UK Gov’t Browser Guidance is Flawed (Here Too)
Monday, September 22nd, 2008
I’ve been lax in writing about the recent UK Government’s Central Office of Information (COI) public consultation on browser standards for public websites partly because my location in the colonies is way across the planet, but also because I’ve been a bit close to public sector web development recently and am a little jaded by that experience. So, this post is about the COI Guideance on web browser support, but will flow into some comment about the Tasmanian State Government policies versus realities of web publishing.
The Expense of Widely Supporting Browsers
The premise of the COI guidance in the UK is that apparently it’s very expensive and time consuming to test websites across all browsers and on all operating systems, therefore they recommend only providing full support to browsers above a certain threshold appearing in their visitor logs. That’s one tick for big browsers and one flick for all those minor annoying little upstarts that tend to get under everyone’s feet. Lesser supported browsers just get the guarantee of a working navigation but the site may not display as intended. That’s just bollocks (in UK terms).
WaSP Speak Out
It was only a short time and the WaSP (Web Standards Project) published an article titled UK government draft browser guidance is daft browser guidance explaining why the COI have it so bloody wrong. The WaSP ask a critical question - when the COI write, may not display as intended
, by whom? Who decides what the cut-off level might be, or what the intended display should be?
