MSN, Opera, and Web Standards

On 24 October 2001, users of Opera and Mozilla found themselves locked out of Microsoft’s MSN site. The next day,
CNET
reported the following statement from Microsoft in defense of the lockout:

Microsoft later announced that it had opened up MSN.com to accept all browsers. Not exactly. As of 4 November, Opera was still blocked from some pages when identifying itself as Opera – for instance, this MSN Gaming Zone page, which also generates JavaScript errors in Microsoft’s own IE5/Macintosh. Likewise, after the initial protests, Visse modified his views, according to Scot’s Newsletter:

Since Microsoft so strongly emphasize their support for W3C
specifications, it is worth checking how their documents comply with
those specifications.

On 31 October, I downloaded the home page on MSN, as well as all the links on that site. As a portal, MSN contains many links pointing to different kinds of services, among them the “love” site, the pet page and Microsoft’s own home page. All in all, there are pointers to 62 documents.

The chart on the following page lists all of them, including the MSN home page itself, making a total of 63 web pages that I dutifully tested for W3C standards–compliance.

In order for a browser to display a document correctly, that
document must be valid. To help web developers create documents that validate, the W3C runs a validating service on the web.

To examine the document, the W3C validator must know what specification the document claims to use. All documents must therefore have a DOCTYPE indicator in the head of the document.

This is not the case on MSN: of the 63 documents tested, only 10 declared what version of HTML they were written in.

There are two main flavors of HTML in use today: HTML4 and
XHTML. Microsoft’s first
explanation for locking out Opera was that:

When checking the documents on MSN, however, “the latest XHTML standard” didn’t seem terribly important to Microsoft – only four of 63 documents claimed to be written in XHTML. (Opera happens to have excellent support for XHTML and compares favorably with Microsoft Internet
Explorer for Windows in this regard. But that’s a topic for
another article.)

Running the documents through the W3C validator was the final step of the study. Given Microsoft’s emphasis on W3C specifications, one
would expect their documents to validate. This was
not the case, and the result was as simple as it was shocking: on the date of the study, none of the 63 documents on MSN’s home page was valid according to W3C specifications.

Given this result, one might conclude that Microsoft is actively
sabotaging the work of web standards and W3C – or at the very least, demonstrating an almost unbelievable lack of competence. Microsoft points to W3C
specifications when explaining why they lock competitors’ browsers out of MSN, yet none of the documents published on MSN follow these W3C specifications.  In any case, it will be harder for Microsoft to blame browser lockouts on standards in the future.

The details#section2

The chart on the following page provides detailed information about each file that was tested, including each file’s source code. {Ed. – Original source files referenced by the chart on the following page may not display correctly (or at all), although they did when this article was new.}