Future proof

Here’s an interesting (frustrating) lesson in future proofing. The office has a linksys wireless router, which has served us well since it was bought toward the end of 2002. Occasionally (but not enough to justify replacing) it will forget all the settings, and I’ll need to go back in to the admin web page and update it.

This isn’t such a big deal, except the admin web page has never been that happy with Safari – it usually fails to load for some inexplicable reason. My fallback has always been using firefox, but I discovered this morning that Firefox 2 is a little stricter on validating javascript, and the onClick-laden form submit buttons no longer work.

So my fallback fallback was to fire up Parallels (in coherence mode of course), and to use Internet Explorer to change the settings. It worked, but it did make me wonder about the built-in obsolescence of devices that play loose with specifications and that have buggy, inaccessible user interfaces.

As we see more devices containing embedded web servers for configuration, are we going to see a corresponding rise in devices becoming obsolete because they no longer work in modern browsers? In the Web 2.0 AJAXish world, it’s more important than ever to write good, clean code that closely follows the standards and degrades gracefully. Otherwise you might find you can’t use your hifi, fridge or oven in a few years’ time.

Related posts:

1. Mobiquitous 2004
2. Back to the Future
3. Safari caching problem
4. Consistent interaction
5. PDA perfection?