By Dr. Philip Baczewski, Associate Director of Academic Computing

Does the Internet Work?

The "good" news is that the browser wars are over (see last month's column).  The bad news is that the Internet still doesn't work. Well, it may work if you exclusively use Microsoft's Internet Explorer on a Microsoft Windows PC, but if you want to vary at all from that path, you do so at your own risk. For people like me whose primary platforms are Mac OS X and LINUX, it's a hit and miss Internet world out there.

Oh, most sites still work. Even Microsoft hasn't found a way to mess up HTML too badly. Online services which feature media or commercial transactions are increasingly broken in my Windows-less world and it's starting to bother me a bit. The whole idea of the World Wide Web was to make it work on any operating system and a variety of applications. Being forced to use a particular browser application on a particular OS platform is very anti-WWW and Internet unfriendly.

My complaint is not just normal everyday whining. This rift in the Web affects me daily here at UNT in Denton. For example, take the following statement on our computer-based training page: "SmartForce courses run best on Internet Explorer 5.x and above. They do not work with Netscape.  They run on the Windows platform only ."  That's three strikes for me and I'm out.  No CBT for you, Mac user!

A Bloom of Browsers

Irony abounds. There are more HTML browsers around than ever (even at the start of this whole WWW business, there were only a handful). You've got Internet Explorer and Netscape as the most commonly used ones still. You've also got Mozilla and Konquerer, the open source alternatives and Safari and Opera, which are commercial products.  And if you still live in a command-line world, Lynx is still going strong. 

Because of Apple's development of Safari for OS X, Microsoft has announced that it will no longer develop Internet Explorer for Mac OS.  Still, Mac users can select between Safari, Netscape, Mozilla, and Opera (I like Opera, but not enough to actually pay for browser software). 

The Root of the Problem

All of the browsers mentioned above display HTML content with apparent ease and consistency.  The World Wide Web Consortium ensures that common standards are maintained for HTML.  The problem comes when a web page or web-based service employs server-based software for dynamic web page generation. 

When web developers want to interface web pages with databases or other underlying processes, they often turn to Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) or Sun's Java Server Pages (JSP).  Both are programming environments which can generate content based upon the context of a web-based transaction, rather than relying on fixed HTML content.  You'll notice ".asp" or ".jsp" as a file extension on some URLs and that will be a clue that such facilities are being employed.  Many Internet commerce sites use such technology.

My experience is that some .asp and .jsp pages work fine, but others yield partial or no content as their result.  .asp pages are more likely to fail on a non-IE, Mac platform for me than .jsp. This is more likely since ASP pages can only be served from Microsoft's IIS server and are only natively supported by Internet Explorer.  The bottom line, though, is that programmers are probably not very rigorous in in testing their applications.  They test only on what's available to them and most often it's Microsoft on Microsoft.

A 90 Percent Solution?

Lately, I've been tempted to swear off the Internet.  No more Amazon, no more Expedia, no more online banking. The only problem is that it is SO convenient. When you have to jump through hoops to get things to work, the convenience stops.  I ran across a .jsp roadblock recently with a site called points.com.  It wouldn't work through my personal Internet firewall. I even tried using a dialup connection at one point only to be told that the service was unavailable at that time.  I can only hope that such poor service conditions take care of themselves naturally via lack of participation on the part of customers.

If we want the Web to work, without conforming ourselves to big brother Bill's image, we as web consumers will need to be vocal about our displeasure with non-functional web pages.  I find that a note to a page's contact E-mail address along the lines of "why doesn't your Web site work with my Mac browser?" doesn't always yield a useful response, but at least provides a bit of personal satisfaction.  Maybe, if enough people do the same, the message will get through.

This just in:

According to Slashdot [http://slashdot.org/articles/03/07/15/1736223.shtml?tid=126&tid=154&tid=95 ], it appears that while Mozilla is not dead, AOL has just cut it loose and is no longer funding the development team. Irony abounds...