Web Standards: My Letter to Webmasters

A visitor to the blog recently asked the following of me:

“Please whip up a generic letter that people can send to webmasters why they should stop being such a gay turd head.”

I thought that was particularly poignant, so I wrote up the following as a standard response to send to webmasters whose sites are all borked up in browsers other than IE.

I encourage anyone who gets treated badly, i.e. the site looks like ass when visiting a given page, to send this (or something like it) to the webmaster. It’s like the voting thing; we can’t complain if we don’t at least make an attempt to be heard.

(Edit: My writing authority (Jason) is going to comment that I need to reduce this to roughly half its length, so if you have any editing ideas on how to clean this up I’d appreciate it.)

Dear Webmaster,

Upon visiting your site I noticed that it is not fully compatible with the Firefox web browser. This in itself isn’t such a bad thing, except it’s an indication of a larger problem, i.e. that the site is not compatible with W3C standards.

In the past it has been common, and almost forgivable, to code a website for Internet Explorer exclusively. Up until the last year or so, so few people were using other browsers that it didn’t make much sense to spend extra development time ensuring that a given site worked in anything other than Microsoft’s browser.

That time has passed.

A significant percentage of users are now surfing the web using a browser other than Internet Explorer, and this trend is only going to increase as more and more people are exposed to options such as Firefox, Opera, etc. As such, I would offer to you that it would be in your best interest to bring your site into the age of standards compliance. Not compliance with Firefox or Opera, mind you, but compliance with the W3C standards themselves.

In fact, the reason that your site does not work properly in Firefox (which is one of the most standards compliant browsers out there) is because in developing for Internet Explorer your site has been literally “broken” in terms of standards. Microsoft has, for whatever reason, steadfastly refused to make Internet Explorer render code in an accepted way.

As such, sites that are developed for Internet Explorer alone don’t tend to work correctly in non-IE browsers. But a careful eye will notice that the trend is to move away from this sort of “hobbled” website. Look at Bank of America’s site, or E-Bay, or Amazon. They all code according to the standards first — and then add any code they have to to make it look the way it’s supposed to in Internet Explorer.

When properly developed, Internet Explorer users will still see the site as they always have, but the site will not be broken (as it is now) for non-IE users. Ultimately this approach will take very little time and energy relative to the benefit you will gain from the effort. By allowing everyone to view your site in a seamless manner you will quite simply have a larger number of happy users.

Below is some information about the W3C, and some information about how you can go about making your site compatible. I enjoy your site and very much would like to return. Please make it easier for me to do so by welcoming standards-compliant browsers rather than offering them a sub-par experience.

Thank you,

The W3C Website: http://www.w3.org/

The Web Standards Project: http://www.webstandards.org/about/

A standards-compliant checklist: http://www.maxdesign.com.au/presentation/checklist.cfm