He expressed his frustrations to Glenn Davis of Project Cool, and the two of them decided the time had come to do something about it. They recruited the rest of us, and after a few weeks of brainstorming we reached a consensus and developed a plan.

GO: Glenn actually raised the issue first on a mailing list I'm on (after the first betas of IE 5.0 and NS 4.5 came out and neither fully supported standards). I then e-mailed Glenn and about two dozen others I thought might be interested in the issue, and suggested it was time to act. Glenn registered the webstandards.org domain and set up a mailing list for us to talk about the issue of standards so we wouldn't have to cc: everyone. From there things snowballed, we got a core group of active people and ended up going public August 10. Since then we're had an overwhelming response with literally worldwide attention. We've apparently struck a raw nerve with developers.

ANCHOR: Why did you decide to become involved with The Web Standards Project?

SC: I'm writing a book on DHTML, and was appalled at how poor the support for baseline standards like CSS and HTML 4.0 was in the 4.0 browsers, not to mention the completely incompatible document object models and so forth. It spurred me to write a cross-platform object wrapper so we can actually build real cross-platform applications using DHTML, but I knew that unless we could convince people who mattered that this could not go on, that we had to push the browser vendors to support the W3C standards they give lip service to—and which they helped write—we were going to be staring at a future where the Web was even more balkanized and costly to maintain.

JZ: I'm tired of wasting time debugging even my simplest projects, and fearful that we will soon reach a place where the Web no longer works. We're privileged to be shaping what may be the most important medium ever developed. And we're watching it be torn apart by fear-based competition and a shortsighted pursuit of bleeding-edge gimmicks before the basics are truly in place. Every industry and every medium has standards—RIAA for the recording industry, NTSC for American television. Without these standards, these media would have collapsed. Ours will too, unless we act.

GO: I got fed up with being a debugger rather than a designer. Why am I constantly debugging and doing workarounds? Because of the patchwork support for standards, some of which have been around for quite some time. (For example, W3C finalized CSS-1 back in December 1996 and we're still waiting for full support.) We've estimated that the workarounds and extra testing needed to get a site to display and function correctly across different browsers and platforms adds at least 25 percent to the time and effort (and cost) of site development. I'd much rather spend that time creating better content for the site.

ANCHOR: Where do you stand on innovation? Are you saying that we need to design for the "least common denominator"?

GO: We're not here to spank browser makers for adding innovations, we just think they should support the core standards—standards Netscape and Microsoft helped write—and preferably before turning their attention to proprietary tags and features. That said, most of our clients want their sites to work across various browsers and platforms, so we do end up "writing down" to a lowest-common denominator. However, of course there are situations where you can develop for a specific browser (an intranet, for example) and it may be appropriate to use proprietary innovations as long as you and your client recognize that this means the site might not work on all browsers.

SC: We need to design for the client's needs. I have no problem with innovation—it's what spurs competition, and that helps people like me who need to build applications for my clients that work cross-platform. What's silly is that sometimes the innovations work better after a single release of the product than the baseline standards do after four.

JZ: That's a trick question, because every web site has to degrade gracefully—has to at least be usable in text browsers and old browsers. But we're accustomed to designing for those variables, and when the technology works it's no problem. The way things are now, many developers can only develop for the "least common denominator," because the cross-browser solutions don't work as advertised. Or because their clients can't afford to pay for two, three, and four versions of the same website. So our feeling is, innovate your head off. But first, support the standards.

ANCHOR: If standards are fully supported by the browser companies, what impact do you think that will have?

JZ: When standards are implemented—and I believe we'll succeed—we'll be able to design for the "greatest common denominator." Of course our sites will still work in text browsers and old browsers, and they'll also work in PDAs and on internet phones. But they'll shine in the "latest, greatest" browsers, which will be good for the browser companies. Style sheets will allow us to separate markup from content. Developing "alternate versions" will be as simple as linking to several style sheets and sending the correct one according to the device that's accessing the site. The same pages, when viewed in a standards-compliant browser, will be able to do magical things. But that can only happen when we have a common scripting language, document object model, and style sheets that work.

ANCHOR: Have Microsoft and Netscape reacted to what the WSP is doing?

JZ: Yes, and so has Opera Software, makers of the Opera web browser. On the morning of our launch, Opera endorsed us. By the end of the day, Microsoft had issued a statement in favor of standards. Netscape followed a few days later, although their statement was somewhat more defensive. But I think they've come around. Some of us have relationships with people inside these companies, and I think the companies are realizing that we're not The Enemy. What we advocate will be good for them, too. If the Web breaks, nobody wins.

ANCHOR: Steve, what do you think people will get out of the session you're giving on Wednesday?

SC: If they're unaware of the depths to which incompatibility and poor standards support actually go in the 4.0 browsers, they're going to get a rude awakening. If they've been putting off using CSS and DHTML in hopes that it will get better, they're going to be sorely disappointed when they see how little things have changed in the 5.* betas. If they have any idea what their projects cost, they'll be angry at the lackadaisical response from the browser vendors. If they have any idea what their projects cost to maintain when they're done, they will go pale with fear for the future of their industry. Oh, and with luck, there will be a glimmer of hope and a real motivation to join a WSP action committee or help in some way.

ANCHOR: If web developers want to help you with this project, what should they do?

JZ: They should visit the WaSP site at http://www.webstandards.org/. There they can send a message to the browser companies; use our resources to learn more about standards; join any of our various Action Committees (some of which test products, while others work on outreach and education); participate in our discussion group; and even contribute code to Mozilla NGLayout, helping at least one browser company achieve support for the W3 standards. They can also spread the word by displaying our banners on their sites, tell their colleagues about the project, and help translate our Baseline Proposal into other languages.

[Back to top]