The Browser Crash Test Dummy
By Dale Dougherty
At XML'99, there was an all-too-familiar session entitled "Browser Update" and if you've been to any Web-related conference over the last five years, you've been to a session like this one. Representatives from Microsoft and Netscape previewed the upcoming versions of their browsers, and while you and I might like what we see, we realize that the browser incompatibility problem is not going to go away.
David Turner, a technical evangelist from Microsoft, showed off the beta of IE 5.5. He touted several demos; one was a streaming media sample in which the lyrics of a song are highlighted as the song plays—a capability exploited ten years ago in HyperCard by Bob Stein's Voyager Company, creating one of the most engaging multimedia products ever based on Beethoven's Ninth. Turner said that the new version of IE would "enhance what you can do," but I wondered once again how much it could enhance what Linux or Mac users can do.
Most of the audience wanted to see Microsoft demonstrate a clear commitment to current standards. Microsoft has been very supportive of Web standards, and one might argue that XML would be nowhere if Microsoft hadn't come on-board early. However, there's always some skew between the Microsoft implementation of a standard and what might be regarded as a fully compliant implementation. Some of the skew is attributable to the inability of any company to sync software development cycles with standards development processes. A product team at Microsoft has to decide whether to begin implementing a draft standard or wait until it's finished.
