Over half of Chinese web pages will "disappear" within a year - Wulin Blog Network

The release of the IE8 beta version and the official launch of the ACID3 test sound like exciting technological progress, but for Chinese-language websites, it is a great threat: this means that within one year, more than half of Chinese webpages will either achieve webpage standardization or disappear from the internet forever. The non-standard nature of the Chinese internet is world-renowned. The three major portals, Baidu, and QQ all use non-standard webpages. When IE8 is officially released and popularized, the Chinese internet will face a reshuffle. Most non-standard webpages will not be able to be displayed and will "disappear from the internet" forever.

Counting on one hand, there is less than a year left.

What are webpage standards?

Webpage standards are, to the people of our country, an even stranger term than "browser."

Simply put, a browser is the software you use to view webpages, while the role of webpage standards is to make the browser follow the webpage's instructions. If the webpage code tells the browser to display "1," the browser should not display "2."

The organization that establishes current webpage standards is the W3C, founded by Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the internet, and now includes many manufacturers and academic institutions, such as Nokia, Opera, and Microsoft.

For a long time, standards have been continuously evolving and upgrading in the hands of the W3C, reaching near perfection technologically; the HTML5 standard even includes details related to audio and video on webpages. Meanwhile, more and more webpages in the world do not conform to these standards.

The reason is simple: Microsoft's IE browser, which has an absolute majority of users worldwide, is a browser that does not follow the rules. When the code tells it to display "1," it will unhesitatingly display "2."

Microsoft IE: Non-standardization is core competitiveness

On Microsoft's official website, it clearly states support for web standards. In fact, Microsoft has always paid lip service while acting otherwise.

Through the bundling of browsers with Windows operating systems in the 1990s, Microsoft successfully ousted the former browser giant Netscape.

Since then, the IE browser has become the de facto web standard.

Over time, errors have become truths. When most web developers want to display "2" on a webpage, they will write "display 1" in the code. The internet is full of non-standard webpages because standard webpages simply cannot be displayed in IE.

For other browsers, this is a disaster. Because Microsoft's non-compliance with standards is completely opaque, there are no documents telling you that IE will display "1" as "2." When other browsers display "1" according to the code, countless users come to complain that the browser is malfunctioning.

This provides IE with its core competitiveness - if you want to "normally" access the internet filled with error-ridden webpages, you have no choice but IE.

Other Browsers: Too clear, and there are no fish

Opera 9 was the first browser on the Windows platform to pass the ACID2 standard test, fully complying with W3C web standards. However, the most common complaint from users was why certain webpages were not displaying correctly and why certain websites could not be used.

Mozilla Firefox is also similar. Although the official version 2.0 has not yet passed the ACID2 test, its test version of Firefox 3 can already display the yellow smiling face during testing. And the most significant feeling among the guinea pig users who tested Firefox 3 was that although the browser had become more standardized, relatively speaking, there were more "abnormal" webpages compared to version 2.

The news that IE8 will support standards by default is excellent for them. Currently, only webpages that function normally under Opera 9.2x official versions can guarantee that they will not "disappear forever" after one year.

Standards in China

All along, the Chinese internet industry has never felt the inconvenience caused by IE's non-standardization.

Any programmer engaged in internet development in China knows that as long as the webpages or applications they create can be used normally in IE, the boss will be completely satisfied. Complaints from users of almost all other browsers will end up unresolved.

Microsoft fixed some "non-compliant" errors in IE7, causing some websites to fail entirely in IE7, yet the entire internet did not experience any major issues. The most severe problem was that the once-popular Dongwang Forum discovered that long posts were directly cut off by tables in IE7, making the lower part unable to display.

Using the W3C Validator to test the homepages of the three major portals, none of them were entirely standard. QQ Space would detect the user's browser and block access if it was not IE.

It took 10 months from the test to the official release of IE7, and the test version of IE8 has already been released, with the official version expected soon. Undoubtedly, as long as Microsoft keeps its word, standardizing webpages is the future trend.

Chinese-language internet has no choice but to hope that Chinese webpages will still be visible after a year.