Just how difficult is it to make a website nowadays? One which conforms to WWW3 standards, avoids browser or operating system-specific commands such as ActiveX and “just works”?

Very difficult, according to the firm who have the job of recreating the huge site developed by one of the UK’s leading charities for people with disabilities. Their brief is to give it a new look, rationalise some of the older elements and above all, to make it accessible for everyone.

They seem to forget about the millions of other sites around the world that are platform and browser agnostic and work with just about any browser. The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 makes it a legal duty to make websites accessible, the web developers in question only made it open to Windows and used a typeface so small that even on a large screen monitor one needs a magnifying glass to view the labels.

The site is still under development so it’s not fair to name names (yet) but the point is that the initial response of the developers was to blame the browser used to access the site rather than their coding. As it is, neither Safari or Firefox can address some elements, the two most-used, cross-platform browsers after Internet Explorer. Something is seriously wrong somewhere.

Broken Windows
After all, Windows is starting to look distinctly proprietary and limited to office locations. Sixty-six percent of people who bought a computer worth more than £500 purchased an Apple, according to Fortune, here. Linux is shipping on an increasing number of computers by default; Dell are offering XP even after it is officially dead while developers are avoiding Vista. Web-based and free applications such as Google’s are encroaching on Microsoft’s territory. There are even some predicting the end of the road for Microsoft operating systems as services and transactions earn more than software licences. Something Apple learned years ago.

It might help if website creators stopped hand-coding and used development tools instead. It is perfectly possible to make page layouts in pure PostScript but why bother when it is faster, easier and better to use a graphics package. Just as when WYSIWYG word processors took away the need to hand-code emboldens, italicisations and so on into the old text editing packages. We used them for typesetting in pre-PostScript days and often got three metre galleys of italics where we had forgotten to turn them off.

But then, we didn’t blame IBM, CPM, Wang or Wordstar.