Introduction

As a project manager for mostly web related projects, recent news worries me. To deliver a product to as big an audience possible, we are in desperate need of solid standards and browsers ought to support these standards.
Will the near future allow us to focus on development? Or will it become a period of escalating cost and loss of productivity?

The past two years we saw a promising move towards the web standards on all the major platforms. This better behaviour of the various browsers reduced the costs of the front-end development this allowed us to focus on the development of the application itself.

Recently the term 'version targeting' showed up in the news again, a new platform called chrome was launched by Google, Adobe introduced Air and Microsoft launched Silverlight. I'm all for additional functionality and more competition in the browser market but, as I wrote at the start of this article, it also worries me. How will recent events effect productivity and how will they effect costs?

Version targeting

Version targeting is the process of adding a switch or switches to your website to inform a browser how to behave in order not to break your website.
Version targeting is generally used for one of two reasons. It's used to unlock platform specific features or it's used for backwards compatibility. This time Microsoft brought it back into the news. IE8 will introduce a new switch for backwards compatibility and finally Microsoft got it right. The switch is implemented as an optional meta element which does not violate the W3C standards.

Google Chrome

Currently only a beta version of Google Chrome is available. This beta is not W3C standards compliant. We need to seriously worry about this because with the market power Google possesses they will gain a significant market share. If this isn't improved, we will loose a lot of man-hours on compatibility issues with chrome.

Air and Silverlight

Air and Silverlight are technologies which allow us to add rich content to our websites. Both should be compatible with all platforms through plug inns. Both are not functional yet on all major platforms. It is a slight worry but for now we trust them to make good on their promise.

Conclusion

At this time we can only hope for the best. The major players have promised to make their technologies browser independent. I do advice everyone to allocate part of their budget to deal with compatibility issues for now because there still are a lot of uncertainties.