The document discusses the "Browser Wars" between Internet Explorer and Netscape in the 1990s which was won by Internet Explorer. It then discusses how standards have struck back in the "Browser Wars 2" with a movement towards more open and standardized web development. The document advocates for developing sites according to open web standards to ensure compatibility across different browsers and devices rather than targeting a single browser through proprietary technologies. It provides examples of how some government and bank sites in countries like South Korea and India broke in non-Internet Explorer browsers due to their reliance on proprietary technologies of IE.
16. “ Anyone who slaps a ‘this page is best viewed with Browser
X’ label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad
old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of
reading a document written on another computer, another
word processor, or another network. ”
– Sir Tim Berners-Lee
20. OpenWeb stack
? [OGG?/ VMS?/Dirac?]
Audio & Video
SMIL
Media
Sycronis
SVG PNG/JPG/GIF… <canvas>
ation
Vector Graphics Raster Graphics Drawing API
Behaviour
DOM JavaScript
Document API Scripting
Presentation
CSS
Style sheets
Structure
XML XHTML/HTML RDFa ARIA
Markup Semantics Accessibility
21. OpenWeb platform
Challenges
Strong branding Vs no branding
Cohesive Vs loose
Tailored tools Vs basic tools
Fast to spec Vs slow to spec
…but no vendor lock-in and pro-user/
developer choice
26. Why?
US government ban on encryption export
Created ActiveX based solution
Result: IE monopoly
Sites fall foul of IE bugs and don’t follow
standards
Officially supported CA only works with
ActiveX
29. Why?
Popular platforms were not Unicode
aware
Unable to show text in Indian scripts
Used EOT embedded fonts
EOT only works in IE and Windows
Unicode support now common, but sites
are not updated
30. Photo courtesy of Majiscup - Drink for Design of Flickr
Case study: The Rest