Slightly ajar

I'm not sure if anyone here is familiar with the state of the Korean web industry, but I've just read a very interesting blog post on Engadget, related to an issue Opera and the Open the Web team know far too well:

South Korea's Ministry of Information and Communication, Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs, and Financial Supervisory Service have all come out against widespread Vista upgrades, advising Joe Consumer -- er, Kim Consumer -- to hold off on upgrading until ActiveX compatibility issues can be worked out. Apparently banks, portals, online games and online shops have relied a bit too heavily on the sometimes insecure ActiveX controls, and are scrambling to make their sites compatible with Windows Vista's new approach to ActiveX. Microsoft has been working with banking services and others to promote compatibility, but the changes are taking longer than it expected, and its not delaying the OS further to appease the stragglers. So the best the South Korean institutions can do is issue said warnings and hope for the best when the 31st rolls around.

Korea has a huge issue with web compatibility. Most sites use Active-X, and even if they don't the majority rely on IE bugs and quirks, instead of following the standards. Looking at almost all of the top sites in any none-IE browser is like looking at a page after it has went through a blender, with mis-placed elements everywhere, and missing content. If IE7 made all of its changes in quirks mode as well as standards mode the Korean web industry would be in even bigger trouble. We've been trying to contact Korean web sites for a long time to fix their sites, but they were either not interested (market share) or didn't reply. There are also grass roots level organisations like OpenWeb Korea that have been trying to combat this problem. Maybe the Korean government and the industry as a whole will realise what we've been trying to tell them all a long -- that relying on one browser, not following standards, and using vendor specific extensions is folly and it will cost you in the end.

Maybe the government should start promoting these open standards now to avoid issues such as this in the future. What will IE8 bring for example? How are you going to get sites to run on mobile, where IE is not king and Active-X or VBScript doesn't exist? How many more Won will it cost the country each time these issues surface? I'm not sure who from Microsoft they are working with to fix these issues, or who Microsoft is talking to, but we have a lot of experience with the problems are facing. We have many issues already found, analysed and suggested fixes ready. We'd love to work with Korea to get their web sites into the 21^st century and away from vendor lock-in, so the offer still stands. If any site want to work with us on fixing their issues then get i touch with me and we'll only be too happy to help