The Internet Should be Platformless
It’s not hard to notice that the local news media outlets and their outdated websites has become one of my pet peeves. I suppose I should be a bit more honest about why this is a pet peeve of mine though. You see, it really boils down to the fact that I have a satellite dish and they charge extra for access to local TV stations, and signal for the local TV stations where I live is laughable. I suppose that’s the way of things when you live on the side of a mountain, but you would think that these things would improve with time as technology advanced. Here, they don’t. I’ve lived in this town for over a decade and I have never lived in a part of town where you could get good local television signal. When I first moved here, cable didn’t offer the local stations as part of any of their packages and then, when they did add them, you had to pay extra for them. So we just sort of gave up on network television and moved on to other things because we were broke then.
Now that we’re not, we honestly don’t see the point in paying our provider an extra 15$ a month to have something that we should be able to easily get over the airwaves for free, if the signal were decent enough for us to view it up here without special signal boosting equipment on our house, I’d watch, but since it’s not… we don’t. I’ve learned to deal with it, but I compensate for not being able to watch the news, by visiting the local news sites from the web.
I don’t know how many homes are like mine, but I do suspect that the number isn’t small.
In my circumstance, when natural disasters are occurring, like what we’re living through now, it is absolutely essential to me that the local news sites function with the technology I use and admittedly, maybe I’m a bit on the fringe here because I use a mac and an iPhone, but I don’t see why that should preclude my being able to use the internet to get the local news. Unfortunately, local news disagrees with me on this. Small media companies are heavily beholden to the Windows platform. So much so, that half the time, their video files won’t play on the mac.
I’ve never understood that. The internet really should be platformless. No matter how you access it, universal standards are in place that open the technology to all comers and yet, the massive money making machine that is Microsoft can’t seem to adhere to the standards that, often times, they had a hand in writing. The standards are there, because it should not matter how you access the internet. The standards were created to ensure that everyone could surf the web equally and yet, here we are. It’s been over 25 years since the world’s first web server went online and we haven’t gotten anywhere. In fact, if anything, the technology has become increasingly less open minded and more centric to Windows.
If you think about it, I suppose it makes sense. I mean, everyone uses Windows, don’t they? Heck, even macs can run windows these days, but if we sit down and look at how people really access the internet, I think you will be surprised by what you find. Yes, by and large, the internet is accessed from Windows machines that are running Internet Explorer, but some amusing numbers came out last month that should force every web developer to stand up and take notice.
First and foremost, is the fact that IE lost market share in December, but not just to Mozilla Firefox. Firefox saw its market share increase to 21%. This means that 21% of people surfing the internet at any given time, are using Firefox to do it. This is not an insignificant number. In fact, it’s significant enough that the days of coding web pages specifically to work under IE are long over. In fact, it was never smart to do to begin with, because IE has always had strong competition in the browser market up until the point where Netscape was bought by AOL and turned into a complete joke. What is particularly telling about the loss of market share for IE, was not Firefox’s gain, but the fact that Safari and Google’s new browser, Chrome, also gained market share from IE’s loss. Last month also saw the mobile browser market share expand to 1%.
1% of browsers navigating the web right now, are on cellular phones, and that number is climbing. iPhone’s market share increased by 58% in the month of December alone, and while that is still only .44% of browsers surfing the web at any given time, that massive increase in usage is nothing to scoff at. That number has been on an uphill climb since the 3g’s release in July and the popularity of the iPhone doesn’t seem to be slowing down, so odds are against us seeing a decline in mobile safari usage any time soon.
I have long believed that the world would soon come to a place where the operating system wasn’t going to matter. What will matter, is how well web site designers can keep the users coming to their sites. As it stands, I don’t have a choice but to pick the least obnoxious and most useful of the local news sites to me. Only one of them works really well from Firefox on the Mac, and only one of them is remotely usable from the iPhone. I’ll keep visiting that site until something better comes along.
Until then, I think that perhaps the local news media should take a look at this article by Jack Shafer on Slate. It details the history of newspapers and internet tech. It is an interesting perspective on how the world wide web suddenly became important to newspaper companies, almost overnight.
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January 6, 2009 3:18 pm 
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By jgasm, January 6, 2009 @ 3:59 pm
Can’t it be argued that this fierce competition is driving some of the innovation on the net?
By Random Gemini, January 6, 2009 @ 4:13 pm
In the browser market? Absolutely.
I would like to see a trend back to the way things were when I was designing websites for a living though. Back in my day, we didn’t care what browser or what operating system you showed up with. Our web pages worked, no matter what you chose to view them with. Website design fell away from that when IE rose to dominance in the browser market.
I do feel that there are innovations happening in the browser market that are moving quickly and changing the way we think about using the web, but I do not believe that web site admins are keeping up with those changes as quickly as they could be if real and enforceable standards for web design were the rule of building web sites in the 21st century.
By tsykoduk, January 6, 2009 @ 4:24 pm
One of the issues that faces web developers is the hacks you have to do to make a cross platform site work were non-trivial. That has eased a bit, but it’s still a concern. Every time M$ releases a new version of their browser it seems that something else is borked.
As an aside, jgasm, it’s about business smarts. There was a time that I would not order from a certain pizza chain because their site broke in safari. As a business owner, am I really ok in effectively shutting out any percentage of my customer base? Could I afford to pay web developers enough money to develop to the standards, and to M$’s standards?
Hard problems. ;D
By Jimmy, January 6, 2009 @ 5:12 pm
Call me sensitive to the Windows platform, but this statement seems entirely exaggerated:
“It’s been over 25 years since the world’s first web server went online and we haven’t gotten anywhere.”
I agree with jgasm’s argument that progress is guided by this competition of independent platforms. I mean look at how long it has taken for the HTML5 standard to come to fruition (which it still hasn’t).
There are standards out there, but if we all only followed those set standards, we wouldn’t have streaming video, RSS feeds, and countless other innovations today. Hell, we wouldn’t even have AJAX.
By jgasm, January 6, 2009 @ 5:56 pm
I do not feel this is a “web standards” and a “MS standards” issue. So safari, firefox, opera, avant, kamelion, chrome etc all follow the exact same standards? and IE just does it’s own thing? Or is it that all browsers have their own issues working with multiple technologies and thus all follow their own set of standards. Some may deviate more than others.
By Random Gemini, January 6, 2009 @ 6:10 pm
Perhaps, when you take it out of the context in which it was written, it might seem like an exaggeration, but the context in which it was written is important. In 25 years, the web standards have not served to provide us with a truly cross platform world wide web and that was the original motivation behind having standards in the first place. It was about making the internet available to everyone who wanted to use it, not just to the guys who were using the most popular operating system of the moment.
I get the impression that you think the same thing that I do about the current web standards. They’re a complete joke. Not only does it take too long to get anything adopted, but often by the time a standard is adopted it has been outmoded because technology moves too fast for bureaucracy. Even worse is that there is no consequence for a particular browser failing to support a standard as written. The W3C has no teeth.
It’s a problem that I think only web developers can solve.
I would put to you, that cross platform development would require developers to be more nimble and require them to innovate more than they do when developing for a single platform and would only serve to inspire and drive further innovation of web based technologies because there would be no neat, tidy little box that everything fits inside of. But first, the devs have to give up on the idea that only one platform exists. They have to let go of the crutch that is the OS and begin doing something new.
Only then, can true innovation begin.
I know that what I am discussing is a bit difficult here because I know that I am speaking in generalities and not specifics and I am debating philosophy rather than statutes. But changing minds and attitudes does not come about by debating specific statutes and the virtues of this OS over that OS. It comes from debating the premise upon which current statutes were built. It comes from questioning the judgment of our current selves and having the foresight to look to a future that is not bound to our present.
I’m asking you, as a web designer, to think about a future web that is not chained to IE. I’m asking you to conceive of a web that is not tied to a specific platform and, in my wildest dreams, is only limited by your imagination and your ability. I am, quite literally, asking you to think about changing the world in a way that only you are equipped to do. I’m asking you to tackle the problem of what comes after the OS because the day is coming, when we won’t need it anymore.
It’s not coming fast, but the writing is on the wall.
By jgasm, January 6, 2009 @ 6:22 pm
I understand what you are saying. Someday I will build a web page and not have to stop and say okay, who has most of my users, of Internet Explorer. What do i need to do now for them. Okay, done. Now I need to check firefox. Okay, done. Now I should check safari. Okay done.
Am I correct in interpreting that I would not have to stop and think about which OS/Browser/Phone has the biggest market and I could just build one time for all, with the same set of “standards”
By jgasm, January 6, 2009 @ 6:34 pm
However, I feel that is a dream that will never happen due to competing corporate interests, personal greed, ego and various other things that have to do with people and not computers.
By Random Gemini, January 6, 2009 @ 6:43 pm
Yes, and yes.
I think you are right. But I also think that it would be pointless to not try to change it and I think that change begins right here. On this blog, in this small little corner of the world.
By jgasm, January 6, 2009 @ 6:52 pm
i was waiting to read “yes we can” for a minute there
By Random Gemini, January 6, 2009 @ 7:37 pm
ROFL!
By Jimmy, January 6, 2009 @ 10:15 pm
Developers are already doing what you’re suggesting in your follow up comments. I suspect this trend of not supporting IE6 will continue even more as IE8 is released.
It’s also worth point out that like it or not, you’re using the (growing) minority platform, and last I checked majority rules in this world.
By Random Gemini, January 7, 2009 @ 9:17 am
But I did admit that in my article and this was precisely my point. That attitude that I am in the minority and web devs shouldn’t have to care about me is the problem.
We live in a tyranny of the majority world, where Dino Rossi can’t win an election because Seattle doesn’t want him to, and where I can’t visit a news site and watch all of the video because Joe Schmoe web dev can’t let go of the platform he develops on.
Joe Schmoe web dev should not care what I show up to his party with, as long as I bring my own drinks.
By Random Gemini, January 7, 2009 @ 9:36 am
Of course, I could also be no fun and lacking caffeine