Developers Demand Standards From Ms, Ns

Computergram International, August 11, 1998

An international coalition of web developers has called on Microsoft Corp and Netscape Communications Corp to live up to the promises they made in July 1997 and fully support the standards created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The developers say they spend fully 25% of their time testing web content for compliance with different browsers - not just Internet Explorer and Navigator, but versions 2, 3 and 4 of each, with and without Javascript.

At the same time, vendors are trying to pump more and more features into the software. Those features are nice, but not essential, the developers say. "We're not trying to squash innovations," says Web Standards Project goodwill ambassador Glenn Davis, "we're saying Microsoft and Netscape should focus on standards first. There ought to be a baseline in browsers that we can develop to." In particular, members of the project are concerned about the way today's browsers implement cascading style sheets (CSS), the document object model (DOM), XML and HTML 4.0. "They're not doing all of those consistently," says project leader George Olsen, "one browser will support some of them but no browser supports them all, and what is supported differs from browser to browser." Microsoft and free browser company Opera have decla red their support for the project, but Netscape was unavailable for comment.