A miserable pile of code!

oh wait…..

Also, if you’re going to claim that 50% of americans can’t find europe, please cite a source.

The hypertext transfer protocol (http://) was a revolutionary improvement over the gopher protocol (gopher://) for several reasons, but the ability to link relevant and related documents, plus the ease of navigating a Web site compared to a Gopher site, made access intuitive and fast.

The Web would have been impossible without internationally recognized standards. HTML and XHTML are markup languages based upon SGML, Standard Generalized Markup Language (ISO 8879).

Initially, the 22 tags defined by Tim Berners-Lee were “HTML,” but the initial release of the NCSA Mosaic browser added a tage to support inline images (which it could display directly, which differed from image support in Lynx, a text-based browser that supported downloading images only — and Lynx is still in use and is an excellent tool for testing site accessibility…and images lacking the ALT tag that describes the image appear as ‘[image]‘, which the only information visually impaired users get about images). Surprisingly, Lynx supported tables for organizing information, but Mosaic did not.

The developers of Mosaic went on to write Netscape’s browser, which became extremely popular. Microsoft “woke up” and realized, “Oops! We do not offer a Web browser!” After Microsoft was denied a Netscape license, it purchased the Spyglass Web browser and rebranded it as Internet Explorer.

Competing interests and the constant flow of new proprietary tags, which were one feature of the “browser wars,” led to serious discussions about standards; the IETF had released an Internet draft for “HTML,” Dave Raggett had a competing Internet draft, “HTML+,” and Netscape and Microsoft added proprietary tags with every minor release.

I’ve been hand-coding Web sites since 1992 and I had to resort to writting and adding “browser sniffing” JavaScript code in HTML documents in an effort to make content accessible to each major browser.

Although there was no HTML 1.0 IETF standard, the IETF publish the drafter for HTML 2.0 in November 2004.

Since 1996, the HTML specifications have been maintained, with input from commercial software vendors, by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which provides on-line and downladable (open-souce code) tools to allow Web designers and developers to validate their HTML, XHTML, and CSS code.

Internet Explorer has the poorest record of supporting the W3C’s standards. Firefox got Microsoft’s attention, and Microsoft has made improvements with MSIE 7 and 8, although Microsoft will always support “MS-HTML” and there are Web sites “work” with Internet Explorer only.

The whole point of Web standards is to allow Web sites and browsers to be compatible, regardless of the browser or computing platform.

Security is also an issue, and Internet Explorer’s use of ActiveX controls makes it inherently dangerous.

Users who do not know what a Web browser is obviously cannot take advantage of the options they have (aside from IE, which Microsoft rams down the throats of Windows users in the US, but cannot do in EU countries — nor can Microsoft install Windows Media Player on copies of Windows sold in Europe. (Many town and city governments have dropped Microsoft altogether and are using Linux and free, open-source software — a trend that started in Germany and has proven to be very successful.)

Sadly, there are Windows users who use Internet Explorer, “because it’s there,” and beginning Mac users typically use Apple’s Safari browser, although Firefox is very popular with Mac users.

People do not know what a Web browser is, think that the Web is the Internet (and they though AOL was the Internet before its demise), and Google has achieved “Microsoft-like” status. In popular culture, if people refer to performing a Web search, they often use “google” as a verb.

American ignorance is more than embarrassing. Someone mentioned in a comment that 50% of Americans cannot find Europe on a globe or world map.

Has anyone quoted the recent survey of American high school students? It revealed that 25% of high school juniors and seniors could not find the United States on a world map or globe.

Cordially,

David

hell, it’s just a matter of knowing a minimum of info about your tool. so would you go driving a car without your license and knowing a minimum about the said vehicle? ha!

Of course, Microsoft hasn’t exactly helped by naming others of its facilities, Windows Explorer and MSN Explorer.

And, with the url bar somewhat doubling as a search bar these days, it seems easy enough to see, and maybe forgive, people confusing browsing with searching.
I have a “young” (compared to me anyway) couple I’ve been tutoring a bit lately in computers and the internet, are themselves technicians of a sort (electricians, well husband anyway, wife just helps) and the guy in fact claims to have been in , 25 years ago, the very first high school computer class/program in the United States (Templeton, Massachusetts). But either one of them so far is proving impossible to get to do their “searching” from the search bar or a search engine page and bar: they utterly insist upon putting their search terms into the URL bar…and of course complain that “it doesn’t always work too well.”
But their probable point of view: a few months ago we had never gone online by ourselves…we’ve still got things like left click vs right click (and an awful lot more) assaulting our brains and right now troubling with just about anything beyond what even just more or less works for us, is overload, plain and simple.

No one has been brainwashed to not try to understand how planes work, but almost everyone went to school and got their natural curiosity distorted or erased…

I am getting more and more annoyed by the fact that people take absolutely no interest in details in their lives. As long as they have food and somewhere to live, they have no problem being force fed by commercials, propagandha, public opinion and all of the rest. They just take on any idea that sounds good enough and act out of pure ignorance…

Well you could call it “North America” as the original poster said “Europe”

Perhaps he meant “EU”

If I use something, whether it be a car, computer, air transport, cell phone… I will research it, both to satisfy my own curiosity, and to at least have a basic idea of what to do when it breaks. And it really makes me sad to see that not only is my attitude quite far outside the norm, but that laziness and apathy have become the standard.