Listening to Microsoft and Netscape bickering during the ongoing Microsoft antitrust case in Washington, you would think both companies had only one lofty goal: to serve the customer.

Let's qualify that. In the case of their browsers - the software each company makes which allows computer users to access the World Wide Web - the customer has hardly had a look in. As a matter of fact, the customer, in all the most essential ways, has been left behind in the rush for market domination.

That point has been underlined by an extraordinary campaign launched this week by three rival technology news websites, publisher ZDNet's Anchordesk, (http://www.anchordesk.com), Wired Digital's HotWired (http:www.hotwired.com) and C/Net (http://www.cnet.com).

Usually the three would be battling for similar audiences. But they have united to raise awareness about a key Web issue, the fact that Microsoft and Netscape use different standards (thus, of course, destroying the whole notion of a standard) in creating features for their browsers.

From their earliest days, the two browsers have deliberately gone separate routes in deciding some of the basic ways in which information - text, images, and sound - will be presented to browser users. That means a frustrating level of technical incompatibility for the people who create websites and for the people who use them.

The fact that you can usually see a website using either browser means that the site designers had to spend hours working around incompatibilities. Sometimes you will have problems in viewing information with one browser.

Sometimes the site is impossible to view at all. If you have received a jumbled mess when visiting a site, it's probably due to browser incompatibility.

A collective of leading Web designers called the Web Standards Project (http://www.webstandards.org) is trying to force change. Two of the men leading the charge in the campaign announced on Monday by columnist Jesse Berst of Anchordesk are members of WSP, Jeffrey Veen of HotWired and Dan Schafer of C/Net.

Veen explains in detail the background to the browser problem and various approaches to resolving it. You can read his comments at http://www.hotwired.com/webmonkey/98/43/index0a.html Schafer issues a clarion call to reclaim the Web at http://www.builder.com/authoring/Shafer/102698

Why should you care? Well, incompatibility hits you in the wallet. Either you pay more for Web development if you have someone creating a site for you, who must work around the lack of consistent standards, or your site suffers in accessibility.

Of course, if companies are digging deeper, costs are passed along to users in other ways. If you're a Web user it also means your use of the Web is stunted. Incompatibilities mean it is impossible for designers to do some of the interesting and useful things they'd like with sites.

Veen and Schafer also argue that capabilities they feel would speed the use of the Web are not being developed because of the standards conflict.

But I hope the most persuasive argument for real standards is simply the very nature of the Web. It is a miracle of digital interconnections and works precisely because the pioneers of the medium believed it could, and therefore should.

They created it to operate to standards which nobody could own. Many worked on this global, collaborative project simply because they were in love with the concept. They often were not paid, and today are widely unknown and unsung.

As Veen argues: "Thankfully, most of us don't have to muck around with the underlying code that makes the Internet function. . . In fact, we're so far removed from the underlying protocols that we can completely forget that the Internet isn't really a physical thing, but simply a collection of standards that everyone has agreed to. But without standards, there would be no Internet. The Internet is standards."

Schafer is more militant. "We have all spent far too much time working around and apologising for problems caused not by our own inadequacies as designers but by the flat-out refusal of Microsoft and Netscape to play by the rules - rules in many cases they themselves helped establish and to which they pay lip service."

Berst, Schafer and Veen hope other major (and minor) sites on the Web will unite and pressure Microsoft and Netscape into being less greedy and selfish. What can you do? Visit the Anchordesk site for suggestions.

Go to the WSP site and sign its petition. Write to the companies and complain. Let them know the customer demands a little service.

Karlin Lillington is at klillington@irish- times.ie