The Sting of Browser Incompatibility
By Bob Kaehms
Well, OK. We are having fun with the browser compatibility dilemma this month. In "Script Junkie," Alexander Hildyard develops a workaround to the lack of "real" support to XML in the browser. Our features explore the differences between CSS1 and CSS2, and between the two major browsers' support of these standards. Our XSL article is a work in progress based on a W3C Working Draft.
New and improved, indeed! So what's a poor Web designer to do?
An industry insider friend assures me that when Microsoft wins, innovation stops. Yet in a series of papers on the economics of market structures for network goods, Nicholas Economides et al. propose that the dynamics can be modeled, that a steady-state solution exists between competition and compatibility. (Visit raven.stern.nyu.edu/networks for details.)
Personally, I'm more comfortable with the standards in the field of metrology. In measurement science, one can always refer to an intrinsic standard based on the laws of nature, including such tangibles as the melting point of gold or the triple point of water, and such obscurities as the Quantum Hall effect. In this discipline, the arguments and battles are over technique, reproducibility, and quality control.
Not so in the world of browsers. There are four players in this equation: the W3C, browser vendors, Web developers, and end users. Since browsers affect the developer's livelihood, this group is most concerned over the compatibility problem.
