Does this bother you as much as it bothers me?

I'm sitting here, using Netscape Navigator to check out a web site. All of a sudden, I'm slapped with a big ole' "Best Viewed with Internet Explorer" message across my face.

That irks me. But I don't place the blame onto the webmaster who issued the message. Not all of it, at least.

The root of the problem is the browser you're using. Be it Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer, Opera, Linx, Mosaic, whatever… There's a serious problem here with the way software developers have created these browsers.

And that problem is a lack of markup and rendering standards.

Coding standards are created so that, within any given medium, one component will work with other components. Translated to web terms, it means that you should be able to code a web page that's reasonably viewable across all browsers.

Sounds reasonable enough, right?

So why, when you look at a web site with one browser, do you see something completely different with another browser? I'm not talking about strictly aesthetic differences either; I'm talking about entire sections of a page not accessible. Not only is it frustrating to the developers who have to code work-arounds for each browser, but it's frustrating to the end-users who have to put up with this.

A group of intelligent individuals realized this early on and created the World Wide Web Consortium. The W3C is made up of the top minds in the web community. This includes folks from Netscape and Microsoft, the two head honchos in the web browser market.

The W3C has put out a bunch of recommended specifications for web page coding and scripting. They've laid out suggestions for standardization among browsers. All the browser developers have to do is to comply with them.

But do they? Noooooo… They have to be cool and make up their own browser behaviors.

Not that there's anything wrong with making up proprietary tags. Hell, frames were originally one of Netscape's proprietary tags. So great an innovation frames were, the W3C assimilated them as a web standard.

I have no problem with that. You can be innovative and experimental and make up your own tags and whatnot. But in your quest to initiate change, at least please cover all of your bases first. At least support the standards, then built your innovations on top of them.

C'mon Netscape. C'mon Microsoft. Get with it. Listen to the W3C. Listen to the legions of web developers and users calling for standards. Stop fighting and competing with each other just for a little while, and agree to adopt these web standards.

Can't we all just get along?

. . .

What do you think of the browser wars?