The great escape from meaningless code

I started out like many developers did. I doodled around with HTML, learning some things here and there. I learned enough to get my first website up. I scanned tutorials and books to learn the code and tags to get the job done. A <p> tag here, a bunch of <center> tags there and <font> tags everywhere. I started learning html about 9 years ago just for fun. I never realized that it would land me a job eventually. When you learn to do things for fun, you never really look deep into the inner workings of things. I understood a <p> tag was for paragraph and the <h1> was a heading (I could go on and on), but I never really understood why to use one tag over another. Why use the <h2> and not a <font size=”4”><b> setup when the end visual result was the same (or close to it).

Once I actually got a job in the industry, you would think that I would learn the correct and proper way to code html. As much as I tried, the way to code one thing for Netscape 3 was different in IE3. It didn’t matter much because IE3 was such an insignificant part of the browser equation. Who would have known that in the next 2 years the web world would be turned upside down? Microsoft developed IE4. To most people using the web, IE4 and NS4 could have been the same thing. Not to a web developer. The difference was night and day. This was the beginning of BW1 (Browser War 1).

The Browser Wars

In BW1, there was no Geneva Convention. Every rule of conventional warfare was thrown out window. Microsoft decided to start supporting its own specs and Netscape decided to support their own. While Netscape was some-what flexible in how you wrote code, Microsoft allowed you to code like a sloppy mess. No more did you need to close a paragraph with </p> or a table data with </td>. It wasn’t written in the books that way of course, it was just something you learned when debugging web sites. There was no push to make html coding cleanly written. CSS was just being introduced and if you tried to use it, it wouldn’t render the same from one browser to the other. So I would just code using endless <font> tags and spacer images to get the pages to look the same in both IE and NS. I did what needed to be done to get the client out the door and the money in the company’s pocket.

Microsoft ended up destroying Netscape in BW1. Netscape went from being used almost 100% of the time to a measly 4%. Microsoft did the unthinkable, they dominated the internet market. How Microsoft did it sparked plenty of lawsuits and hate mongering. For many web developers, the end of BW1 was a sigh of relief. We can focus on 1 browser and had an excuse when something didn’t work in Netscape or Opera. It is the age old excuse. “Who really cares about Netscape 4 anymore? There are only like 5 people who use it anyway, right?” This might not have been the best attitude, but it seemed to get the clients off our backs. And in 2005, that excuse is actually valid, right?

Easy does it

After years pass, Microsoft gave us IE 5, IE5.5 and now IE6. It seemed the world was getting used to a one browser system. IE wasn’t the greatest, but Microsoft strived to give us such fun things like DHTML, Active X, and better CSS support. It still had its quirks, but I have learned to live with them. Netscape would pop up here and there with NS6 and NS7, but really couldn’t capture any market share. The Mozilla Organization kept talking about their browser and Opera was just for non conformist. I figured if a site didn’t look good Opera, their users would understand. And besides, does anyone know anyone who actually uses Opera.

Finally the Mozilla Organization released the Mozilla browser out for beta testing. It sort of looked like Netscape, except with some cartoon dinosaur up in the corner. I decided I would give it a shot. I used it for a couple weeks. It wasn’t IE. I could sure tell you that. None of my pages looked right in it. Why would anyone use a browser that didn’t display HTML correctly? I then downloaded Opera. The same thing happened. My sites I spent months building, didn’t look anything like they were supposed to in either of these new browsers. I quickly discovered all the years fighting the battles from BW1 were all about to start again. BW2 was under way.

The enlightenment

I decided I better learn how these browsers worked incase Microsoft was overthrown from the golden crown in a rebellion. I was ready to leap into the forefront of the Cross Browsers showdown. This time it was between 3 browsers.

With my research I started learning about Web Standards. This group called the W3C had posted guidelines on how code should be written. It was a huge eye opener. After hours and hour of reading, I realized that Mozilla and Opera were not the inferior browsers I thought they were, but I was an inferior coder that was stuck in the years of BW1. I learned that you can code with forward compatibility. I was amazed to learn that HTML and CSS were now standardized and supported by all modern browsers. I could code something once and have it work in all these new browsers. Not only could I code for these web browsers, I could code for handheld devices such as PDA’s and cell phones. I could code my printed pages to look different than my pages on the screen. My sites would become more accessible to people with special needs. I could stop coding tables within tables with spacer images pushing content where it needed to be.

Coding in XHTML and CSS, my dreams have come true. Microsoft, Netscape, Opera, and now Firefox are standards compliant and finally seem to be on the same page with each other. I never truly realized how bad BW1 was for me personally. I just did what I had to survive in a sea of incompatibility. I feel the weight has been lifted off my shoulders. All browsers are now my friend. There are still some little problems here and there, but I know the major companies are trying to work it all out. Thanks to organizations like the W3C and Webstandards.org, web developers can now sleep at night.

It’s a shame though, 90% of developers out there don’t realize the possibilities and benefits of coding with web standards. In future posts, I will outline the benefits and help developers enjoy the same enlightenment as me. If you are already enlightened, I will help share my new found tips and tricks to help you get ahead of the competition.

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 23rd, 2005 at 12:28 am and is filed under Geek_Out. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.