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Netscape syntax checking and market position

``` [Concern is growing around the Internet about various policies of Netscape that tend to reinforce its market position through violation of standards and other nonstandard features. The enclosed messages from Risks detail the latest chapter in this instructive story. The bottom line is that Netscape is the market leader in an industry whose products are highly standardized. This is a recipe for disaster unless it can find some way to differentiate its offerings. It has two basic options: emphasizing service and trying to break the standards. It is clearly pursuing the first of these options, but many people feel that it is pursuing the second as well. If so then it gets away with this in large part because everybody is focused on preventing Microsoft from attaining a dominant position on the Internet. But it's worth keeping in mind that Netscape's putative strategy here is precisely analogous to the strategy by which Microsoft obtained its dominant position in PC software: an architecture of proprietary standards (its own operating system) that help organize a critical mass of mutually enabling customers (in economic terms, a network) on top of a platform whose open standards are maintained by others (the IBM PC spec). It seems likely that the market will now slow down momentarily for some rethinking in the light of the discovery of serious security problems in Netscape 2.0, largely associated with basic architectural decisions in Java. That rethinking should include a recommitment to functioning standards.]

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Subject: RISKS DIGEST 17.88

RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Monday 11 March 1996 Volume 17 : Issue 88

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Date: Sat, 9 Mar 1996 07:51:22 -0800 (PST) From: hbaker@netcom.com (Henry G. Baker) Subject: Netscape's too-lenient syntax checking

> From: [webmaster @ affected site] > RE: Re: [site name deleted] Web Link

> From [frustrated web site visitor] > > The main link to [site name deleted] doesn't > > work through 'lynx' because the html is not > > correct. The ' > link is never terminated with '', so that > > the [site name deleted] link won't work. > > Could you please look at this problem, and > > send me a message when it is fixed. > > Thanks very much. > > Thanks for the input. The mistake was never noticed before because the > Netscape browsers are smart enough to detect the error and deal with it. > Lynx, however, is not. The problem is fixed, although I don't recommend > looking at the site with anything but Netscape 1.1N and higher. We > incorporate too many of Netscape's features to make viewing these pages > without it useful.

I have nothing against Netscape trying to be smart, but the very sloppiness that makes it behave reasonably for unreasonable input leads web page designers to believe that their web pages have been debugged if they work correctly on Netscape. Perhaps Netscape should have a `careful' mode for helping web page maintainers to provide `squeaky clean' pages.

I have found numerous web page problems with Lynx in this way, and when informed of these problems, some web page maintainers have been downright snotty in their responses. Their attitude seems to be `it serves you right for not using a graphical browser like Netscape'.

Perhaps the web site designers should wake up to the fact that most of the sophisticated web surfers that I know either use an ascii browser like Lynx, or turn off image loading when surfing, because they actually want to visit more than one web site per day. All those pretty 4-color buttons (??) that they use look good for one visit, and thereafter become the source of a lot of irritation due to slow page loading.

Henry Baker www/ftp directory: ftp.netcom.com:/pub/hb/hbaker/home.html

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End of RISKS-FORUM Digest 17.88

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Date: Tue, 12 Mar 96 19:46:10 PST From: RISKS List Owner Subject: RISKS DIGEST 17.89

RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Tuesday 12 March 1996 Volume 17 : Issue 89

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Date: Tue, 12 Mar 1996 06:26:30 GMT From: Jonathan Kamens Subject: Re: Netscape's too-lenient syntax checking (Baker, RISKS-17.88)

> I have nothing against Netscape trying to be smart,

What Netscape does isn't merely "smart"; it's also a violation of the HTML specification.

That specification defines what is or is not legal in an HTML document. Programs which purport to be HTML viewers are supposed to confirm that the document being viewed conforms to the HTML specification (e.g., not missing "" markers after "" markers) and complain if it doesn't.

Unfortunately, Netscape decided, "Why should we write something which checks the HTML for validity, which we can just write a smart interpreter which figures out what the author of a document wanted to do, even if they didn't actually say that?"

Henry Baker has already pointed out one problem with this -- it allows webmasters who use Netscape to test their HTML to be lazy about ensuring its correctness. Since Netscape is the most popular browser, and therefore more webmasters use it than any other browser to check HTML, users who don't use Netscape are often "shut out" of sites.

Worse, Netscape has intentionally implemented numerous features that are not conformant with the HTML specification, that their browser supports but others do not. Instead of working through the process recognized by the HTML-design community for adding functionality to HTML, they just added the functionality they thought was needed. Since many sites take advantage of this additional functionality (it is pretty neat, after all), once again, users who do not use Netscape are "shut out".

Rectifying the latter problem isn't simply a matter of adding Netscape's functionality to the HTML specification, because they've added functionality which is difficult, if not impossible, to implement in SGML (the Standard Generalized Markup Language, which is the meta-language in which HTML is defined). That doesn't matter to Netscape, since (as I mentioned above) their browser interprets the HTML in a do-what-I-mean fashion, rather than in a "Is this valid HTML?" fashion, but it matters to the rest of the Web community, since browsers which are trying to remain true to what HTML is supposed to be simply may not be able to implement the features which more and more sites are using.

{Begin politics.}

I find what Netscape has done totally reprehensible. There was a recognized body of people defining the HTML standard, a recognized procedure for implementing changes to that standard, and a recognized "proper" way to parse and display HTML code. Netscape threw that all away, and I believe that they were fully conscious when they did so that they were breaking the standard and causing lots of grief for the other HTML developers in the world. What they're doing is nothing more than an attempt to make Netscape, a commercial product, the only browser that can be used to access the full potential of the Web, which is supposed to be free. The sad thing is that they may very well end up succeeding.

{End politics.}

(Thanks to Andrew Greene for teaching me most of this and proofreading this message.)

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Date: Tue, 12 Mar 96 09:13:27 -0500 From: padgett@tccslr.dnet.mmc.com (A. Padgett Peterson) Subject: Re: Netscape too lenient syntax checking? (Baker, RISKS-17.88)

> ... The problem is fixed, although I don't recommend > looking at the site with anything but Netscape 1.1N and higher.

That won't always work either. After putting 2.0 on a machine I noticed large chunks of text on one site disappearing. Seens That with Netscape 1.x if it encountered a syntactical mistake such as it would realize that a double quote was missing on the end and, having reached the end of the anchor, "assume" one.