Web Standards

Well, thanks to Zaphod, I’m finally aware that all the pictures in my posts are shifted up about 25 pixels when using Internet Explorer. I was unaware of the problem since I’ve been using FireFox for the last few weeks, and it shows everything perfectly.

While I haven’t nailed down the exact Cascading Style Sheet issue in the blog template that is causing it, I do know its because Internet Explorer doesn’t like playing nice with Web Standards. For those of you whose eyes just glazed over, that means Microsoft doesn’t feel they need to base their web browser on standard web design procedures becuase they’re the market leader, and they don’t have to.

Just one more thing I have to be frustrated about regarding the IT industry. Some of you may be asking yourself “What’s the big deal? Internet Explorer looks good.” And that’s true to an extent. But you need to put the use of Graphic User Interfaces into perspective. The user interfaces of computers don’t follow any scientific laws or restraints. When designing how humans should interact with computers, programmers basically just came up with an arbitrary user interface they thought was best. If it’s not intuitive to 75% of computer users, well that’s tough, the computer programmer thinks it makes sense.

This isn’t the case with other sciences or engineering fields. Physics and chemistry play a huge role in how and what we interact with. With computers, the only ’standard’ most people would agree on is the keyboard, and that’s even starting to change.

My point is, there is a reason we have standards, and organizations (like the W3C, IEEE and ICANN) devoted to developing those standards to insure they are the best and most effective for their application. Without standards, we’d all be forced into expensive and proprietary technology whether it was good for us or not.

[tags]nerds, web, technology, standards, rant[/tags]