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In Dean’s recent Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone post, he highlighted our responsibility to deliver both interoperability (web pages working well across different browsers) and backwards compatibility (web pages working well across different versions of IE). We need to do both, so that IE8 continues to work with the billions of pages on the web today that already work in IE6 and IE7 but also makes the development of the next billion pages (in an interoperable way) much easier. Continuing Dean’s theme, I’d like to talk about some steps we are taking in IE8 to achieve these goals.
I’ve been on the IE team for over a decade, and I’ve seen us apply the “Don’t Break the Web” rule in six different major versions of IE in different ways. In IE 6, we used the DOCTYPE switch to enable different “modes” of behavior to protect compatibility. When we released IE 6 in 2001, very few pages on the web were in “standards mode” (my team ran a report on the top 200 web sites at the time that reported less than 1%) – few people knew what a DOCTYPE was, and few tools generated them. We used the DOCTYPE switch in IE6 to change the box model to comply with the standards and enable developers to opt-in to the new behavior. We’d already seen so much content written to IE5.x’s non-standard interpretation of the CSS2 spec that we couldn’t change it without causing a slew of problems.
In IE7 we made a lot more changes to improve IE’s standards compliance, particularly with CSS. We limited these behavior changes to IE’s “standards mode” only, and we expected that this would help limit compatibility problems as it had in the past. Unfortunately, and somewhat surprisingly to us, this wasn’t true; many of those changes made IE incompatible with content that was already part of the web. It turned out by the time IE7 shipped in late 2006, roughly half of the top 200 US web sites were in “standards mode”. Many of those sites had been “opted in” to standards mode by a tool that generated their content; many of them had probably been hand-coded by someone who was trying to do the right thing, and make their HTML code valid according to the W3C. Regardless, users of those sites expected them to keep working the same, even when they downloaded a new version of IE. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.
But wait, a lot of people say at this point, why isn’t this a problem for Firefox, or Safari, or any other browser? The answer is that developers of many sites had worked around many of the shortcomings or outright errors in IE6, and now expected IE7 to work just like IE6. Web developers expected us, for example, to maintain our model for how content overflows its box, even in “standards mode,” even though it didn’t follow the specification – because they’d already made their content work with our model. In many cases, these sites would have worked better if they had served IE7 the same content and stylesheets they were serving when visited with a non-IE browser, but they had “fixed their content” for IE. Sites didn’t work, and users experienced problems.
In short, there was an expectation that even under standards mode, IE would keep working the same way. Because sites expected IE6 behavior, the DOCTYPE switch failed to protect compatibility in the real world when we changed behavior under standards mode to become more compliant. We realized that “Don’t Break the Web” should really be translated to “Don’t change what developers expect IE to do for current pages that are already deployed.” (Of course, for content that is developed to a later standard that isn’t deployed yet, you can expect different things.)
With this painful and unexpected lesson under our belt, we worked together with The Web Standards Project (in the WaSP-Microsoft Task Force) on this problem. I can’t give them enough credit for this work; it’s tough to step into the shoes of a browser vendor that ships to half a billion users to figure out what the best thing to do is, when you really just want to sit down and write code to the standards. We started from a simple statement of “enable (and encourage) interoperable web development, but don’t force IE to break pages that work properly in IE today.” I think we all want to converge to a world where a web developer doesn’t have to spend much time at all testing and recoding their site for different browsers. At the same time, we can’t break the web experience on current sites for users like my mom, even for as good a reason as improving standards compliance. With all the great styling and layout changes we’re working on in our new engine for IE8 to be much more standards compliant, that’s a lot of potential breakage. (More details in the near future, but the Acid2 announcement gives you some idea.)
We realized that the model for web development was really “write to the standard, then test against and fix problems in the most popular browsers.” This meant that the web developer had one crucial piece of information we could make use of – what version of IE they had tested against, and after much discussion in the WaSP-MS task force, we ended up with a <meta>-based “opt-in to the browser version I tested with” strategy.
Aaron Gustafson, one of the members of the WaSP-Microsoft Task Force wrote an article detailing where we ended up that was posted on A List Apart today; I highly recommend reading it for a different perspective. I’ll summarize, though, that:
We believe this approach has the best blend of allowing web developers to easily write code to interoperable web standards while not causing compatibility problems with current content. We also think this approach allows developers to opt in to standards behavior on their own schedule and as it makes sense to them, instead of forcing developers into a responsive mode when a new version of IE has different behavior on their current pages. I’m excited by all the standards work we’re doing in IE8; I’m even more excited that we won’t cause a lot of compatibility problems for our users and web developers.
Chris Wilson
IE Platform Architect
After commissioning a 2005 study from LEK Consulting that showed collegiate file-swappers were responsible for 44 percent of movie studio "losses" to piracy, the MPAA then used the report it bought to bludgeon Congress into considering legislation to address this massive problem. Now the MPAA admits that the report's conclusions weren't even close to being right; collegiate piracy accounts for only 15 percent of "losses." Oops. And that's assuming you believe the rest of the data.
The Associated Press broke the news today; apparently, the MPAA is busy notifying government and education officials about the blunder, which may explain why it's too busy to post a mea culpa to its web site. The group blames "human error" for the calculation problem.
Of course, human error can and does happen to the best of us, and at least the MPAA finally owned up to a mistake that no one else would have noticed—even if it took over two years. Of course, the reason no one else would have noticed it is because the group kept the 2005 report and its methodology under wraps. But even the summaries that it published were enough for us to express some potent skepticism of the numbers back in 2006 and to argue that "the contours and effects of piracy are quite open to debate, and as a result, the best ways to address the problem are up for debate, too."
But the MPAA didn't see it that way. It had its numbers, and it trucked them off to Congress. Howard Berman (D-CA), a powerful Congressman from Hollywood who does plenty of work with IP issues, bought the complete bill of goods. In March of 2007, we reported on Berman's veiled threats against universities and colleges in the US, comments apparently based in part on the now-discredited report.
"Indeed, the statistics demonstrate that students engage in rampant piracy," he said at the time, "and while Congress has given universities many exemptions from copyright liability it might be time to condition some of those exemptions on action taken by universities to address the piracy problem."
This attitude led to bills like the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007, still pending a vote in the House. That bill directs schools to "develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity." Or, in English: figure out some way to sell content to your kids, then figure out some way to filter their Internet connections if that fails. No one was required to implement these plans, but the very fact that the bill has already cleared its House committee suggests that Congress is getting serious about having universities bring down that 44 percent—sorry, 15 percent—number.
But university actions, no matter how draconian, are unlikely to affect collegiate downloading habits too much. The AP also quotes Mark Luke, a VP at education technology group Educause, who argues that most college students live off-campus; therefore, even if the MPAA numbers are now in the ballpark, filtering campus Internet connections will have only a minimal effect.
With most of the Ars staff having backgrounds in higher education, the MPAA lobbying drive to turn universities into copyright cops touches a raw nerve. The fact that one of the key data points in this lobbying for the last two years was overstated by a factor of three is bad, but the fact that it came from a secret report just makes it all worse. After all, this is exactly opposite the approach taken by most of the academic world (and the open-source community) when it comes to research, and there's a good reason why findings need to be open and repeatable and scrutinized by other experts before gaining acceptance. Or before guiding US law.
Yes, college students need to rein in the file-sharing. We get it. Artists need to eat. But while the MPAA has been busy lecturing universities about the way they run their IT operations, perhaps the universities have something to say to the motion picture business about how it buys and releases its research. Back to school, MPAA.
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