1996: The Year in Review

Compatibility

Unfortunately, the gains we foresaw at the beginning of the year in compatibility, namely the coming death of the AOL browser, may have been all but lost now. While the browser wars have consolidated into two childish adversaries (Netscape and Microsoft) who battle each other on whose browser can uniquely support the most irrelevant new HTML tags, WebTV has now jumped into the ring to lower the standards so far that we will all pine for the days of AOL's version 2 browser. To make matters worse, both Microsoft and WebTV's browsers identify themselves as "Mozilla" (or Netscape) making it that much harder to really tell who we are serving pages to in order to serve them specially constructed pages that make our sites look as good as possible.

Hopefully, both Microsoft and WebTV will both find the confidence this year, like insecure teenagers, to identify themselves as who they are instead of who they're not.

In particular, if WebTV lasts the year--something that surely isn't a sure thing--they can only offer their audience second-class citizenship to the most significant innovation in global society since, well, television. WebTV is simply the 1960s dreams of videotext finally realized. It is a least common denominator that I doubt much of the Internet can afford to support--even if they wanted to.


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