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It wasn't the fact that it was just a browser, it was also a browser that managed to be annoyingly incompatible with standards. Not to mention was created specifically to stop Netscape.

Did you use the internet a decade ago? Back in the late, Netscape Navigator sucked compared to the IE versions available at the time. IE4's support for the HTML DOM and CSS were much better than Navigator 4's. Both companies frequently ingored standards and created their own, and many times this actually was good. Remember blink (NN)/marquee(IE)? Frames, cookies, and JavaScript? All Netscape inventions. XMLHttpRequest, which enables "AJAX" and makes things like Gmail and the new Slashdot possible? Originally developed by Microsoft in 1999 and later implemented by other browsers starting in 2002. Oh... and the standard - still a working draft - was first drafted in 2006.

Many of the complaints made regarding IE in the past 5 years or so could apply to the last versions of Netscape Navigator.

• From 2001: "Unfortunately, NN 4.xx had only minor and cosmetic updates while Explorer was able to incorporate more CSS features, and re-work buggy implementations."
• From 2002: "Netscape 4.x is the single biggest obstacle to standards-based web design."
• Some interesting comments from 2003

Read on.

The actual issue that people who created things years ago have stopped doing any interesting new work or contributing to society, yet still expect to get paid?

Or the actual issue that these copyrights do nothing but stifle everything except "approved creativity". Ask Apotheosis about that one.

Maybe the actual issue of companies like Disney leeching off of public domain works and parlaying them into a profit, but then lobbying to keep their work out of the public domain and giving others the same benefit they had?

Or maybe you just wish you were one of those entitled "artists" in the above categories.

Plus, one should not forget to mention that they spent all that time redesigning their website without tables only to figure out that in order to get any of that neat stuff like, catalogs, forums, search results, product lists, address books, etc. you got to have tabular data,.i.e. TABLES.

No, most of us are smart enough to know which tool to use for which job. It's not CSS's fault if one person happens not to be.

Some of the links:

macedition.com
CSS sucks
CSS doesn't work anywhere any way consistently so why bother pushing its use? Point what doesn't work, tell web browser companies what they are doing wrong and beg/plead/demand they fix it.

Some idiot that can't tell the difference between a browser issue and a CSS issue.

soulthought.org
Okay...CSS sucks...well, browsers do, anyway...
I spent the entire weekend wasting my time trying to get a CSS-based three-panel layout to work properly. I finally digressed to a two-panel layout, and now it looks okay in IE and sucks in Mozilla Firebird. If you people would follow the standards, this would be easy!!!!!!

Someone who can tell the difference. Doesn't support the original site's flawed argument at all.

nuketown.com
When I re-designed Nuketown last year, I went to a CSS-only layout and I regret it; while the design works for the most part, there's really no way to make sure all three columns are automatically the same length (as is the case with tables). I have to resort to hacks

Misses the point of CSS.

fishbowl.pastiche.org
Cascading Style-Sheets Suck
I loathe CSS with a passion.
Correction. I loathe the fact that every web browser supports a different, incompatible subset of CSS2. W3C standards were supposed to save us from having to test pages in every single browser under the sun, but we're travelling at high speed in the opposite direction.

Someone who can tell the difference between the two issues but still wrote two titles damning CSS before acknowledging the real issue. Doesn't support any argument against CSS.

globalcoordinate.com
I'm sorry but I think that the designers of the CSS stylesheet spec should be shot. Why does simple layout have to such a black art?

Hmmm.

/* double, double, toil and trouble */
#left {
float: left; /* fire burn and caldron bubble */
width: 15%;
}
/* macbeth! macbeth! macbeth! */
#middle {
margin: 0 16% 0 16%; /* to be replaced with eye of newt */
}
#right {
float: right;
width: 15%;
}

And finally, Barry:

barry.pearson.name
CSS positioning is so fragile that I can publish simple material, conforming to specifications published many years ago, and not have a clue about what people "out there" can see or not see. It isn't just about whether it has the intended colour. It might not appear at the right place on the page. It might not appear at all!

That's a link to a browser bug, Barry you big failure.
More from Barry:

There is a mention of something resembling page layout in the CSS2 Recommendation. "9.6.1 Fixed positio

Here's a piccie of it. Whoops, no underscore between 'nice' and 'job.'

"whatever the hell that thing is in the Mac logo" that would be a mac.. or a sad mac http://www.macedition.com/partingshot/sad_mac_2001 0914.jpg.. it depends on if he hit the memory controler before the picture was taken

You will, however, notice that many of the bugs mentioned there are fairly trivial, and (as of Firefox 0.8) several of them appear to be fixed now.

It's not anything like IE's bugginess and incomplete support. You don't see freak bugs like IE's margin-doubling. IE also lacks support for :hover, position: fixed, and has many other bugs and omissions.

And the fact is, no browser supports all of CSS2. Mozilla (Gecko) has much better support than most browsers, and they are constantly improving it's rendering. Compare that with the stagnation of IE's development over the last several years.

But IE on the Mac IS out of date,

So? Many people use out-of-date software, you shouldn't force a person to upgrade when their current setup works well enough.

it doesn't work properly,

Only if you define "properly" so strictly that no other browser would work "properly" according to that definition. All browsers have significant rendering bugs. In the case of IE for Mac, the problem is just as likely to be that the site is not being compliant because IE for Mac is less lax in requiring standards compliance than many other browsers (again, I remind you that it's a completely separate program from IE for Windows).

it is slow,

True, but if that doesn't bother the user in question, who cares? The topic here was whether a poster's dad should continue using IE for Mac or not.

and it isn't being supported.

Actually, support won't be retired until 31 December 2005. But since Microsoft support is useless anyway, who cares?

The rest of your message was just off-topic so I'll let that be.

Go here for an introduction to the difficulties of modern web development with IE for Windows.

For me, the two biggest problems with IE for Windows that I run into are:

1. The complete lack of CSS2 selectors. It's just annoying to have to go to a lot of trouble to implement something that would be trivial with a sibling or descendent selector.

2. The box model in IE for Windows is wrong, not "different" as you say, but wrong. It incorrectly includes margin and border width in size calculations. This is not a matter of different interpretation. It is broken behavior. And I am unaware of any way to make IE for Windows correct this problem by using a different DOCTYPE as you suggest. If you could provide any documentation on how to do this, I would be seriously grateful because it is a major thorn in my side.

Even leaving all the comments and indentations in, I was able to reduce a 68KB page to a 36KB one, plus a 5KB stylesheet. Moreover, the number of images loaded per page went from 205 to 52.

They also fixed the CSS bugs on Mac IE.

Judging from the Mac IE CSS bugs, I'd say that Mac IE uses a completely different CSS engine than Windows IE.

Look here for a list of CSS bugs that Mac IE has that Windows IE doesn't.

Also, Mac IE has the *worst* javascript implementation of any 5.x+ browser.

All in all, Mac IE should be avoided like the plague.. it's on par with Netscape 4.

I am aware of nonconformities to the latest CSS standards.

Look at this chart. Just scroll down and skim the list. See all that purple in the first and second columns? Those are all things that IE doesn't do properly. Check out the third column from the right, Mozilla. Not much purple there at all.

Or try here. Scroll down and look at all of the non-green in the first column (IE 6). Compare it to Gecko (Mozilla).

Even better, try this one. Be sure to use the blue arrows at the bottom right to go through all of the pages. Compare IE6 to Netscape 7 (Mozilla).

I'm going to have stop here because I just can't stop laughing. Try and code a webpage sometime, you'll see how bad IE is. I think a better question to ask is "What CSS standards does IE comply to?"

However, as a browser, it is one of the browsers that will render even partially received information (or broken HTML) correctly.

Really, I hope you were joking...

I think the GPL promotes speech-type freedoms, by preventing it from being taken away. By inflating the commons (making revisions free as well) it enables people to make their own revisions.

It's much like freedom to innovate is dependent on tool access. When I started computing in the early 80s, computers shipped with schematics and the complete development library used to write the system code. (An assembler, and a basic interpretter, but it's still what they used.) Now, if it wasn't for free-software languages, you'd have to spend $500+ to even begin to really program (not just script something for another program, like VB is pretty much limited to). This reduction in the ability of the average person to participate would really limit the diversity of opinions and would lead to the only forums being tightly-controlled ones where the owners censored everyone, yet users didn't have a valid alternative.

Or, there's an interesting article here that talks about Carl Orff who wrote his opera Carmina Burana "based mostly on modern interpretations of Hungarian folk music and nursery rhymes that had fascinated Orff since he was a child." He borrowed the culture that surrounded him and he wrote powerful music. Later, in the 80s, comes Techno band Apotheosis and they do something similar, they write a song call O Fortuna, based largely on Orff's work, but in a very different way. The way that an adventure I wrote involving wizards and rangers wouldn't be like LotR, but could been seen to have derived much in the way of ideas from it.

Of course, Orff's estate sued. he was allowed to borrow his culture to create new music, but Apotheosis isn't allowed to do the same.

There's a reason why people are referred to a consumers these days. It's all we're supposed to be. The laws have changed (essentially perpetual copyright, the DMCA removing the ability to copy for quotation or parody, etc) so that unless we invent a new work totally out of vacuum, not based on anything even slightly identifiable, we don't have the right to claim that it's ours.

The GPL prevents this by saying that while you can use something, it has to be available to enrich future generation in the same way. And it's not enough that the original is available, the work is seen as a living entity, always changing to remain relevant. Orff based his work on what he was surrounded by, Hungarian Folk Music, and Apotheosis based their music on what they were surrounded by, Carl Orff's music among other things, and I'll base my music on what I was surrounded by as I grew up, god help me, 80s rock. :)

If copyright was reasonable, so that it lasted a generation or less and I could learn from and build upon what I grew up with, legally, we wouldn't need the GPL. It's a response to copyright that may never expire, to people claiming ownership of derivative works based on a single guitar riff, or to people embrace-and-extending the tools of the commons in order to lock people into a proprietary protocol which of course, you're not allowed to embrace (except at $300 per seat), or extend.

The GPL very much protects freedoms, the free aspect is a side effect that just happens to be kinda cool. I think if you read Stallman's essay's it'll be clear that (right or wrong) this is what was going through his mind as he conceived of it - it wasn't that he didn't want to pay $20 for printer drivers, it was that he couldn't get them, for love or money, and wasn't allowed to make his own. (Without reinventing a very large, copyright-protected wheel.)

Read why here.

Nothing (yet) beats gecko's (mozilla renderer) CSS 1/2 compliance.

The most complete list I'm currently aware of is at macedition check it out here

I did a quick tally from that table and Opera is the champion with only 11 "Not OK's" compared to Mozilla's 14.

"Along that line, are there any good places to look for mozilla/mozilla firebird's CSS2 compliance?"

Very good.. if you don't realize already, IE is terrible with CSS2. Nothing (yet) beats gecko's (mozilla renderer) CSS 1/2 compliance.

The most complete list I'm currently aware of is at macedition check it out here

One thing that Ars Technica didn't mention is that MS does still have a browser for OS X. It just isn't available for free download - you have to subscribe to the MSN isp (I think) to get it.

According to this report MSN Explorer/Mac actually has the best support for CSS 3 selectors of any current browser. Too bad it's only available to paying customers.

Read why here.

Its commonly beleived that users won't upgrade their browsers; but its not true. MacOSX has mostly shipped with IE; the most common browser now is Safari. See here and here. The change happened too fast to be thru new installs.

I know this topic has been talked to death already but this is a good followup to the previous slashdot article questioning Apple's G5 results.

Simply put, misinformation is rampant about elementary facts of the SPEC tests and spl got it badly wrong. Charlie White's results don't even warrant comment frankly.

There's strong opinion (certainly not to everyone's tastes) in this piece, such as:

...The thought of a Mac with more horsepower than an Alpha workstation was just too much to bear for one sad little troll, so he deliberately misrepresented the VeriTest white paper, accused Apple of cheating, and managed to get this nasty little propaganda job posted to the front page of Slashdot, computer geek central, where he managed to find many sympathetic ears. We can forgive "spl", as he's not a professional journalist, and savaging him for being too stupid to understand the white paper and too lazy to ask anyone with a clue is like kicking a puppy for peeing on the rug; but now it seems that Mark Hachman at Extreme Tech all but plagiarized that troll-cum-article by "spl." He pretends that his bold discovery was all his own, independently verified by "spl"...like the rest of the universe doesn't read Slashdot and wasn't aware of the issue the day before his odious little hatchet job saw the light of day. Who does he think he's fooling? Since he's leeched onto spl's idiocy, and magnified it in a widely read online publication, Mark gets to bear the brunt of my wrath for being too stupid to understand the white paper, and too lazy to ask anyone with a clue. Pretty piss-poor behavior for a professional journalist. He's obviously from the Jayson Blair school of reporting, only without the writing ability.

But I recommend it personally (no, I'm not the author but yes I'm involved with the site.) Read the rest here.

I know this topic has been talked to death already but this is a good followup to the previous slashdot article questioning Apple's G5 results.

Simply put, misinformation is rampant about elementary facts of the SPEC tests and spl got it badly wrong. Charlie White's results don't even warrant comment frankly.

There's strong opinion (certainly not to everyone's tastes) in this piece, such as:

...The thought of a Mac with more horsepower than an Alpha workstation was just too much to bear for one sad little troll, so he deliberately misrepresented the VeriTest white paper, accused Apple of cheating, and managed to get this nasty little propaganda job posted to the front page of Slashdot, computer geek central, where he managed to find many sympathetic ears. We can forgive "spl", as he's not a professional journalist, and savaging him for being too stupid to understand the white paper and too lazy to ask anyone with a clue is like kicking a puppy for peeing on the rug; but now it seems that Mark Hachman at Extreme Tech all but plagiarized that troll-cum-article by "spl." He pretends that his bold discovery was all his own, independently verified by "spl"...like the rest of the universe doesn't read Slashdot and wasn't aware of the issue the day before his odious little hatchet job saw the light of day. Who does he think he's fooling? Since he's leeched onto spl's idiocy, and magnified it in a widely read online publication, Mark gets to bear the brunt of my wrath for being too stupid to understand the white paper, and too lazy to ask anyone with a clue. Pretty piss-poor behavior for a professional journalist. He's obviously from the Jayson Blair school of reporting, only without the writing ability.

But I recommend it personally (no, I'm not the author but yes I'm involved with the site.) Read the rest here.

Easy place to look:

http://www.macedition.com/cb/resources/macbrowserc sssupport.html

Try this one.

But they did technically update IE for Mac OS X. What would have been the next IE version was instead bundled into MSN for Mac OS X.

The sad part is that this new IE is now one of the most standard-compliant browsers around. Just look at this CSS Support Chart. Tantek (an IE:Mac developer) hints even more support. From the chart, it's better than Safari and comparable to Mozilla. But no one seems to have notice.

Which is a shame on Microsoft for hiding this great new browser under MSN. With all the fan-fare on the (not-free) MSN look and feel, the technically superiority of the new IE:Mac rendering engine gets lost.

If you actually look at the link (which compares CSS Support in a range of browsers) you gave, technically MSN for Mac OS X (which is basically the newest version of IE:Mac) clearly supports more "stuff" than WebCore/KHTML (and quite comparable to Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine as well). There's a lot of new work put into standards-support in Microsoft's new Mac browser based on the chart.

And too bad, no one has seemed to noticed.

Which is too bad considering how much work the IE:Mac crew put into this new browser. Check out Tantek's log (he's part of Microsoft's IE:Mac team) about his disappointment with the news.

IE:Mac was special in that it brought a lot of innovation to the browser arena: Find as you Type, Text Zoom, Doctype switching and many more.

There was an article on MacEdition a few weeks ago in which CodeBitch talked about tabbed browsing.

The most interesting part of the article though, was the graphic halfway down the page that showcased the browser shares of Mac Edition visitors from November 2000 to March 2003.

There was an article on MacEdition a few weeks ago in which CodeBitch talked about tabbed browsing.

The most interesting part of the article though, was the graphic halfway down the page that showcased the browser shares of Mac Edition visitors from November 2000 to March 2003.

There was an article on MacEdition a few weeks ago in which CodeBitch talked about tabbed browsing.

The most interesting part of the article though, was the graphic halfway down the page that showcased the browser shares of Mac Edition visitors from November 2000 to March 2003.

What an utterly useless comment this was. "KHTML sucks, dudes, but I don't know why." Pfeh.

If you did about three minutes of research, you could find a link like this one that tells you exactly in what way KHTML sucks... and more importantly, points out to you that it doesn't

But hey, let's not worry about the facts when we can just spew bile, right?

WebCore/KHTML is getting there at a great pace. It has awesome support for most stuff, and as Microsoft says, it's better than IE/Mac.

It has fairly thick CSS support, too:

Woot, link!

While I recognize the right of Apple to dictate conditions & practices to their resellers, I think Apple is being short-sighted by scaring off resellers like this. Agreements not allowing recompense for damages, and preferentially releasing product earlier to their own stores is clearly creating an unfair competitive situation favourable to Apple Retail, something which Apple said they would not do when they announced their retail store strategy 2 years ago. Sure, it means more business will go to Apple Stores and Apple online, but there is also a cost invloved: fewer people in the market to promote Macintosh products. One example is that Elite and other resellers are/were able to get into vertical markets in a way Apple would never have the resources to pay attention to.

While deprecating resellers for company-branded stores may result in a short-term finacial gain, I think it's poor long-term strategy for the overall health of the platform. Note to all you people out there saying "Slashdot has double standards with MS!" it's not the same, since

I suspect that Tasman 0.9 is newer than the version in IE 5.2.1. According to CodeBitch's latest article, she's already seen a new version of IE in the logs, and the version in MSN Explorer for Mac is the same as the version that will be in the next IE.

Here's the link to the MacEdition report this guy's talking about:

http://www.macedition.com/nmr/nmr_20021112.php

Suffice to say for now that this is unmistakeably good news

--CodeBitch

I wrote an
SoupIsGood Food

As usual, CodeBitch has something interesting to say about standards in general and ESPN in particular.

the lesson from this seems to be that, given the mac's proportionally smaller user base, mac users seem to often get the short end of the stick when it comes to cross-platform drivers &c. the makers of vuescan and macbibble can probably attest to this. bibble, as i recall, was originally inspired by nikon's hideously buggy/crash-prone driver software for their D1, which set a few bars in terms of digital camera hardware but was well-nigh unuseable by mac users because of the software (which you had to buy separately!). we're seeing the same thing these days with quark, albeit in stronger language.

granted, this is pretty much the way it's going to be as long as mac users make up 5-10% (depending on who you ask) of the desktop computer using population, but it's still a drag.

Seriously, though -- Opera must have a smaller "market share" than iCab, let alone OmniWeb, IE, Gecko-flavors or...well, smaller than ANYthing that browses on the Mac.

In any case, in the Aqua interface, trays are a specific & unambiguous interface style that for whatever reason hasn't been used very often so far. The best example I can think of from one of the "core" applications is Mail.app, for which there is a screenshot at Apple's site. The other big application I can think of right now is Omniweb, which uses a drawer to organize bookmarks. (I'm not an Omniweb user, so I wasn't aware of that until searching for this post :). Of freeware apps that I use regularly, the best example I can think of is (the very slick) MacJournal, which uses two trays -- one to present a list of journals, the other to present entries within a particular journal (for example).

Now that I poke around a bit, the best critical reviews of the tray interface I can find so far are this MacEdition review and this Oreillynet tutorial. (John Siracusa also wrote some excellent OSX reviews for Ars Technica, but I can't find a section that focuses on drawers in particular.)

But the authoritative reference -- which unfortunately doesn't seem to have screenshots to go along with the prose -- is the Apple MacOS X Human Interface Guidelines:

Drawers are a special window type, found only in Mac OS X. They are child windows--which slide out from a parent window--that users can open or close (show or hide) while the parent window is open. These windows should be used for tools or controls that are closely associated with the parent window and frequently accessed, but do not need to be visible all the time. For example, Mail uses a drawer to provide access to the user's mailboxes.

So while this isn't incompatible with what you're asking for, it looks to me like it's not quite the same thing. This is an existing toolkit that could be called on by any Cocoa or Carbon application, and it seems to me like this is a perfect example of where best to apply it.

Thanks! And the MacEdition Guide to CSS2 support in Mac-only browsers has been updated for Safari.

MacEdition has a good writer who tirelessly flogs web standards. She has several guides to cross-browser CSS support at the bottom of the page.

The company clearly doesn't want to properly support Macs. Whatever spin the marketroids want to put on it, it comes down to Quark not giving a rat's ass about Mac support. I'm pure Mac OS X now (aside from one little legacy program that I don't think is even made any more - but it's not a heavy-duty program so emulation is fine), and it's great. Adobe has committed, M$, for %$@&'s sake, has committed. Quark simply doesn't want Mac business any longer. Leave them.

OmniWeb is not without flaws. It needs some CSS improvements, seriously

"Some" CSS improvements?? OmniGroup is so far behind the curve on CSS that I don't bother to account for it in my sites.

its text rendering...can't be beat.

I used to agree, because it was the only browser that used OS X's text rendering capabilities. Recent versions of Mozilla now use Cocoa for text rendering, obviating the only real presentational advantage of OW. I can't comment on its other nifty features because it's just too frustrating to watch it break compliant sites.

Mozilla ain't perfect. It renders fairly quickly, but the interface is a bit rough and the programmers don't seem to know about multi-threading (trying to open a new tab while a page is loading usually takes two or three tries). However, it's the benchmark for standards compliance, and for that I'm eternally grateful.

As The Apple Turns is another excellent site for commentary and rumors.

And how could we forget the Naked Mole Rat's reports over at MacEdition? He's the grand-daddy of all rumormongers; he got his start as Mac the Knife way back when MacWeek was still around.

Glad to see they got some of their data from CodeBitch's Mac Bug List.

Her column is bloody excellent for browser discussion. Always informative and well researched.

I could be wrong, but none of those bugs seemed to address the major problem I have with IE on Mac (apart from it being dog slow...), that weird bug where it doesn't render large slabs of a page at all unless you click on it or resize the window...
unless that's a result of the overflowing/clipping bug...

Glad to see they got some of their data from CodeBitch's Mac Bug List.

Her column is bloody excellent for browser discussion. Always informative and well researched.

I could be wrong, but none of those bugs seemed to address the major problem I have with IE on Mac (apart from it being dog slow...), that weird bug where it doesn't render large slabs of a page at all unless you click on it or resize the window...
unless that's a result of the overflowing/clipping bug...

See macedition.com/nmr/nmr_20020914.php

(Disclaimer: Naked Mole Rat Reports are usually hilarious. But for the first time, on Sept. 14 there was a "guest columnist," who wrote a lame parody of those Nigerian spam messages.)

See macedition.com/nmr/nmr_20020914.php

(Disclaimer: Naked Mole Rat Reports are usually hilarious. But for the first time, on Sept. 14 there was a "guest columnist," who wrote a lame parody of those Nigerian spam messages.)

For almost two years this author has been writing extensively and authoritatively on the need for, and the problems with not using, HTML standards. She's even developed test suites for CSS and other compliance. You might be surprised that Opera doesn't fare so well.

Overall, great tips I've not seen elsewhere -- so get CodeBitch to crack the whip.

That's backlash

(Check those URLs!) :)

Aren't you aware that QuickTime 6, which implements MPEG 4, has been finished and ready for release for quite some time, but Apple is witholding it until the MPEG LA creates a sensible licensing scheme?

Apple is making a principled stand for all of us little guys.