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| standards and decorum |
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24 November 05.
This essay has been (heavily) edited and aggregated into a longer work entitled Why Word is a terrible program. At the outset, we would like to stress that nothing in this letter should be construed as a criticism of Microsoft's Internet Explorer [...]. We would write the same letter if the choice was to offer support solely for Mozilla Firefox, Safari, or any other product. [...] He also points out that when a security flaw is found in a product, people or institutions will often switch to a competitor until the security flaw is patched. That is, even we of decent eyesight would do well to keep a variety of readers on our hard drives (I use three). This is obviously only possible if a variety of readers can all understand the same document format. Extending the standardsSo standards are good. But despite the obviousness of that statement, folks still insist on not complying. The politics are typically around the more blatant forms of standards-ignoring, such as the LoC's self-conscious proposal or Microsoft's seeming inability to correctly implement a standard written by anybody but themselves (see below). But more subtly, everybody writes extensions. Sure, you can stick to the standard, the ad copy explains, but if you use our product, you can also use this nifty widget that doesn't appear in competitor's products. This means that the vendor can tout its product as both 100% standards-compliant and at the same time better than the standards-compliant competitors. Many users are clearly happy with this, but it is a siren that will surely leave the user stranded, and is a nice way for the vendor to lock users in while claiming full compatibility with competitors.Dear GCC users: many of the GNU extensions to standard C don't even work in Cygwin. Ignore them. Once an author has written a document featuring standards-plus-extensions, recipients have exactly the same onus of trying to get things working as if the author had ignored the standards entirely. For example, a plain browser is fine with HTML, but with the right plugins, you can also view the Macromedia Flash format. You've no doubt seen more than enough web pages like this Thai restaurant, whose Panang tofu is a delight. Their menu, which is plain English text, can only be read if you have Flash installed. I don't know what web designer talked the managers into developing this, but they committed a grievous sin if they promised that this would attract more customers than a plain HTML menu that every browser can instantly load and display. Surely, the most common reason for ignoring a standard is that it does not allow for some form of expression that the author eagerly wants to use. But the author needs to bear in mind that freer expression bears all the costs of broken standards. For example, consider the sad state of email. Like a restaurant menu, about 100% of email is also plain text. You tell people things, using words. For about 40 years, there has been a standard (ASCII) that allows different programs to interpret text correctly. Ah, what Nirvana: all the information we need to get across can be gotten across with an easy and supremely well-supported standard. Now that the world is increasingly international, there are more character sets than English-centric ASCII, but nearly every known language is supported by the Unicode standard (yes, Ogham, Ugaritic, Deseret, and Limbu are in there. [PDF]) Yet people increasingly throw the standard out and encode the text into a word processor document in a proprietary format. If you're lucky, you have a word processor that can read the documents your colleague produced (What if the sender has Word 2000 and you have Word 95? Just hope it wasn't important...). Putting plain text in a word processor document—even with a bit of extra formatting—is exactly on par with putting a plain old menu in a Flash plugin: yeah, there's a little more glitz, but it comes at the price of potentially excluding, imposing work upon, or alienating the reader. Of course, word processor documents are nice because they do provide extensions on top of plain text. They let you control the font and layout that the recipient sees in ways that plain text can only approximate. Flash certainly does things that HTML will never even think of supporting. But there is a trade-off that many people ignore, under the presumption that everybody is just like them. "Well, I have a copy of Word 2000 and an email client that displays web pages, so everybody else must too. My eyesight and dexterity with mouse and keyboard is fine, so my recipient's must be too." In a social context, the presumption that everybody is like you is the source of a great deal of impoliteness, offense, and general unhappiness, and we teach people from early childhood to understand that others are not like them and that they should maintain standards of decorum until they know that the other party is OK with breaking them. Sure, we can wear the risqué t-shirt to work and maybe make some people smile, but we know that such free expression carries a trade-off in the form of a risk of offending some. There do exist valid reasons to ignore standards or set out to establish new ones; e.g., the correct response to a spoken "thank you" is "you're welcome", but it is accepted custom to send a "thank you" email but not a "you're welcome" email, because that sort of thing just sort of clutters up the in box. But those who ignore the standards for no reason or for lousy reasons ("I don't have to say thanks—he owed me.") are just rude. Back to meAs a digression to the main essay, here's my own dilemma, which the reader is welcome to comment on. The home page for Apophenia validates (as does its CSS). Further, I like how it looks. But when rendered on Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE), it doesn't appear correctly: the headers are cut off, so "The goods" becomes ": goods" and "Download Apophenia here" becomes "vnload Apophenia here".Have been trying not to make this another MSFT-bashing essay, but MSFT has clearly shown disdain for standards in the past, either in shoddy implementations of set standards or confusing users with near-identical but incompatible competing standards, to the point that the Fed(eral government) has had to step in. The State of Massachusetts recently decided to demand that all of its documents, which need to be universally available and are in some respect the history of the state, must all be in an ISO-standard format (notably the Open Document Format). Rather than fix Word and Excel to fit the standard (not a hard task for a professional coder), MSFT continues to push its own format. So, do I spend some short chunk of my life rewriting the document to comply with the W3C's formal standard plus MSFT's implicit standard of what they support? To date, I've compromised by having a second page which is stripped down and renders fine in IE and a little note in the main page saying that the user can please go to the spare page if necessary. I also reported this as a bug in IE, under the presumption that they're not _trying_ to break things, but bugs get through. I reported that this was a web page that validated but didn't render right in IE. I got a reply from Customer Service stating "The webpage that you specified has got an issue. [...] This issue is not related with your Microsoft Internet Explorer." If I were really good, I'd write the JavaScript to automatically redirect the user, but that'd be a half an hour of my life that I could be spending doing things that actually make me happy. I have no interest in throwing a tantrum, but neither do I want to spend yet more of my life working around MSFT bugs. Place your opinion below.
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