Obsolete Power Corrupts

Posted on April 4, 2008
Filed Under Computer Science |

Moving down my bookshelf, I was looking for a good Peter Norvig quotation. Through providence (read: Google), I discovered that Norvig himself maintains a quotes page, and here was my favorite:

“Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.”
~ Ted Nelson, on the Microsoft DOS operating system

Unfortunately, I could not find the source of the quotation, so right now my word is only as good as Peter Norvig’s.

This hearkens back to an age-old question: whether to favor backwards compatibility, or to favor the evolution of systems. Unfortunately, there is no right answer. For a project like Linux, completely changing the device driver interface in 2.6 so that it is 100% incompatible with 2.4 makes perfect sense. The goal of the Linux project is to make a good operating system. If a complete redesign accomplishes that, there’s no sense keeping the crap. A lot of people still use 2.4, and the source is always available if you want to make changes yourself.

On the other hand, you have the Web Developer Dilemma. If enough of your userbase uses Internet Explorer 6, you’d damn well better test your site for functionality in Internet Explorer 6, even though it is a broken browser. Failure to do so causes harm: lost revenues, lost advertising, and lost opportunity. Backwards compatibility is necessary even though your site is being corrupted obsoletely.

Sure, in a magical world where every programmer refuses to conform to a broken model, the user is the one who has to change. However, unless you have some magic date in mind where every single programmer is going to start supporting standards 100% and leave IE6 in the dust, you’d best follow the standards if the traffic and revenue is worth enough to you.

It may be a little hypocritical for me to say that, as my blog is neither standards compliant (this is #1 on the list of things to fix when I graduate and have free time again) nor works in IE6 (this will be fixed never), but most of the violations are in Amazon links I haven’t cleaned up, and for ever 10,000 visits I get, ~75 are IE6 browsers.

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