cssfan: Blog 050811.1118 (U.S. Copyright Office Charges into the Past)

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U.S. Copyright Office Charges into the Past

ID: 050811.1118

Web Standards logo In an August 10, 2005 article for CNET News.com, U.S. Copyright Office poll: IE-only OK?, Paul Festa reports the U.S. Copyright Office is soliciting opinions (through August 22, 2005) on the Copyright Office's decision to make the October 24, 2005 launch of its online preregistration system for unpublished, commercial works-in-progress, based on Internet Explorer 5.1 and higher. The decision to create a proprietary website will be based exclusively on "whether any eligible parties will be prevented from preregistering a claim due to browser requirements of the preregistration system."

Apparently the reason for this anachronistic decision is "Siebel software that guaranteed compatibility with only selected browsers — including both IE and Netscape 7.02, a browser with negligible market share — in the current Siebel 7.7 software." The Copyright Office plans to "upgrade to Siebel 7.8, which supports Netscape 7.2, Firefox 1.0.3 and Mozilla 1.7.7, but not in time for the Oct. 24 launch." Current versions of these browsers are 8.2, 1.0.6, and 1.7.11, respectively.

The most absurd comment was that of Stacey Schneider, director of technology product marketing, who said: "We're running a business, and testing is extremely costly. We optimize against what our customers' demand. For Siebel 7.8, it became clear, especially for the government sector, that there's demand for Mozilla. But there are hundreds of vendors out there with their own browsers. And not many applications support many more than what we do."

This is precisely the reason sites should not be optimized to a particular browser. Why should one's browser choice have any more impact on what can be read online than one's choice of paper for the printed word? To optimize for one browser, practically means making it compatible for at least one other, then another, until we're back into the prehistoric days of multiple versions of pages (and websites) for multiple proprietary standards.

The tragic irony is it's the US Copyright Office, a division of the often future-leaning Library of Congress, that's proposing this atavistic step. (I shudder to imagine they are also designing the site to use fixed-width tables complete with 1-pixel "invisible" spacers.) Given this level of backward thinking, I wonder if the site will even pass the government's own Section 508 accessibility standards.

The way to avoid the problem of designing for "hundreds of vendors out there with their own browsers" — an overstatement at best — is to design sites to comply with W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standards for (X)HTML and CSS. Designing to web standards minimizes costs, and saves invaluable design, development, and testing time. The onus of correctly rendering W3C-compliant pages should fall on browser vendors, not on web site designers.

Can you imagine how absurd it would be if print authors were told they needed to write one way when using one manufacturer's paper, and another way when using another type of paper? Can you imagine how absurb it would be to tell readers they need one pair of glasses to view what's written on this type of paper, and another pair to view what's written on another type?

In my September 2002 article, The Tyranny of Typography, I wrote:

While it is tempting to create Internet Explorer-specific web pages only, remember that five years ago Netscape was the dominant browser. … A prudent strategy is to create W3C standards-compliant web pages that will be rendered similarly by standards-based browsers, both now and in the future.

The final sentence is as true today as it was then:

A prudent strategy is to create W3C standards-compliant web pages that will be rendered similarly by standards-based browsers, both now and in the future.

I encourage Stacey Schneider and the other dinosaurs at the Copyright Office (and Siebel) to at least visit the Web Standards Project, and to read yesterday's blog, IE7: Half a Loaf on Internet Explorer's poor compliace with W3C recommendations.