Saturday, September 07, 2002

Digital Web Magazine - Features: 99.9% of Websites Are Obsolete
An equal opportunity disease afflicts nearly every site now on the Web, from the humblest personal homepages to the multi-million-dollar sites of corporate giants. Cunning and insidious, the disease goes largely unrecognized because it is based on industry norms. Though their owners and managers may not know it yet, 99.9% of all websites are obsolete.

These sites may 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 the latest versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, and Mozilla (the Open Source, Gecko-based browser whose code drives Netscape Navigator, CompuServe, 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 non-traditional devices from Palm Pilots(TM) to web-enabled cell phones, many of these sites have never worked and still don't, while 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—a practice the industry calls "versioning."
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