Linux is so fantastically easy to use that even my dad uses it! In most respects he prefers it to Windows. I prefer him using it because when things go wrong, I can fix them, instead of just telling him to re-install Windows again. Not only that, but since switching to Linux, my dad hasn’t caught a single computer virus. Hurray for Linux.
And yet trouble is stirring in the Microsoft free paradise. My dad is starting to complain. He is starting to say things like, “it would have worked in Windows.” What can be going on?
The trouble is the web. More specifically, the web as it has been mutated and disfigured by those who do not understand it: corporate web designers. One of the basic principles of the web, is that pages are described in terms of their content. This means that they can be displayed on almost any kind of device, from a graphics accelerated supercomputer, to a handheld PDA, to a text to speech device for blind people.
Cue my dad, who on seeing the latest TV advert containing a web address, wants to see what all the fuss is about. He goes, for example, to www.daewoo.co.uk to look at their latest range of cars. And that’s where the trouble starts. Instead of a nice list of cars, some pictures and a pricelist, we’re met with a message saying, “cookies must be enabled to view this website.” But cookies are enabled, what is going on? We try another browser, Mozilla instead of Konqueror. This time the page loads, and it’s full of flashy animations and things that light up when you move the mouse over them. Beautiful. But what’s this. When we click on a picture of a car, instead of more details about that model, we see the message, “the URL you entered is not valid.”
There’s nothing for it but to boot Windows and start up Internet Explorer. Exasperation all round. And it’s not a rare occurrence either. In fact my dad seems to be considering returning to a life of expensive upgrades, re-installations and viruses, all so he can view the web pages he wants to see.
The odd thing is that I too use Linux almost exclusively at home, and lately at work. I too browse the web, much more than my dad. And I hardly ever meet a website that doesn’t work perfectly. What can be going on? The issues are numerous and intricately interrelated. I shall attempt to ennumerate them.
Most annoyingly, there’s the problem of corporate web designers. They have forgotten that the web is about content are forcing it into something that is about layout and design. There’s nothing in that Daewoo web page that can’t be done with image maps and server side scripting. All the browser ever needs to see is standard HTML. Instead what we get seems nothing more than an adolescent’s masturbation over Javascript. If you can actually find the frame that contains the content, a quick look at the source of the page will reveal how hideous it all is. Many corporate web sites are like this. Instead of using the web for what it’s designed for, businesses have become obsessed with turning it into a destop publishing suite for their tacky brochures. Look is everything. Content is quite secondary.
Despite being generally annoying, it is possible to make a desktop-published, animated website work in Linux. Barclays Internet banking works perfectly in all the graphical browsers I have tried, despite being quite fancy and despite the fact that most of its users are accessing it with Internet Explorer. Most problematic sites tend to rely heavily on Javascript. I’m not sure why Javascript behaves so differently on different browsers. Is there not a standard written down for these things? If so, who is not following it? The people who wrote Mozilla and Konqueror, or the web designers? Perhaps it is all Microsoft’s fault for including non-standard features in their browser. In fairness, without further investigation I cannot say which.
Most of the bugs could be ironed out if web designers would test their sites on different browsers. But it seems that they don’t care. This is partly understandable – why should they care if only 5 or 10 percent of visitors have problems? But by making as much as possible work using server-side scripts, compatibility problems wouldn’t exist at all. In fact the web is inherently multi-platform, it takes effort to make a site that will only work on one browser. Surely web designers know this?
Some of the trouble is caused by my dad’s taste in web sites. As a bit of a geek, the kinds of sites I visit are usually aware of people using non-Microsoft platforms, and care about these people and cater for them. By contrast, anything TV-advertised is more likely to be aimed at the mass-market Internet-Explorer-using audience. This adds one more barrier to the casual user wanting to ditch Microsoft. Linux developers have done their bit by making it easy to use, but web developers seem to be refusing to co-operate. It’s one thing for me to sit on my high horse and proclaim that, frankly, I don’t want to see a website if they’re going to make it require a particular browser, but this is of little comfort to my dad who just wants things to work and doesn’t care so much about the principles.
These problems will eventually go away. Thanks to the law of diminishing returns it will take a long, long time. I suspect that the solutions will not come from businesses demanding 100% compatible web sites, though. Rather, hard working hackers will be the ones who spend more time than should really be necessary supporting every non-standard feature of buggy web-sites that they can find.