Over the course of the summer, The IEUC has been struggling to improve the quality of our website to better serve you. Countless hours have gone into developing the templates and backend automation facilities that make these pages possible and most of that time has gone into supporting the “web standards” developed by the World Wide Web Consortium.

At the end of the day, virtually all of our pages validate against the “strict” variant of the HTML 4.01 standard with their *intended* appearance being defined by valid CSS style sheets. In theory this means that our pages should look gorgeous to you regardless of what platform and browser you are using as long as your choice supports these key international standards.

Indeed, if you are a Macintosh user browsing with Safari or have downloaded the latest release of Mozilla Firebird or one of a handful of *nearly* compliant browsers things should look pretty good for you, with informational rollover effects and user modifiable display preferences to increase the contrast and font size of our pages.

Unfortunately, our server logs reveal that the vast majority of you are using various releases of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer which is perhaps second only to certain versions of Netscape Navigator in notoriety for its buggy support of style sheets. As a result, if we provided you with the same content that we serve to more compliant browsers, our pages would be so mangled as to be virtually unreadable – a sad fact you may have noticed if you visited us during the last week and a half before we had time to address the issue.

There are of course several possible fixes. We could try to write our pages to older non-standards compliant flavors of HTML that are better supported by today’s dominant browsers (an exercise that would likely wreak havoc with disabled visitors dependent on screen readers). We could move to XHTML, but if served according to official guidelines, it would make our pages inaccessible to a number of older browsers. We could apply a number of relatively popular CSS-bug workarounds in which we would rely on bugs in how Netscape and Explorer read our style sheets to prevent them from recognizing the instructions that would cause their screen layout routines to mangle our pages (but this violates the very spirit of using standards in the first place and makes our layout dependent on one set of bugs to circumvent another set of bugs making it susceptible to failure if the former are fixed before the latter). Finally, we could try to detect which browser you are using and patch our pages on the fly to use a different style sheet that avoids triggering the known bugs.

Of course none of these approaches will work for all browsers on all platforms and to make matters even worse, our logs show that you are using over 300 uniquely different browser/platform configurations. We can’t even *begin* to test how our pages look on all of them, let alone start to identify and work around their bugs. It is that very fact that argues most persuasively for one to follow the advice of a Microsoft whitepaper and standardize on a single browser. But even Microsoft’s own Explorer has completely different rendering engines (and thus bug sets) in its Macintosh and Windows releases.

At one point, frustrated webmasters tried to take the initiative with a “Browser Upgrade Campaign” that would shunt visitors to a page urging them to switch browsers if they attempted to access their sites with non-standards-compliant browsers. It proved a mixed success and was ended when commercial scammers began to abuse its browser diversion code.

So what can we or any web authors do? There is no known bug free totally complaint cross-platform solution we can recommend and any advice we can give would leave you trading one set of bugs for another. As noted at the start Safari and Firebird come pretty close to the right thing, and our pages look quite good inside them. But we can’t ignore the fact that most of you use Explorer and many of you might not be in a position to do anything about that fact, despite the many serious problems with its interpretation of modern web page.

Since there is no way to please or accommodate everyone, we have made the hard decision to play the numbers and patch pages being served to Explorer with a small number of additional stylesheet rules to override our default styling and hide the display customization routines that don’t reliably work in your browser. The result will be a slight reduction in attractiveness and functionality (eg. you won’t see our informative style sheet-based navigation menu rollovers), but it will leave you with pages you can read today without having to switch browsers.

If you have some other browser, we are sending it our unpatched standards-compliant pages, in the hope that it has a modern layout engine that can properly display them. If you are using a really old browser it should ignore our style sheet and give you an acceptable text-based display. If you are using an old buggy Netscape, you are probably having an awful time viewing many sites and not just ours and we apologize for not having the resources to directly accommodate you.

The bottom line is that today’s web is broken and webmasters can’t save the day until we, as End Users take responsibility for our role in the circle of dependency and move to a new platform with self-verifying standards. The current status-quo is a disaster, what should take hours takes months of “write once – test everywhere” debugging, and we aren’t talking about complicated software. All web designers want is to be able to position photos and text on a page, control what happens if page elements don’t fit, offer popup menus with rollovers, and embed multimedia objects. This isn’t rocket science, the current standards are far from optimal from the web author’s perspective, and their support is buggy beyond belief. Moreover the underlying HTML and XHTML that describes the content of your pages pale by comparison to research hypertext systems that have been in operation for decades.

We need a new platform that different vendors can extend in different directions without breaking basic compatibility with its core standards. We need YOUR support to make it happen. When we succeed, the new platform will make both authoring and browsing painless. It will save you time, it will save you money, it will increase your productivity, and it might save your job. Or you can stay with the status quo and grit your teeth as you view mangled pages or invest countless hours tweaking your work until one day your employer decides that it is taking you so long to debug your web pages that it is more economical to outsource your job to a low cost overseas supplier. The choice is yours.

Of course, for us, “here” is a state of mind, because it doesn’t make sense for us to try to package our quest as a drive to create yet another brick-and-mortar lab. One day, perhaps, we will enjoy a level of support that will make it feasible to build, rent, or lease such a physical plant in support of a residential program like that of the Stanta Fe Institute.

Indeed, it would unquestionably be a good thing to dedicate a substantial facility to furthering research into End User Computing, so there would be a neutral site at which visiting researchers could collaborate on such issues. But there are already labs a many chipping away at different facets of the technological problems facing End Users. The real problem lies in breaking down disciplinary boundaries and figuring out the best ways to put all the pieces together, and that won’t be happening any time soon at an established lab, since all of these organizations have a primary interest in maintaining support for their own site. This is why collaborations among such peer labs tend to fizzle out in a few years when most participants start to fear that the fruits of any initial success are disproportionately accruing to the host site. In other words if a distributed project is administered from Lab A, in time its partner Labs B, C, and D will fear that Lab A is getting more money and prestige from the project than they are so they will start to pull back and the project will die. This same dynamic also dooms most interdisciplinary and interdepartmental projects within a given institution.

Thus for now, we need to run a lean operation and channel our resources into Forging a non-threatening network of colleagues from all labs and requisite fields of endeavor who care about breaking this vicious cycle and are in a position to make things happen. Indeed, as we embark on our quest to reboot the computer sector and knit together the many critical strands of relevant research, our not being attached to an existing institution or trying to compete with any of them in the brick-and-mortar building game will be absolutely critical.

If and only if we can draw on public support from enlightened computer users like YOU, will we be able to do what others can’t and make it possible to leverage each of our supporters’ contributions and undertake the needed work that wouldn’t otherwise get funded.

Alas, there is a tremendous amount of inertia centered around maintaining today’s desktop computing platforms. Whole careers have been built around mastering the quirks of yesterday’s hardware and software. Decades old decisions based on then appropriate technology tradeoffs have become ossified into bad designs that make our lives miserable, but the risks of trying to make a clean break and offer a real alternative are too great to be undertaken in the commercial sector.

We all know that today’s operating systems are sources of endless frustration and that it doesn’t matter which one we are talking about in this regard. Apple’s OS X works smoothy out of box and looks gorgeous, but even if you are a single user using your machine in the total security of your own home, there is no way to escape being forced to “prove” your identity by retyping your password thousands of times over. Despite their rapidly improving user interfaces, the many flavors of Windows remain subject to constant worm and virus attacks that make them a security nightmare. Likewise, while Unix and Linux may well have the potential to do anything an end user could ask for, often at little or no cost, unlocking that potential requires a deep immersion in highly arcane knowledge much of which is grounded in historical accident. Moreover, none of these environments makes coherent use of the many advanced technologies and common sense insights accumulated since the dawn of the personal computing revolution.

But despite these clearly manifest and utterly pervasive failings, just image going to your friendly local bankers and asking for funding to start from scratch and design a real alternative to ALL of these platforms – not just some sexy looking veneer grafted on top of Linux or some other current offering, but a REAL alternative. We all know it is needed, but from a commercial standpoint it is untouchable. That is why we have formed The IEUC to do what needs to be done in the not-for-profit space.

We all need this to work. You need us to succeed. There is a silver bullet, and YOUR Support is it!

This is the first entry in “Forging The Future”, the official web log of The Institute for End User Computing, Inc.

If you found our site through this page, it should be noted that The IEUC is a New York State not-for-profit corporation currently in the process of preparing to apply to The IRS for a Section 501(c)(3) federal tax exemption. We anticipate that this process will be completed by the end of the year.

Our charitable purpose is to advance the state of the art in information technology and advance the interests of End Users like you!

What is an End User? An End User is anyone and everyone using computers and related technologies as tools in their work or play. Indeed, even computer programmers are End Users of the tools they use to develop new programs, as are the developers of those tools when using other tools to develop them! Likewise, your next door neighbor, your son or daughter’s teacher, and your employer can all find themselves in the role of an End User as can bleeding edge technologists, liberal arts faculty members, and those brave patriots who put their lives on the line to man all levels of our homeland security infrastructure.

In short, all of us are directly or indirectly End Users of computing technology, but our needs often take a second place behind short term technological, economic, and marketing considerations. The problem is that up until now it hasn’t been anyone’s job to worry about The Big Picture and take a long term view of where we are and where we should be.

That is why we founded The Institute for End User Computing and made it our Job to look out for you and focus on doing The Right Thing rather than the fast and easy “Worse is Better” thing.

But The Institute is young and while we are truly gifted in terms of the brain trust that we can draw on, we are starting off on a shoestring budget. So we need your support!

If you’ve ever wanted to tear your computer off your desk and hurl it out a window or lob a brick through your screen in a fit of “Computer Rage”, stop complaining, and do something about it!

We know what needs to be done! We know who knows how to do it! But we need your financial support so we can fund them to do the work. After all, even the most public spirited and magnanimous providers of free and open source software need to put food on the table. So we need your donations so we will have the resources to employ them to build the next generation of tools to make your life easier, your employer more productive, our cyber infrastructure more secure, and just maybe indirectly change our information technology environment enough to one day save your job or even your life.

We are already hard at work in the trenches and hope to prove worthy of your generous support!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled commentary.