I don’t how many people even remember the olden days of web development. I’m talking about the time when under construction GIFs were accepted, even if a site had been “under construction” for over a year. It was during this era that what has been known as the “browser wars.” We pretty much all took a side, and our pages advertised quite obviously what side we chose. These ubiquitous banners saying “This Site Designed For…” inhabit some dark and painful corner of our minds. When the wars were over, it stopped mattering if you were a Netscape supporter or a Microsoft supporter. You survived and that was all that mattered.

People talk about the war; they say that Firefox started it up again. I don’t think I believe that. Microsoft and Netscape worked very hard at pushing the differences. These days, all of the major players (even Microsoft) work towards a standard. This makes all of our lives easier. I wake up and realize that one day in the future I won’t have to worry about whether or not my design works in both browsers.

Don’t misunderstand; it already has gotten much better, and we are continuing on that path, even if our progress isn’t always in the direction I would hope. But then I see something like this(theregister.co.uk), and I lose much of that faith. For even a small manufacturer to say that the standards are “too hard” or able to be compromised is a statement of arrogance. For it to come out of one of the major players is unforgivable. As a developer and designer, I want to know that by working with one set of rules I can reach the most people. As I have a number of Mac users in this audience (a member am I), as well as an important minority at my full time gig, I can assure you that any solution for me will address them. That solution has historically been the standards.

Reading this article, I find myself imagining a new series of website badges proliferating. It is this vision that shows that, despite all talk towards progress, we still feel the need to homogenize. Microsoft has made some unique strides as of late, and the corporate dialog is one of working together. They have sat on a broken html renderer for the better part of a decade. If Trident cannot be expected to handle web content correctly, it is past time to replace it. And if there are sites that get broken by this fact, it is time they were made to uphold the standards we have all agreed upon years ago.

Bandying around the term “backwards compatibility” is a disingenuous way to say that you are above the standards the community has set.

You are not.

Near the tail end of last year, I replaced my Powerbook for some nice Apple Intel goodness. For the most part, I have loved my new MacBook, although it did require some changes in workflow. This is due to the fact that, at least for me, Microsoft Office runs horribly on Rosetta. It runs worse than my old Photoshop 7.

I switched my one email account (this one) that I used on Entourage over to Mail.app. That was the big change. I don’t use Word or Excel that much, and Keynote puts PowerPoint to utter shame. After that, I spent very little time thinking about it.

Today, I was forced to recall the pain. I needed to write a quick business letter and fired up Word. I guess it was the instance of Photoshop CS3 (wonderful, I should add), but it took literally a minute and a half for the project dialog to come up and be changeable. Everything just sort of hung there afterwards.

Ultimately, the whole ordeal took about an extra ten minutes because of Rosetta, and this was for a ten minute letter. I can only imagine what people who have to use Word for extended periods of time think about this joy. Personally, I’m glad I have nice Universal apps that cover my general writing needs.

While I can accept that it can take a bit of time to update an application for a whole new architecture, I am reminded of why most magazines (that are Mac houses) switched over to InDesign. Adobe took a bit of time in converting their apps over to Mac OS X, but Quark took a much longer time. This meant that any creative who needed a layout program and wanted a new computer had to either run Quark in a hobbled environment or use Adobe’s flashy InDesign. If you take a look at the field now, you can see what most shops with a decent budget chose.

Maybe it’s time for someone to really challenge Office on the Mac…