Will Browser-Neutral Web Soon Become Thing Of Past?

Psychotic Venom asks: "I do ASP development as a part-time job during school. ASP's not my first love or anything, but I don't have a great deal against it. I recently went to an ASP site and got this message and I just wonder what's really going on. I mean, I LIKE Netscape. I like having an option...and I thought that was part of the reason behind a server side scripting language. So are we all slowly being pushed out to the point that we really DON'T have a choice if we want to really do Web surfing? Are we going to have to keep IE on our machines to view anything Pro-Microsoft and Netscape for everything against it?" And after reading this, I suddenly found the words "Netscape-specific tags" on the tip of my tongue. Yes, the bad karma finally catches up with Netscape, but the browser market is a hell of a lot larger now than it was in 1995. Pretty soon we may see e-Commerce sites silently echoing this sentiment, upgrading perfectly valid HTML forms to ones that depend on client-side components that will only work on Microsoft (or Microsoft sanctioned) operating systems. If a few major players on the Web adopt similar practices, the standards-compliant Web, as we know it, will die. Can this be prevented?