FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Chris Carrico Urge Public Relations chris@urgepr.com 213-848-8743 Been a casualty of the browser wars? The Web Standards Project wants to share your "war story" with browser makers New York, NY - October 7, 1998 - The Web Standards Project (WSP) http://www.webstandards.org, an international coalition of leading Web developers, announced today that they're collecting "war stories" about the effect of the current patchwork support for standards by Web browsers. Web developers and Web users are invited to share their "war story" at http://www.webstandards.org/warstories. WSP will use these stories as case studies about the real-world problems caused by the current patchwork support for Web standards. WSP's first case study, of http://www.thevisitor.com, shows the typical frustrations of Web developers who try use advanced-but incompatible-features being promoted by Netscape and Microsoft (see attached case study). "Web developers and Web users have become casualties in the browser wars," said George Olsen, WSP Project Leader and Design Director/Web Architect at Los Angeles-based 2-Lane Media. "Browser makers have asked us what problems are being caused by their lack of support for standards-and we intend to tell them. Not only the specific technical problems, but also the financial and human costs," he said. "For developers it's frustrating to waste time working around incompatibilities when we could be spending that time and effort making better content for those sites," Olsen continues. For people who are paying for sites, incompatibilities are costing them extreme amounts of money for the extra development time. As for people using the Web, these incompatibilities mean running into pages that won't work on their particular browser, if the developer didn't know enough or wasn't careful enough to do all the necessary workarounds. WSP, which is urging browser makers to fully support standards created by the World Wide Web Consortium, estimates compensating for the lack of consistent support for standards adds about 25 percent to the cost of building a Web site. The lack of standards also threatens to fragment the Web as browsers move the desktop. This effort complements an effort, jointly announced by WSP and The Open Group, to document specific technical problems that plague our society. The two will be working together on a variety of activities intended to encourage browser makers to support Web standards. Among these efforts, WSP will help The Open Group with its efforts to develop test suites that will check how well browsers comply with Web standards, and WSP will be publicizing the results of these tests. About The Web Standards Project: WSP is an international coalition of Web developers and Web experts who are urging browser makers to fully support Cascading Style Sheet Level 1 (CSS-1), the Document Object Model (DOM) and XML in their browsers. Its effort to bring attention to the existing and potential problems involved with browser incompatibility does not mean that WSP is opposed to innovations by browser manufacturers. The coalition merely urges browser manufacturers to use open standards for enhancements and support existing ones before adding new features. - ### - For more information about The Web Standards Project contact, George Olsen golsen@2lm.com (310-473-3706 x2225), WSP Project Leader, and Design Director/Web Architect at 2-Lane Media. WSP Browser Incompatibilities Case Study: The Visitor.com The Visitor.com site uses "Dynamic HTML," which is not a standard but rather a buzzword used by browser makers to refer to a collection of techniques using Cascading Style Sheet Level 1 (CSS-1), the Document Object Model (DOM) and scripting languages, such as JavaScript and JScript. Unfortunately, the incompatible support for the standards involved, meant that media, now Razorfish Los Angeles, had to create four versions of the site to avoid excluding potential visitors: Netscape Navigator 4.0, Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0, a version for earlier browsers, and another for WebTV. (The first three were produced by .) Richard Titus, currently with Razorfish Los Angeles, estimates that multiple versions increased the development costs by a third. "We tend to push the envelope quite a bit both in terms of layout and in terms of functionality. Which result in higher man-hour cost," he said. "I should also note that we have a tendency to do a lot more graceful decomposition on our sites than most developers and that requires a ton more work because you have to support numerous browsers." Developer, Robert Smith, said that multiple versions, meant extra developers were needed. "Two people handled the primary version (for Netscape), one person adapted that to Internet Explorer and another made the crippled version for earlier browsers," he said. Programmer, Eric Canale, said that the development team's biggest problems stemmed from the inconsistencies in the way different browsers handled DOM-issues and differences between Netscape's JavaScript and Microsoft's JScript. These differences were also inconsistent between different versions of a particular browser and even among the same browser running on different platforms, he said. "Sometimes Netscape 4.0 Javascript code that worked fine on PCs would hang [on] a Mac," he said. These developers also faced numerous challenges to due inconsistent handling of positioning elements with Cascading Style Sheets. Canale said that the project convinced him that using Dynamic HTML doesn't pay. "The three versions of the site we did in-house doubled our production time, since a lot had to be recreated >from scratch or seriously debugged," he said. "The site looked great but cost a fortune to produce." - ### - About The Visitor.com case study: For more information about the browser incompatibilities experienced by the development team, contact: Richard Titus, Managing Director of Razorfish Los Angeles rxdxt@razorfish.com 310-581-3616 Eric Canale, currently Chief Technology Office for Centropolis Interactive ericc@centropolis.com 310-244-3948 Robert Smith, currently "Fixer" with the Hollywood Stock Exchange fixer@hsx.com 310-458-1029