An Open Letter to the Vice-President for Information Technology

From: Joseph Barillari <jbarilla at princeton dot edu>
Subject: Netscape, IE, and the future of campus standards
To: Betty Leydon <betty at Princeton dot EDU>
Date: Fri, 05 Sep 2003 20:39:44 -0400

Dear Vice President Leydon,

It was with reserved pleasure today that I read that OIT has retired
Netscape Communicator 4.7x. As your announcement indicated, that
browser was obsolete years ago, supported web standards spottily (if
at all), and was generally unfit for use on the modern Internet.

However, that pleasure was quickly quelled when I read that OIT would
not only be standardizing around Internet Explorer, but would not be
replacing the aging Netscape with one of its more modern successors.

I realize that the corporate organs of this University would prefer to
standardize around a well-supported browser. IE, with the vast
majority of the Web's market share, is a natural choice in this
regard.

However, the academic organs of the University (if I may speak as a
cell in the undergraduate organ) do not benefit from a homogeneous
computing environment to an extent that outweighs IE's many
well-documented flaws. The Web Standards Project documents several,
namely:
    * No support for attribute selectors (Windows/Mac)
    * Incomplete support for PNG (Windows)
    * No support for the W3C event model (Windows/Mac)
    * No support for adjacent selectors (Windows)
    * No support for border-spacing (Windows/Mac)
    * No support for position: fixed (Windows)
http://www.webstandards.org/opinion/archive/2003/06/27/

These flaws are not fatal to a browser used to access corporate
applications (PeopleSoft, for instance), because corporate
applications are designed around these flaws. They are, however, quite
injurious to academic users, who generally use their web browsers to
browse the /entire/ web, not just the subset designed around omissions
of Internet Explorer's engineers.

As free operating systems like Linux gain support in China, India,
Brazil, and other countries with low Microsoft market penetration, an
increasing set of web authors are coding to the published web
standards, rather than to the ad-hoc rules created by long-unfixed
bugs in Internet Explorer. Content authors in these states feel no
need to tiptoe around the mistakes made by Microsoft's engineers. Nor
could they -- they often have no access to Windows machines. Other Web
authors, disgusted that some of the best features invented by the W3C
are foreclosed to the entire Web audience because IE users cannot
utilize them, have chosen to employ those features anyway, as a means
to encourage web users to install standards-compliant web browsers.

Viewing web content as it was meant to be viewed requires a
fully-standards-compliant web browser. Internet Explorer does not fit
the bill. Microsoft recently announced that it will /never/ fit the
bill -- they have retired the stand-alone Internet Explorer. Until
their next-generation operating system is released, IE will not be
updated. And the new version that accompanies that OS will not be
back-ported to OIT's standard OS, Windows 2000.

It is in light of these reasons that I ask, on behalf of my fellow
cells in the academic organs of this University, that OIT include, as
an alternative to IE, a modern, standards-compliant web browser on its
student cluster machines. Both Mozilla 1.4 and its corporate cousin,
Netscape 7, fit the bill admirably.

I would be more than happy to discuss this matter further at your
convenience.

Regards,

Joseph Barillari

-- 
Joseph Barillari -- http://barillari.org

13:31 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/web/standards