Redneck Dialect instead of Lingua Franca: Why You Need to Ditch IE Now Part II
It’s the 4th Friday of the month and you know it’s time for your favorite A Gentle Introduction to Linux for Non-Geeks again! Do you know Internet Explorer is not only transmitting all sorts of nasty computer diseases to users and giving security experts headaches, it’s also a big nightmare for web designers?
Imagine you are taking part in an international climate conference in Japan, where you meet with environmentalists all over the world to talk about the greenhouse effect that’s destroying our ozone layer. Since everyone speaks a different language, an official language for the conference is to be decided. After a brief survey it seems everybody speaks English, so English it is! Because we have agreed upon a “standard” for the purpose of our meeting, everyone is able to communicate with each other freely. What happens, however, when the president of the conference from Japan insists that because the conference is taking place in Japan, and that the majority of the attendees are Japanese, the official language should therefore be Japanese? Those lucky ones that have learned Japanese as a foreign language can cheerfully accept the decision, but those of us who haven’t will have a problem now. If our reasoning and protests go unheard, and pulling out of the conference altogether is not an option, we would need to resort to an interpreter, which is a waste of time, money, and human resources.
You’d think nobody would be so unreasonable as to totally disregard an accepted, well known standard and force their own rules upon other people. But this is exactly what Microsoft is doing to the Web community. The languages that all modern browsers speak are called (X)HTML and CSS. However, every browser has its own regional dialect that no other browsers can quite understand. In order for the web designer to talk to every browser using a lingua franca without having to learn each and every dialect, an international standards organization for the World Wide Web was established in 1994 by the name of World Wide Web of Consortium, or W3C. Although it takes time and energy to get used to a new accent, or to unlearn one’s own dialect, developers of various browsers agree that a standard is essential for the further development of the Web, and is in fact why the Web became so powerful in the first place.
But Microsoft had refused to listen, let alone comply. Having had a head start simply by having the Internet Explorer built into every Windows Operating System, the Redmond company used that advantage to bully others. “Learn our dialect if you want to talk to us!” said Microsoft, “Who cares about your international standards, we have the largest usership, our dialect should be the standards!”
As you can imagine, nobody can go very far with that attitude, especially when more and more people are giving IE the boot. As the complacent Microsoft realized they were losing their market share rapidly, it changed its tunes and started making promises of better standards compliance, promises that the company has yet to fulfill.
So you see, Using the standard language in browser world, a web designer can easily talk to browsers like Firefox, Opera or Netscape. These browsers are all practicing to speak the lingua franca as correctly as possible. The language is also being improved and evaluated constantly by the international community so new features can be added, and our browsers can do even more things for us. Not so with the bully browser. To write a page that IE can understand, designers have to use the Redmond Redneck dialect, which most other browsers do not understand. Many time and energy is thus wasted to find a compromise so that users of Firefox and users of IE can see the same content. It’s like having to find an interpreter because a dominant few refuse to use a common language.
“I’m not a web designer anyway, what does that have anything to do with me?” you might ask. Well as countless designers will tell you, they’ve been bullied by Microsoft too long and they’re not going to put up with it anymore. Many of them are choosing to adhere to the international standards instead of using the obscure, regional dialect. What this means is that IE won’t be able to render everything correctly, because it insists on its Redneck Speak and refuses to learn the language everyone else speaks. The reason why Web designers have put up with IE for so long is because IE used to dominate the browser world, and they can’t afford not to learn that Redneck Dialect. Fortunately, things are changing now; IE is rapidly losing its market share, and it’s only a matter of time before it has to give up its backward dialect and speaks like everyone else does. We as Joe/Jane users can accelerate that process by refusing to use IE.
Hey this is the last post for 2007. See you guys in 2008!
Popularity: 46%