Matthew Knott

Web standards is a passion of mine. They are the guidelines set down for a document type, and should be followed. Being a devout standards follower can bring you kudos and appreciation, but your efforts may be let down by the web browser used to view the site.

Poor support for web standards in Internet Explorer mainly, and older versions of Safari, amongst others, means that your site may loose much of it's shape and pizzaz.

Until now, the challenge of the web designer has been to tailor their styles and code to be cross-browser compatible. Ultimately, you may have to reign back some of your design and functionality, sacrificing the overall product, but what if the situation was turned upside down.

Imagine if some of the biggest websites started blocking browsers that would not display their site correctly? It's not unheard of for a site to carry a disclaimer that it will only work properly in Internet Explorer, but you just do not see complete blocking at browser level, and because of this, there is no incentive for Microsoft to release patches for their slightly older browsers (which still dominate the browser demographic).

This type of motion would have to be started by a major site, one that could sway enough opinion and also encourage more users to upgrade, faster than if the smaller sites embarked on such a mission.

Legally, the site ultimately has impunity from prosecution on the grounds of discrimination because the browsers are not technically capable of displaying the content correctly and consitently, and therefore can be blcoked from viewing the content.

Morally, there is always going to be the desire to be open to all, but I think a day will come when major sites will force a browser upgrade before granting access.

Technically, there is a level of satisfaction derived from creating a site that renders near identically on multiple browsers, but the time it takes to achieve this compatibility, and time is money.

Tags: Standards Safari Web_Standards Browser Internet Explorer Leverage Web Giant Accessibility Blocking Discrimination