The Omnivore Browser Manifesto
Written: Jul 21 '00 (Updated Jul 21 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great for CS profs grading HTML code.
Cons: The browser breaks by design.
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| kurt_kurosawa's Full Review: Sun Netscape 6 for Unix |
Before you read this, please read the Netscape Communicator reviews by aaanativearts, samsonite1023, clocks, and skadar. Go on, this is important. Come back when you're through.
Welcome back. Not a pretty picture, is it? You've just heard from the pros and you know how bad things are for them. Now I want to ask you--if their code breaks Netscape, what chance do amateur efforts have of being clean enough for Netscape? And that being so, as a surfer, if the browser breaks every time it doesn't like some bit of code or the other, what are your chances of getting the content you work so hard to find?
When the latest NS came out, "purists" wildly applauded the fact that it was designed to choke on "improper" code. This "feature," touted as a lofty basic design philosophy, is nonsense--"to improve the state of the art" is the party line of the faithful--but it is only a smokescreen for the fact that a finicky browser is much easier to program than a robust one (Netscape is now Open Source, the product of volunteeers who never meet and never have to answer to shareholders--not knocking the quality of OS efforts, but currency is ever a problem, and NS is way behind).
The self-appointed HTML police are delighted with all this because it means any code that doesn't dot its "i"s and cross its "t"s breaks the browser, punishing the "bad guys" by preventing them from effectively communicating their content to users. Bad guys? Much of the code out there is just hammered together by hobbyists who test it on their own browsers. If it flies, they figure they're good to go. And much of that code that's "illegal" was perfectly legal in previous specifications put together by the same standards committee.
Now, I surf because I want to hear what my fellow Webizens have to say. I'm here for the great content they provide based on their expertise in their subject matter areas, not to pass judgment on their HTML grammar skills. And I don't need or want an NS content filter, especially one that filters good and bad content alike on the basis of adherence to the grammar of a fickle language standard.
That standard (in my opinion) went to hell when the Consortium decided after 3.2 Transitional to deprecate (encourage discontinuance of support of) features of earlier standards because of the current unfashionability of the (non)philosophy that gave these older features life, to wit: to make coding easy, forgiving, and obvious for non-programmers like college professors and aerospace engineers--and you and me.
The purist approach, seen in what the French legislature did to the French language, goes to the forseeable end of making HTML the exclusive province of high priests, as things were back in the Dark Ages before micros when, if you wanted to run a computer program, you had to humbly submit your card deck to a high priest in a white coat outside the sanctum sanctorum. Non! Netscape, I wave my clue stick in your general direction!
So what's a surfer to do? Well, I don't have the resources to write my own browser, so I simply deleted Netscape and went back to MSIE, fairly sturdy again in release 5.5, but as always, carries with it some residual proprietary ignorance of Netscape code from the browser war years. But if I did have resources, even if I just knew some folks with resources, why, I'd issue a manifesto, a militant call for a team effort to build The Omnivore, a browser that would digest anything that was thrown at it.
Darn. I wonder who might be able to pull off something like this? Do we have any reviewers who really understand usability? Someone who might know some folks (or folks who know some folks or whatever) at big companies with lots of resources that aren't currently involved in browser wars but who might not mind being the heroes of the generation, maybe IBM-sized outfits . . . ja-kob, ja-kob, ja-kob, jakob (grin)!
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
kurt_kurosawa
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Member: Kurt Kurosawa
Location: York County, Virginia
Reviews written: 56
Trusted by: 46 members
About Me:
"Inside the needle's eye, a turning night of stars." Rumi, tr. Barks
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