#32004/7/31 15:44:57
Chapter One. 99.9% of Websites Are Obsolete
An equal opportunity disease afflicts nearly every site now on the web, from the humblest personal home pages to the multimillion-dollar sites of corporate giants. Cunning and insidious, the disease goes largely unrecognized because it is based on industry norms. Although their owners and managers might not know it yet, 99.9% of all websites are obsolete.
These sites might look and work all right in mainstream, desktop browsers whose names end in the numbers 4 or 5. But outside these fault-tolerant environments, the symptoms of disease and decay have already started to appear.
In modern versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera Software's Opera browser, Netscape Navigator, and Mozilla (the Open Source, Gecko-based browser whose code drives Navigator, CompuServe, AOL for OS X, AOL China, and other browsing environments), carefully constructed layouts have begun falling apart and expensively engineered behaviors have stopped working. As these leading browsers evolve, site performance continues to deteriorate.
In "off-brand" browsers, in screen readers used by people with disabilities, and in increasingly popular nontraditional devices from Palm Pilots to web-enabled cell phones, many of these sites have never worked and still don't, whereas others function marginally at best. Depending on needs and budget, site owners and developers have either ignored these off-brand browsers and devices or supported them by detecting their presence and feeding them customized markup and code, just as they do for "regular" browsers.
To understand the futility of this outdated industry practice and to see how it continually increases the cost and complexity of web development while never truly achieving its intended goal, we must examine modern browsers and see how they differ from the incompatible browsers of the past.
