3.3 Standards based design
Of course, the many specifications released by the W3C and ECMA International since the late nineties would have little impact if they remained unimplemented. The real-world adoption of these so-called web standards however was (and still is) a slow process. Although browser makers were actively involved with the W3C, most of them were rather reluctant to bring their software immediately in line with its recommendations. Things slowly started to change in 1999 with the release of Internet Explorer 5.0 for Windows: the browser did a fair job of rendering HTML and CSS and partly supported the DOM and ECMAScript (through its own JScript engine). Subsequent updates improved the browser's rendering and scripting performance, with Internet Explorer 6.0 (2001) being Microsoft's most standards friendly browser to date.38 It is important to note that today Internet Explorer 6.0 is the browser with the greatest market share.
On the Netscape front, things went quite different. In 1998, the Netscape Corporation opened up the source code of its browser and invited programmers all over the world to improve upon it. The Mozilla project was born and reached a first milestone in June 2002 with the release of its Mozilla Suite 1.0,39 a package featuring a browser, mail client, chat client and web page editor. Unlike its predecessor, Netscape Navigator, the Mozilla browser came with excellent standards support, thereby outperforming Internet Explorer's rendering engine. Mozilla Firefox,40 a standalone browser based on the browser component inside the Mozilla Suite, further extends this support for web standards. Interesting detail: since its launch in November 2004, Mozilla Firefox' user base is rapidly expanding, thereby taking away market share from Internet Explorer 6.0.
Two other browsers worth mentioning are Opera41 and Safari42; both come with excellent standards support, but have less users than Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox.
The transition to standards supporting browsers made it possible for web developers to give up “tag soup” like coding practices and start creating designs that adhere to the W3C's recommendations instead. While in 2000 only a few got their hands wet with web standards, their number sharply increased throughout the last couple of years. Many site redesigns nowadays go hand-in-hand with a complete overhaul of the web pages' underlying code: XHTML or HTML 4.01 for structure, CSS for presentation and DOM driven dynamic effects.43 The benefits of making the jump to web standards are plenty: creating cross-browser compatible designs is much easier, web pages load faster as they are stripped from redundant code, updating a site's content or tweaking its layout can be done in a minimum of time, and accessibility increases as disabled users don't have to navigate through tables holding the site's design together. Other advantages include easier conversion to other document formats, better visibility in web searches, and improved device independence, meaning that standards compliant sites can be viewed with a wide range of devices, including mobiles.
Combining this last point, the advantage of device independence, with the ubiquity of internet enabled cell phones in Japan, one should expect that Japanese web developers have made the jump to web standards long before anyone else—doing so would allow them to create just one version of a website and have it displayed on the maximum number of devices. However, the reality is very different. In the next section I explain what is going on.
38 Although Internet Explorer 6.0's level of web standards support was almost unseen in 2001, it soon became clear that its rendering engine also has several shortcomings. Several CSS properties and selectors are not supported (Web Standards Project 2003) and there are issues with Internet Explorer 6.0's handling of the application/xhtml+xml MIME type (Hickson 2004).
39 The Mozilla Suite is available for several platforms. See http://www.mozilla.org/products/mozilla1.x/ for more info. Later versions of the Netscape browser (6, 6.1, 6.2, 7, 7.1) were based on the Mozilla Suite's core, but failed to generate momentum—most internet users simply sticked to Internet Explorer (or another browser) and didn't see a reason to switch.
40 Mozilla Firefox is available for several platforms. See http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ for more info.
41 Opera is a commercial browser available for several platforms, including cell phones. More info at http://www.opera.com/.
42 Safari is only available for the OSX platform. See also http://www.apple.com/safari/.
43 Some examples of major sites that recently made the switch to web standards: Blogger (http://www.blogger.com/), ESPN (http://www.espn.com/), Lycos Europe (http://www.lycos-europe.com/), MSN Search (http://search.msn.com/), Sprint (http://www.sprintpcs.com/), Wired News (http://www.wired.com/), etc.