Osiolki.net

» see osiolki.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Polish Opera users had a word for a web page that only rendered correctly in Internet Explorer. They called it an osiołek, a little donkey, for the stubbornness of the webmaster rather than the stupidity of the code. In May 2003 four of them turned the running joke into a website and started keeping the list in public.

Osiolki.net ran under the motto Internet. Dla wszystkich, internet for everybody, and the operation behind it was a good deal more patient than the name suggests. A reader reported a broken page. The team checked it against a published set of rules, worked out what was actually wrong, wrote the correction, and mailed it to whoever had built the site. Then they waited eight or nine days, longer if the person asked for longer. Only after that did the page go on the list.

Over roughly three and a half years the volunteer roster grew past twenty people and 814 sites came back fixed. The last of those was logged on 18 July 2007. Nothing was added after it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how you became a donkey ~

The criteria were narrow on purpose. You earned the title for locking out a browser entirely, for errors that made a standards compliant browser unusable, for restricting features with no technical reason, or for a public institution ignoring accessibility guidelines. Hopeless cases got promoted to Super Osiołek. Sites that were fixed before publication went into a hidden section nobody ever saw, which was the outcome the team actually wanted.

The exclusions say more about the project than the rules do. A page broken by a genuine browser bug was not a donkey. Neither was a small deliberate deviation made to keep several browsers happy, nor a trivial code error with no visible effect anywhere. An interactive presentation that honestly needed a capable engine was left alone as well, and so were the online music stores and the antivirus sites whose ActiveX controls could not have worked any other way. This was not a group looking for things to be angry about.

Some Polish webmasters argued the whole thing was a browser vendor's marketing operation in a T-shirt. The team answered that in public and kept going. The condition they were pushing against was the one I was sitting in at the time. Turkish university years with a TTNet line at home from around 2006, pointed at a steady supply of local pages written on the assumption of one browser and one operating system. Nobody in Turkey was keeping a list.

~ what happened to the list ~

The stated cause of closure on the Polish Wikipedia article is a single sentence: the service ended because Internet Explorer's popularity fell. There was no funding crisis and no falling out. The condition they had organized around stopped being the default condition of the web, so the organization had nothing left to do.

The site itself stayed up, frozen, for another five and a half years. Archive captures hold steady at around three kilobytes until early 2013, when the body collapses to 306 bytes and the domain goes. It is a parking page now, dark blue, offering itself for sale. The eight hundred and fourteen fixed pages are mostly gone too, but they were fixed, which was always the only scoreboard that counted.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »