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The Browser Wars

(August 2002)

The Second Browser War

The second browser war has already happened, with very little fuss, out of the sight of most web users. This was the fight to increase support for standards by browsers to the point where it became viable to use standards-based web code, and discard all the proprietary junk that made many aspects of web authoring such a pain in the butt.

The first phase of that battle has now largely been won. The most recent offerings from all the major browser manufacturers now do a fair job of displaying valid same code the way the standards say they should. CSS1 can now be used freely, with the expectation that it will just WORK on all browsers, apart from one or two relics like Netscape 4, and support for newer standards is improving.

Thanks to cunning design work by the W3C, most newer standards are largely "fail-safe" - if a browser doesn't understand something, it should just ignore it, and the text presented to the user should still be readable, if not presented exactly as intended. As a result, later standards such as CSS2 can also be used, on the understanding that it might work, and if it doesn't it won't completely wreck the page.

So, the standards are out there, and the browser manufacturers are working to support them. So what's the problem?