No sooner has humankind identified one kind of discrimination as an evil to be abjured than it comes up with some subtle way of defining new tribes and the untouchables to be excluded from it. The Internet has now become a battleground between forces too intent on their own interests to work for inclusiveness.
The global village already has its Brahmins and its dalits and the striations in between. The Brahmins have high-speed, late-model computers running the latest mainstream browsers with every available added option over high-speed digital lines. The dalits sit at home with old hardware, old software, slow modems, unreliable service providers and Telkom lines.
The new discrimination is called browserism: the building of a website that can only be used properly by those with a particular kind of browser or technical capacity. Browserism is a largely unprotested brake not just on communication, but also on marketing – proving that the open market is often not a guarantor of progress.
While the tobacco barons whimper about Minister of Health Nkosazana Zuma’s new anti-smoking regulations on advertising, their marketers now commission, in their ignorance, websites that often amount to the equivalent of an advertisement placed where only a few will ever see it.
Web surfers are quite familiar with little logos are the bottom of Web pages saying “Best viewed with Internet Explorer” or “Best viewed with Netscape”. The prevailing standard for the language of the Web, or HyperText Mark-up Language, is HTML3.2. Netscape and Microsoft quite deliberately introduced non-standard extensions to HTML viewable only by those using their browsers. I have even come across websites that actively excluded users of the non- preferred browser. The classic local example was AdVantage, an advertising site invisible to any browser other than Internet Explorer 4 – and now defunct.
It is true that more than 95% of those using the Web are using either Netscape or Internet Explorer. And the late-model browsers have begun to recognise each other’s quirks. So what difference does it make, some will protest, if at least 95% of people can enjoy a particular website?
They should think first about whom they are excluding. A great number of people don’t have the Pentium computers and high-speed Web links needed to run, say, Internet Explorer 4. Burdened with parastatal telephone costs, they often cannot afford to download the huge software packages magnanimously offered free by browserist sites to their visitors.
Browserist Web design also makes life difficult for the handicapped, especially the blind, to whom a Web page dependent on graphics or multimedia devices is invisible. If you don’t go around kicking crutches from under the crippled in public, you shouldn’t be doing it on the Web, where accommodating the disabled is cheap and easy. If you don’t consider them, they may choose to communicate to the Net, more inclusively and effectively than you, that your website sucks.
Marketers who have commissioned a website should be using a whole ream of criteria to assess the work delivered to them.
The website is likely to be demonstrated using the high-end workstations in the offices of a design agency. When they click between the different pages of your scintillating new site, the large graphics and heavily designed pages you see most likely are not being downloaded from your new website, but from the hard drive of the computer you’re looking at. So of course they load with lightning speed on to large, high-resolution monitors and do indeed look gorgeous.
But what if your customer is sitting on the other side of the world, or if the cyberspace between him/her and your website, for whatever reason, is particularly clogged? They might have the fastest, most advanced technology available and still have a hard time downloading your page. The more compact and efficient it is, the more likely you are to have readers. If they click on your website and don’t get something to read within 30 seconds, you’ve probably lost them.
Your new website will probably only be demonstrated on Netscape 4.x or Internet Explorer 4.x when a proper assessment demands that it be shown through a range of different browsers.
Bear in mind that even if your prospective customer is running the latest browser, many design features demand additional software or “plug-ins” which your customer does not necessarily have.
Even if they are using Netscape or Explorer, about 30% do not have the latest versions. Another 30% browse with images “switched off”. Many don’t have the patience or expertise needed to download and install plug-ins. Often their Internet link won’t run at the high speeds on which seamless use of the plug-ins depends.
Very often professional Web designers will protest that they need all these bells and whistles to preserve the creativity that will make your website unique. Carefully explain to them that creativity is about achieving the remarkable within strictly defined limits, rather than working without any constraints at all.
It is often forgotten that HTML was invented to describe not designs but content. Its original tags do not say “put this headline in 16-point Helvetica bold 37mm from the right-hand side of the page”. They just say “make this a headline” and leave the details to the browser. The differences in the way browsers will view the same pages, while sticking to the official HTML specifications, can be astonishing.
One of the most useful functions of the minimalist and lesser-known Opera browser is that a click of a desktop button can turn off the Web’s dismal designs, returning legibility to text by stripping away failed colours and restoring it to black on white.
Hotwired, the Web design site associated with Wired magazine, is a mecca for Web designers. One of their columnists printed a letter sent him by a canny marketer. This man would fire on the spot any agency that didn’t demonstrate his website on at least 10 different browsers, over a slow modem link and on an old-model PC.
Fortunately, there is an anti-browserist movement, a movement for Web accessibility. It chooses logos that read “Best viewed with any browser” (or “Best viewed with eyeballs”) and follows simple design principles. Graphics are kept to a minimum and as small as possible. Behind every graphic that someone may not have the patience to wait for is a description of what they are missing.
Every link to another part of the website is technically simple, so that any browser may take advantage of it. Even if the Web page is huge, at least part of it downloads within seconds, giving the reader a reason to stick around. Colours have been chosen with care and do not look like mud on geriatric workstations. Where browser extensions are called for, there are proper alternatives.
The ever-patient body that administers the standards which define the Web is called the World-Wide Web Consortium (w3c.org). They have released definitions for HTML4.0 in which they have made great efforts to accommodate and reconcile the ambitions of Web designers and the greed of browser hawkers.
But unless people who use the Web protest against its abuse, there can be no guarantees that it will ever achieve the “power of universality” as its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, intended.