Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's IE 5.5 Flouts Industry Standards
Eric Harlow writes: "Microsoft's newly released Internet Explorer 5.5 is trying to do something Microsoft was worried that Netscape might do -- make the browser a platform. Of course, now that IE has 86% of the market, it can lure developers into using flashy new tools that leave Netscape users out of the dust since the new IE has all kinds of 'IE only' features -- and they haven't managed to fix standard items as CSS."
Here's the CNET story; a snippet reads: "Together, the proprietary innovation and the purported faults in standards compliance mean that Web pages created to work for IE--widely considered to be the dominant browser--won't work with browsers from Netscape, Opera Software and other providers."
Similarly, jchristopher writes: "The Web Standards project has come out against Microsoft again, this time blasting them for the proprietary "enhancements" found in their recently released IE 5.5 Web browser. Microsoft is up to their tricks again. Meanwhile, the browser still does not fully support CSS1. Here is the press release from the Web Standards Project."
I wish companies would stop touting incompatibility with others as a desirable feature rather than a liability. Would you buy a wrench that said "Works only on Ford"?
Right now I'm in the process of creating a site for a business that wants all of the latest gizmos on their site (and since their targeting businesses with T1 connections, bandwidth isn't a problem). So I've been playing with JavaScript over the pass couple weeks, keeping the every-handy book "JavaScript: The Definitive Guide" (from O'Reilly) by my side. Now, it's a well known fact that O'Reilly is not in bed with MS (quite the opposite, in fact). But in the 3rd edition (copyright June 1998) IE's support for modifying styles thru JavaScript beat Netscape's, hands down. CSS is an open standard, and JavaScript was originally a _proprietary_ Netscape innovation.
My point is simple, both companies/browsers have their faults. Personally, I hate both of them, but I (regretfully) use IE. All I really want in a browser is the following:
* HTML 4.0 _full_ compliancy
* CSS1 _full_ compliancy
* a good effort towards CSS2 compliancy (enough that they will be compliant within the somewhat near future)
* JavaScript 1.1 _full_ compliancy
* a good effort towards JavaScript 1.2 compliancy (similar to CSS2)
* Java support
* _stability_ (Netscape crashes way too much, which I understand is because of bugs in the MS code they use, maybe that'll all change)
* a price of less than $50
Notice I did not mention the following things:
* free (beer or speech) - honestly, I wouldn't mind paying for a decent browser, and while the source is very nice, I'd rather have something that worked w/out the source, then broken source. If you personally believe that the only way the above objectives can be reached is through a open/close (circle one) source project, I don't care.
* bookmarks - I can cut and paste from a text file
* skins - I don't care wtf the browser looks like, I want the webpage to look right!
Note: I have tried Opera on two occasions, and it's definitely getting better, but it wasn't quite good enough the last time I checked. I'll probably download the latest release after finishing this post, but I don't have my hopes too high.
If anyone knows of a browser that meets these requirements, please, please let me know. I don't want to beta test or write my own code (which is why I haven't tried Mozilla, and why I don't mind paying for the finished product).
I'm also in the process of switching my daily computer use from Windows to Linux, and I'm _extremely_ frustrated with Netscape under Linux. So I'm looking for a browser that works under Linux or Windows or both.
Yes, Netscape did, at one point, hold a 'monopoly' of sorts over internet browsers. But Netscape did not hold sway over any other parts of the industry. Microsoft, however, is able to write browsers that will only work in Windows. With this happening, Microsoft has effectively cut out Linux or other UN*X based OSes from the consumer market. If the internet was totally inaccessable for you, would you change OSes?
If Microsoft is allowed to create their own standards, then it stands to reason that they will not be allowing these standards to be supported on OSes that they don't make. Therefore, more people will move from Linux (for example) and back to Windows, simply because they can get on the internet. And, if Microsoft does manage to get IE accepted as a 'standard' then what is to stop them suddenly charging $$$ for it? They could get away with it if people had no alternative then to use IE.
Mozilla better get things together and start playing catch up with a vengence - they're losing the race as it is. I'd hate to see them dissapear.
--
- Bob
What sort of impact does it have if and when businesses get flame mail about their propriety-based websites?
:), nonetheless did a few million hits a month.
It has a big impact. More than one company I've done work for has repeatedly ordered major website changes on account of just one or two angry emails -- and these were sites that, while not as large as Slashdot
Management types are indeed clueless, but this can be to your advantage. Most websites get so little feedback that your cranky email about standards compliance might change some minds -- if you remember to avoid "standards compliance" and instead say that you'd like to buy their products, but their site isn't fully compatible with your non-M$ browser.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I see that KDE is making a browser, but it is limited to KDE. Why doesn't Sun, IBM, or VALinux, or anyone try writing their own free browser that is fully standards compliant?
Further, it would actually show that there's a demand for that functionality, and that W3C is moving too slow to be useful.
That's putting it mildly. No browser today has the layout engine functionality that MS Word or Pagemaker had in 1993. People talk about web technology moving fast, but I have no idea where that comes from -- it's certainly not at the client end. There have been a bunch of plugins for inline media boxes, but beyond that, all that has happened is that browsers have crawled along nearly a decade behind the state of the art in word processors. And W3C? Heck, my third-grader was still in preschool when they started mumbling about CSS.
I don't guess I'll win any friends by saying this, but the closest thing we have to a fully-documented, practical markup language is Postscript. At this point, I'd just as soon see someone graft an HTTP client onto gv as continue mucking around with Microsoft and AOL/Netscape.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
If using the tool means your car can go much faster and to places other cars can't do, then yes, the tool was important.
To make a gross generalisation, Microsoft is only concerned with keeping its market share, profits, etc, and most of the time would rather use insidious methods than innovation.
MS doesn't need to "extend its monopoly" with IE. The extensions to IE allow web developers to do things that they couldn't do otherwise.
Yes, but what about non-MS web developers?
If they are right and these are things that developers wanted to do, they will use the extensions and MS will succeed. If they are wrong, they won't. It's that simple.
No, it's not quite that simple.
There may be many ways of doing things that developers want to do (but currently can't). By not going through formal standards processes, or consulting the community at large, MS is more likely to implement an MS or Windows centric solution. Never mind that there may exist a nice general platform independant solution, which could have come to the surface if MS consulted the community.
Just because developers want to do these things doesn't mean MS will do them in the best possible way for the community at large. In fact, it's rather unlikely, as MS only really cares about its community.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
------------------------
------------------------
Thus Spake ComradePenguin
A problem with the analogy of the Ford-only wrench is that web sites, which the new tools in the latest version of IE help build, are about something else.
It might make sense to buy the Ford-only wrench if you work on cars.
It doesn't make good sense to use the Micros~1-only code.
If 86% of adults are 6 feet tall or less, would you build homes, stores, churches, libraries, and government offices with doors and ceilings that were 6 feet 1 inch in height?
Micros~1 may have the largest share of browsers in use today. But who's to say they will tomorrow? And this version of IE certainly does not have even a simple majority of web users. To turn users of all other browsers away is shooting yourself in the foot.
Um, is there a non-Javascript workaround for that PDF-as-blank-page problem? I've recently encountered that myself for first time on Oracle website. Other PDF files seem to work fine, invoking a plugin and rendering operably.
...in the gun that M$ has steadily amed at its own foot? Not many.
I think the general public will realize that ignoring standards is not innovation. Why? Because when Netscape PR1 came out, a small bit of news quietly crept past the media: AOL will implement Netscape 6 across its product line. The 86% IE usage numbers will plummet within 30 days of AOL 6.0 being released.
I don't advocate AOL in any way except in this decision.
This is a tremendous opportunity for OSS developers to prove that we can do things better than the corporate behemoths. With the right spin, IE's market share could be destroyed right now. Most end users associate browsers with HTML first and foremost. Playing up he fact that IE 5.5 still has HTML compliency problems inherited from 4.0 might make the public think a little more about what they use.
My predictions:
- M$ will continue to produce "innovations" (read: glitter) for their products.
- The anti-trust trial will hit them like a brick due to their arrogance.
- IIS, IE, and other M$ web technologies will lose ground on the internet, while maintaining a high intranet market share.
- Linux, Netscape, OSS will continue to grow. MacOSX will grab Apple a big chunk. IE on a BSD variant? Vaporware.
- Over the next 10 years, the balance of power will gradually change. M$ will be reduced to a floundering shell of itself, too busy supporting old products to develop new ones, or in a position similar to Apple before Steve Jobs came back.
These times are full of opportunities. Stop whining about them and start turning them to an advantage.Dracos
"Integer: a number that represents any valid floating-point value"
And as was proven back upon its release, IE 5 for the Macintosh renders it flawlessly.
If only the PC version was as good as the Mac one...
They are _not_ features - They are /innovations/
:)
you would have been fired on the spot from the Marketing dept of MS - as feature can be synonymous with bug
Can you imagine the shennanigans that Microsoft could play with AOL if IE became the defacto browser?
It will be interesting to see who wins this particular "Clash of the Titans
And from the top-level post:
Of course, now that IE has 86% of the market,
I thought this was an interesting battle myself, but, correct me if I'm wrong... Didn't IE win this one a while ago?
HTML is not a programming language; it is a markup language. Huge difference.
Web browser implementors are free to choose which tags to support, and to degrade gracefully when unsupported tags are encountered. This is a too-often-forgotten but fundamental feature of HTML and the Web.
With HTML, the content is supposed to be nominally readable even when all tags have been stripped. This is not analogous to C code, wherein if all of the "code" were stripped, we would be left with nothing but comments, in what would be a thoroughly useless -- and utterly uncompilable -- program.
--
begin 644
<rant>Of course, so is Netscape. But, we can't say anything bad about the holy Netscape, now can we?</rant>
In my experience, IE is far superior to Netscape in almost every way. Particularly when it comes to developing for a particular browser. I am, in fact, reluctant to develop for Netscape. I force myself to because to simply ignore what now amounts to roughly 15% of the people browsing the web is just plain bad medicine.
Don't get me wrong, I disklike Microsoft and it's anti-competitive behavior just as much as the next guy, but, I'm afraid that they've got the superior product here. And, as long as that is the case no one except the Die-Hard-Linux-Freaks, and those who are forced to, are going to use Nestcape. This is the power of the free market, and it is as it should be.
And that's all I have to say about that.
"Dude, pounds are so metric, fuck that." - Noah
Everybody knows it's much better to:
- Never redesign anything. Never evoluate.
- Always keep backward compatibility since a standard is really usefull when there are 10 ways to do the same thing. It is so much cleaner.
We should all realize Java is heading the wrong way...(yeah right)
phobos% cat
phobos% cat
cat:
Those links you included point to documents about writing C++ code that goes into Mozilla. They do not support the statements you made. Were you hoping no-one would look?
Now, it is true that there are W3C recommendations that Moz doesn't fully support yet (e.g. SVG, a few small bits of DOM2). However, the important facts are that Mozilla does implement more of the standards correctly than any other browser, and that the Mozilla community is fully committed to finishing the job as quickly as resources allow.
It is also true that Mozilla has created its own "standards" in areas where the W3C standards are incomplete or inadequate (XBL, a few CSS extensions). However, these extensions are being proposed to the W3C when that makes sense, they aren't being pushed on Web developers, and they are based on and compatible with existing W3C standards whenever possible. Furthermore, because Moz is open source, whatever extensions it supports are open to the whole world; there can never be any hidden features that only one group knows about, and an open-source implementation of those extensions is always available.
Of course isn't inside !
... >
... >
:)
It goes:
<!doctype
<html>
<head>...</head>
<body>...</body>
</html>
not:
<!doctype
<html>
<head><body>...</body></head>
</html>
That's just silly
Independent sites such as http://www.richinstyle.com disagree with you.
Since MSIE is the de facto browser of choice and the other companies can't be bothered to make an actual significant release (those Mozilla milestones are the biggest bloatware pieces of trash I've seen), who can blame them for attempting to innovate? Microsoft once had to play catchup to Netscape's browser, but now, OH NO, GOD FORBID, it looks like Netscape will have to catch up to MS! DAMN YOU BILL GATES! DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL! I use Opera because it takes less memory than MSIE, but if there's a page Opera can't load, I don't mind using MSIE to access it. It doesn't take 30 seconds to load up like it does for the newest Mozilla.
"molon labe"
Standards depend entirely on who follows them. HTML is nothing but a tag language. w3c arose because Tim Berners Lee created HTML, his colleagues at CERN used it, hundreds more used it, then thousands and millions used it. There were other committees/people over the years who created SGML languages, which were used only internally. If the situation had been reversed, they would be the standard, and HTML would be a CERN memo.
Ultimately, a standard is just a convention that people follow. If all the people of the planet decide next year that a meter is 10 feet, then that's what happens. HTML tags aren't "correct" or "incorrect". They are just a convention people agree on. That's what a standard is - just a yardstick to make life easier. In software, it comes down to an agreed upon arrangement of bits and bytes. If everyone agrees to change it, it changes. Generally a company or body decides this arrangement. If only a few people listen to them, then they become irrelevant. That was my point.
w/m.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Just released: Update patch 1 for IE 5.5 to fix a gaping security hole!
Keeping
Well, as they always say, if you can't beat them
(with your own lame dial-up network), join them
(and progressively destroy the Net community by
making it your own private preserve)
Carefree highway, let me slip away on you.
Well, it's good to know that M$ can keep using anti-competitive practices and severely mess things up even more.
On a side note, if I tried to explain what happened to most people I know, they would probably say something along the lines of "MicroSoft sets all of the standards anyways, right?"
It would be innovation if they:
A) Worked with regular HTML
B) Released the specs to implement these features publicly.
I'll be over here using all of these "obsolete" websites in Mozilla.
Eh...
That's still going on, right? And wasn't it already decided that Microsoft should cease such activities within 90 days?
Actually, I don't really mind. All this does is put Microsoft in an even worse light than they're already in, by showing that they are still up to their old tricks, defying the DOJ right in front of their eyes. My Goddess, judge Jackson could have a field day with this *grin*
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
To err is human, to moo bovine
I don't understand what right we all have to be blasting Microsoft over this. They're well within their rights to do whatever they damn well please with Internet Explorer. If it means making incompatible with Netscape, that's fine, but nobody has any right to complain with anything but their dollars (or downloads) -- the market has spoken and said that IE is good. You can't even come up with the "leveraging a monopoly" excuse here -- if you don't want them to exploit this, don't develop to the proprietary features. It's really very simple: Microsoft isn't forcing you to do anything, and I wish everyone would stop whining like Microsoft was making them download IE at gunpoint.
I realise that CNET only just noticed this but it's hardly news. The Web Standards Project made their statements on the 10th of April - 4 months ago. I think /. even covered it before.
WHY? You ask. Well I work for Rare Medium Inc. One the the big dogs in competition with Razorfish and gang. We do not code any site that is not compatiable with NS+IE, PC+MAC. At least our corporate QA won't let it pass anyways. The major sites that you will visit on a day to day basis will be compatitble with the major browsers.
And as far as developing IE 5.x only features, FORGIT IT MS, EAT ME. I'm not wasting my time or my companies time doing Propriatary code that relies on an enormous amount of interdependencies.
So techies, mamas and papas, your corporate sites will render properly in any browser as long as you pay the money to get a big firm to make sure that happens.
Go boutique and you get a boutique site.
IE 5 introduced true, open persistence via an XML datastore which makes integration into enterprise applications like ERP ridiculously simple. It also allows a developer to define their own events. Furthermore, IE makes it trivial to tie in anything that happens in its client with any middle tier or other application which the vast majority of businesses support via a mature and widespread (albeit proprietary) component scheme. In short, IE has made its browser into a fully functional programming platform. IE allows them to do this, Netscape hasn't, despite many promises to do so.
Developers use IE because it is better to use an "politically incorrect" tool that allows one to use a unifying technology, i.e. the web, than it is to build a nest of old school, single purpose, unmaintainable intractable kludges, or to sit on one's hands and say, "sorry, we can't do that yet, but maybe next version" [because we wish to impose our personal biases upon the corporation which pays for your work.*]
In short, shareholders are not forcing Developers to work with IE. I know that I have never seen a VP, let alone a shareholder, who ever specified how a given solution was supposed to be implemented. Developers use IE because it works out better for what they need.
*Unless your a "consultant" with no customers, so such considerations don't concern you.
Uh oh - I feel a rant coming on...
IE allows you to write entities (&<entity>;) without the required trailing semicolon. This may sound innocuous enough, untill it decides that you made a mistake when you didn't:
IE will chop out § - without the semicolon - and replace it with the entity. I've had to rewrite several scripts because of this accidental namespace clash (I can't remember ALL the entities), but really, this should have never come up. Allowing people to get away with being stupid is not acceptable if it hinders legitimate work.
OK - I feel better now.
Culture is more than commerce
Opera 4.0 implements CSS2.
"Innovate": To embrace, extend and extinguish
-which other operating systems have yet to adopt, but they will because its stupid for a gui to distinquish between content on the hard drive and content on the internet.
Surprisingly enough, M$N does this.
"Innovate": To embrace, extend and extinguish
... and this will become really worrying when M$ starts moving to server-based software (eg .NET). Want to use Word? Then, you'll have to use IE.
"Innovate": To embrace, extend and extinguish
Yeah, calling me an idiot shows how smart you are. Go suck your father's penis, and drink every ounce of his cum.
Time does not wait.
Microsoft Internet Explorer browser is now used by 86 percent of Web surfers worldwide, up 32 percent from 16 months ago and an all-time high, an online study found.
They don't exactly quote any source at all.
I'm not saying the statistic is wrong, I've just never seen anyone back up the numbers by saying how they came by it. Did they poll the weblogs at www.microsoft.com, or www.yahoo.com?
//
cpeterso
This is patently false. A monopoly cannot choose for the market, and cannot squash all the alternatives either. the single most important alternative is of course choosing none of the above. We could go on and on discussing this, but there is much already much written on Monopoly power in the economics section of your local book store.
Once you start browsing multiple open windows you'll realise how fussy IE5 is in comparison
Sometimes I had to dumb down pages for IE, but that was for IE3.
I used Netscape religiously (years) until the day I started to develop sites.
***
~
~
:wq
86% - I can't believe that statistic. I run a site that provides plugins for an (unnamed) Windows application. The application is the type that we use full time, not just as a hobby, and it requires that the users that download our plugins install IE with that application. So, people visiting my website are windows users that by default, have to have IE installed and working on their systems, and I am still showing 24% netscape. This has actually increased slightly in the last year (probably due to Outlook / IE security holes driving people away from MS internet software within our industry).
Predictions:
- Bush will (unfortunately) get the presidency
- Due to pressure from Bush (direct or indirect through appointments to various positions) M$ will get off easy, with little more than a little wrist slapping
Bullshit. There's already been a court ruling on the case.
The only way Bush can interfere is to first fire the current prosecutor before he finishes the case (something only Bill Clinton has done on a change on administration in the last 50 years), appoint a replacement prosecutor who will deliberately throw the appeals, and hope the court reaction to those actions isn't to go ahead and punish MS anyway based on the already-submitted information.
Do you realize exactly how much political capital those actions would take, and how uncertain the outcome would be? Even National Review, which advocates a housecleaning by Bush at Justice and has denounced the MS trial, doesn't think Bush will try to affect the MS case or that it would be a good idea for him to try.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Well, the applet on MSDN is horribly slow on NS because NS's java VM is a horrible p.o.s. compared to MS's. This is simple truth.. take a look at the *retarded* amount of bugs in NS 2.0-3.0's VM... programming Java 1.0 for those browsers was not fun... stuff would look perfect in appletviewer, but it would take weeks to make it work on NS.
-Stu
The W3C Validator needs some work. It's not just being a pain about using quotes "" [ Although they should be used ] But, it's pulling apart urls, and saying that "mode is undefined", etc, etc, etc... Please, try to find me a major web site that doesn't set the validator off, I wouldn't use it. { I didn't know BGCOLOR="#......" wasn't a W3C standard, oh well...)
HTML 3.2 is to blame. Most of the deprecated tags date from that version.
I'll have to argue with you on the source of these errors: the doctype definition on the page clearly defines the standard to compare against as HTML 3.2. Here's the tag:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">
This is a change from the last time I ran a validator on Slashdot's code; before the only error it gave was that the author didn't specify which DTD to use for validation. While I admit they should perhaps have chosen HTML 4.0 transitional instead, thay do seem to be making good efforts at producing clean, portable code. I've read slashdot on Lynx and AvantGo (a PalmOS-based browser) and while it's a bit inconvenient to read on a palm pilot screen it was rendered accurately.
I guess my point is that while we shouldn't be making poor excuses to cover up the mistakes of our editors, they are doing a decent job. Let's cut them (and the standards comittee) some slack, OK?
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
Rev.
I think I'm running into this problem right now with a website that I'm reworking to be more standards-compliant. (It was originally created with frames for formatting and lots of text-containing graphics with no ALT tags. Browsing it with Lynx shows just how woefully deficient it is.) I have a reworked (but still not finished) main page up (if you want to see what I'm doing, check out http://salfter.dyndn s.org/www.thejewelers.com/index-html4.html that works fine in IE 5.01, but Navigator 4.7 completely ignores the associated CSS positioning info. W3C's HTML and CSS validators say the page is OK, and some other HTML validators (such as NetMechanic and even the Netscape-controlled Web Site Garage) have said the same thing. Web Site Garage's browser-compatibility check even said the design was OK for Navigator 4.x. Actually viewing it with the different browsers says something different.
(Just got Mozilla M16 installed under Win98...it renders things a little differently than IE, but it's comparable to IE. Much better than Navigator 4.7. I tried installing Mozilla under Linux to get it running on the metal instead of under VMware (which is where I run Win98 and IE), but the installer segfaulted. The box is a 450-MHz K6-III with 256 megs of RAM and SuSE Linux 6.3, which ought to be enough to run anything.)
_/_
/ v \
(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
\_^_/
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Yeesh. Okay...um....and you think you have some right to tell those of us who have been working in the web industry for five years that we don't know what we're talking about? I suggest you spend a few more years learning about computers, kid, before you go shooting off your mouth when you don't know what you're talking about.
--
I agree with you Wonko. On a slightly different note, did you try to make your site look almost exactly like /. ?
--
Exactly! The above was a quote from the original article. The point is Microsoft wins market share by flooding the world with their shoddy product, mass-marketing until it's a household word, THEN they have the muscle to force the standards bodies to do things their way. Hence, 'inundation' not 'innovation'.
These people looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
and so do you!
Yes but how many competent HTML authors do you know of? The idea is for authors to be encouraged to write good HTML code by having the browser their testing it in report problems properly. Anyway, I should have been more specific.
The problem I have with validators isn't with the validators themselves, it's with the environment that they expect authors to use them in.
I can easily design a page of perfect HTML that will run perfectly through any validator. The problem is that as soon as I correct for the frailties of both Netscape, MSIE, and whatever other browsers it needs to be visible in, any decent validator will come up with hundreds of errors.
Hence most "competent" authors who design so that the page is properly viewable would find validators mostly useless with anything other than a very simple page.
If browsers could be set to work the way they're supposed to (along with an option of being lenient on bad HTML for backward compatibility), it would go a long way to helping solve this problem.
===
Who Netscape? AOL good, MSN bad...
>>Pretty good plan... Once they manage to make it impossible to, say, do your banking, check the weather, download your tax forms, buy movie tickets, etc, with anything but IE... Won't work with me. I goto the bank, look out of the window, call my tax accountant, goto the cinema...am I out of touch somewhere?
>>If enough people do this... They'll soon stop visiting those web sites...
>>only 24% Is that 100-86? Anyway, it'd only be true if that 24% (or whatever) supported the standards. NS is lousy compared to IE, at least in this respect. Well, maybe in any respect...
Funny, I'm using it to view this without any problem. In fact, it's worked wonderfully since I installed it. Print preview is great. Is this really IE5.5 you're talking about???
Yeah, AOL and SUN, those renowned lovers of openness and standards.
>>use browsers which adhere to WC3 standards I keep reading stuff like this. Nobody has yet told me which browser(s) that might be... >>or whatever other standards the unix community adopts. Oh, so _which_ standards aren't even clear yet.
--
Barry de la Rosa,
public[at]bpdlr.orgASM,
tel. +44 (0)7092 005700
-- /. ID is lower than Bruce Perens'!
Barry de la Rosa,
public[at]bpdlr.org
My
Sorry, forgot all the BR tags :) argh!
True but why would your mom, my grandma, or Hemos' dog pay for a web browser? I love opera, but paying for a web browser just doesn't seem right anymore to the general public.
Read my plan to save the Bengals
Wrong Question. Ask: "do you want a cool extra for your free car, that happens to run well on most roads?". The overwhelming answer is yes.
I saw that
Grr. Geeks just don't get it. This is exactly the same lock out mentality as companies like microsoft's. If programmers had ever bothered to make their programs remotely usable, companies like microsoft would never exist. We got what we desrved here. If programmers today were to make remotely usable software, microsoft's business model would be dead in a heartbeat.
With repect to the Ford analogy. If programmers were let near cars, they would be as complicated as jet planes and be less reliable. Would that be ok? Would everybody who couldn't pilot a car be a dummy or a luser? And would we piss on a company that made drivable cars for these lusers? Face facts: there is no competition for IE right now. In the browser marketplace, it's a hands down winner and has been for nearly three years. Most people just want to drive, and programmers are a minority of browser users.
--
I saw that
I would wholly be in agreement if the news was "... has implemented all current standards along with new innovative features." Broken implementation of standards coupled with new features simply is lame, and stupid, given their market position and legal troubles.
Well, apparently, you only have to fool the majority of people for a little while.
You can also put an animated menu bar into 800K, stick it on a homepage and be too dumb to realise that this is A Bad Thing.
Flash encourages bad, bloatware pages. Maybe a good and useful animation in 20K is appropriate somewhere. I've no problem with that; that's only the same volume as a decent size JPG. -- but can you really say that the vast majority of Flash usage isn't huge, bloated crap that adds absolutely nothing useful to a site.
Why would you want to USE PDF's all over the internet? First of all, those are proprietary (property of Adobe). Second, the most common tool to create them is not only proprietary, but expensive. The files are also rather larger than webpages are... They don't support all of the features that one would want on a website. Other such things...
No offense, but it really just doesn't make sense/is a bad idea.
Eh...
You can't DO that if you're M$ competition.
M$ won't put out the details and has supported every piece of legislation which will make reverse engineering illegal (for everybody but them of course.)
Bill Gates is a bully. Get used to it and deal with him like one. You'll live better.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Strange to note the similarities between these XML-based behaviors and components that IE5.5 has, and the XUL stuff from Mozilla. Except Mozilla is apparently being "innovative", where IE's getting bashed as usual.
So Mozilla's Cross-Platform. But are Windows users REALLY going to want to switch from IE in order to see the latest XUL-based toys?
Roll on Konqueror. Some of us just want to browse the web, y'know? The authors of IE and Mozilla might want to remember that.
This forces Linux users to constantly play catch-up just to be able to use the newest web technology.
They aren't in any worse a position for a while. If MS don't add features then Linux users still can't use them, but neither can IE users. It takes a while for the new features to make their way onto web sites so its not a major problem.
The way to fix this is reasonably simple. If you find a website that has IE only features, first take a deep breath and calm down. Once you are calm, send a polite email to the site admins explaining why you are not able to use there site.
m l
If enough ecommerce companies get enough polite emails from people who can't buy stuff from there site, they will probably change there sites. For other sites, it depends on how many page hits they want. That probably comes down to how much advertising revenue they hope to make or will miss by precluding some of the browsing public.
The register had an interesting piece about a comment from someone from microsoft who was asked why IE 5.5 wasn't in the Win 2K service pack.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/11905.ht
Made me laugh.
Bob.
ALl MS has to do is wait for Bush to become president. The new attorney general will settle with MS as quickly as possible for the minimum Jackson's ruling allows.
I'm currently doing a stage in the french arm of w3c. CSS1 is not that hard to implement... it's ridiculous that MS, which has so much more resources that the w3c does, is unable to get a working version of CSS1 out. And CSS2... oh boy. Also, one of the strengths of XML is that it's very easy to extend. However, any xml extension will be correctly parsed by any xml-parser, meaning that the obvious choice for an extension mechanism would be to base it on XML, at least ensuring that the extensions don't interfere with existing software.
So why is microsoft's "DHTML" not XML compliant? I truly hope this goes the way ActiveX did... the "no go" way.
Furthermore, I would make sure that the extensions can easily be transformed to existing tags using XSLT. XSLT (frequently referred to as XSL) is a language that essentially allows one XML document to be transformed into another. Simplistically put, you make you're own markup (extensions) and "map" them onto different xml elements (tags).
Meaning if a browser wanted to, it could load a compatibility XSL transformation from, say, it's website so it could at least make something from the new tags, even if some functionality is missing.
Notice that this only works when those extensions are xml... guess why microsoft didn't want that...
BTW, I have no clue about official w3c opinions...
--EMN
It's hell because, like at my work study job, my boss will expect me to pull off a website that is compatible for IE and Netscape, which can sometimes lead to long term insanity.
There must be a way Mozilla can conform to some of these standards so that Microsoft can stop trying to pull this crap. (No, I don't want Mozilla to be a clone, but what else are you going to do, you got to adapt to survive at this business. I disagree in advance that the percentage of developers, whose jobs depend on creating compatible products, will suffer a lot. No, I'm not saying Mozilla should give up, but they should consider somehow implementing these standards (do they conform to CSS1?).
Nuff Respec'
DeICQLady
7D3 CPE
Oops I forgot to included the reference gif but not the actual standards test. click here to test which browser conforms more to the CSS1 standards. If it looks like a Picasso (as in Netscape) then the browser is not conforming to standards, while if it looks like a bunch of boxes (like in MSIE) then it is standards compliant.
--
You should remember that most of slashdoter are using IE (May be CmdrTaco could publish slashdot.org agent statistics).
If everyone changes to Opera or Netscape web designer will care of standard.
Don't cry guys, this situation is yours...
"That's still going on, right? And wasn't it already decided that Microsoft should cease such activities within 90 days."
You need to get out and read the news sometime. Microsoft filed an appeal and Judge Jackson issued a stay on that order until the appeal is heard, which is likely many months off (probably not until 2001).
Fuck you all.
Can you metamoderate?
Learn to spell.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"Industry Standards" usually implies that there's an 'Industry' with quite a number of participants who hammer out their differences and arrive at a common standard.
It does not usually denote a situation where there are two monolithic 'competitors' and one carping, whining board of academics defining a 'standard' from an ivory tower.
Netscape set the tone for this whole market when they grabbed the Mosaic concept and ran off to the left coast to cash in on it with a resoundingly closed-source strategy. (they only 'opened up' after they had failed in their attempt to 'take over the desktop')
Or that the Mac programmers are more capable than the Windows ones of writing code which meets the specification.
Just a few years ago Netscape was doing the very same thing. Now it's everybodies darling. Looking through my HTML book I see how many non-standard Netscape extensions there are. It's just they haven't added any new ones in a while because it's a stagnant product.
Things could be worse: imagine if there were two or three browsers with equal marketshare all adding their own extensions, trying to take things in their own direction. The web would be abysmal to develop for. As it stands, it's bad enough, but you have a simple choice: simple standards lowest common denominator pages, or IE enhanced. The trouble is, there are a lot of ignorant developers out there who know no better or are just plain incompetent.
and it was chu ... damn
:wq
Everybody uses M$ Word, not because it's great, but because they don't know any better. You and I might use Star Office cuz we're 'in the know', but sitting back and wishing there were better standards or criticizing others for continuing to support M$ won't help. Walk around your office and preach the gospel. Convert the lost lambs. :-)
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
Can anyone imagine what might happen if or when Microsoft changes the HTTP protocol so that IIS uses so that new commands are introduced that only Internet Explorer understands?
This seems sort of like when Intel released the "Pentium Processor with MMX Technology." Soon some games appeared (POD is the most memorable) that supported MMX instructions. These games ran much faster on an MMX enabled system than on a non-MMX enabled system. I tested this myself; I had a P200, while my friend had a P200 with MMX. We had equal amounts of RAM, same mobo, and same graphics card. The MXX system showed significant speed ups. What I'm trying to say here, is that for a time, Intel (A big, evil company like Micro$oft at the time) used a proprietary technology that proved useful (although MMX never really had a killer app, it still is in every processor produced today). Intel, owning nearly the total market for CPU's at the time, released a new technology to try to push even farther ahead of rivals AMD and Cyrix. Eventually AMD and Cyrix were able to implement MMX technology in some way, but even today, AMD still lags behind Intel. The same most likely will be true with these new tags, Microsoft dominates the market, brings (very little) innovation to the market, in the form of a few HTML tags, and will most likely continue to dominate (which is unfortunate). The article said that most likely, M$ will submit the tags to implement in the DHTML standards. Hopefully, M$ will play fair so everyone can benefit from these slightly innovative technologies.
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
I personally don't know what CSS is, but if browser developers aren't bothering to implement it, I doubt that there's a whole lot of demand for it. Standards are created by comittee. The result is usually a comprimais that no one is really happy with, or a bloated standard that has tons of features that are of little use to the majority of developers.
Web developpers are not going to leave 14% of the market in the dust. IE 5.5 does have some IE only candy, but you CAN respect every W3C recommendation and make your sites work in both Netscape and IE nontheless, and that is what responsible developpers will do.
http://www.logient.com
Why don't you take action -- make sure that others don't use the software?
Um... he's complaining about the problem and spreading the awareness that it is in fact a Bad Thing. I think I'd classify that as an action that attempts to persuade others to not use this software.
What keeps Mozilla from adopting these features?
As I understand it, these features are proprietary innovations... they only work in IE.
Hope I helped...
You're right in stating that both browsers have been putting proprietary crap in each of their browsers, but the reason IE is getting flamed is the very fact that their newest release doesn't support ALL of the standards that are in place. You would think that with all of their resources they could produce a standards compliant browser (they did in the Mac version for 5.5, why can't they do it for the Windows version).
I guarantee you that when the new Netscape is finally released (hoping and praying it comes out before 2001) it will get the same roasting as IE if it doesn't support all the established standards.
Even more interesting is that Microsoft could have beaten Netscape to the punch and delivered a fully compliant browser, make all the developers happy, and look golden in front of the press. Unfortunately, MS continues their path of arrogance and stupidity.
This article couldn't be more flamebait if JonKatz wrote it all from stolen quotes of slashdot posters while uploading Cuckoo files through Napster.
If you use Frontpage, you're not a web designer.
--
Humancasting
OliverWillis.Com
An Operative with an Agenda
People who demonize Microsoft and praise Netscape really bother me.
Does nobody remember when Netscape came along and started adding all sorts of non-standard tags? When people used to color their pages black in protest of Netscape ("If you cannot read this page, it is because you are using Netscape. Get a real web browser and return.")?
Netscape used some shady tactics to get where they were, and when Microsoft does the same thing, and Netscape starts losing the war, they cry foul.
This is how business works. Get over it.
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
WAZZZUP?
Hehe, yeah, totally man.
Eh...
Maybe we should all boycot IE. Not hard to do for Linux users, since [almost] all linux users use NS. But if we got support from WaSP and maybe made it easier for people to download alternative browsers, such as NS and opera, we might have more support from all of those Windows users out there.
Since that means that this increasing amount of web space can't be seen by an increasing amount of users.
This will help webpage authors to avoid IE's proprietary stuff. If they don't they will get an increasing amount of complaints.
Guns don't kill people. People kill people.
Browser? I barely know her!
The best way to deal with this is to send a polite email to the web master of any site that uses these (or any other M$ only extensions). Tell them that you would really like to view/use/support their site but unfortunately you are unable to see it. People creating web sites generally want them to be visible to the largest audience possible.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
I used to be a Netscape user for several years up until this year, when I switched over to IE. I was amazed at the difference I saw. IE is much more tolerant of mistakes, handles tables a whole lot better (actual size and background images being two of the biggest factors) and has support for the hover style, a feature that can sublty but importantly enhance a page.
Now I don't mean this to be a post just in support of IE. The reason I bring this up is because it really is an issue of innovation. It sounds cliche to talk about Microsoft and its innovation, but I think that perhaps this is most apparent on the web, with browsers. I cannot tell you how many times I have felt held back by Netscape's lack of functionality, and even compliance with standards. Things have taken twice as much effort and in some cases rquired a "dumbing down" in order to get them to work well and look good in NS. I know that NS is working on the Mozilla project, and I've heard pretty good reviews of v6, but the fact that no major upgrade (and I'm primarily looking at adding functionailty) has been made for several years has really hurt the web in my opinion. In my experience, the pages for IE are much more flexible and technically advanced than those that run on NS. So my point here is, advancement is a seriously important aspect of the web.
On the other hand, however, a lot of the problems with the design has also been browser compatibilty. This requires constant checking, constant updating (have to keep on top what who has what) and in general it makes things very difficult. Usually the problem is more that one browser doesn't meet the w3c's standards rather than there being a specific proprietary advancement that the other does not ahve. Unfortunately, what Microsoft is proposing will be a proprietary advancement, and this one NS is sure to not follow.
I don't know what to do about this. The web has developed so well in the recent past because of the balance between innovation and standards. There has been a pretty good balance between pushing ahead and joining the others. I have to say though, that the web cannot continue to be where its at for very much longer. Static web pages, limited funcitonality and unwieldy design languages I hope will soon be a thing of the past. I guess when it comes down to it, I am very happy that MS is doing this.... we obviously can't look to Netscape/Mozilla for innovation since it seems like they're more concerned about integrating AIM into the browser than really advancing the technology. I am also somewhat apprehensive about how this will shape how people view the web but frankly, after years of struggling with mediocre and limited design space, I'm ready for something new.
What it comes down to is that MS has 85 percent of the browser market cornered. I don't care that there's idiots saying how they /like/ the browser; these people are a tiny minority compared to people who use it because they have no other choice but to comply with poor trade practices.
:)
The US justice system is in no shape to deal with this - three-year trials worked in the old days, but in today's Internet system, a year is almost too long. By the time the appeals are over, Microsoft will make more billions and achieve greater market power.
There should be a separate system for administering digital justice. I don't think there's room for 3 month delays between hearings and hundred-thousand page briefs typed over a period of twelve weeks. They should've put MS and Janet Reno on Judge Judy
Oh, and to all you smarasses who think you can get rid of IE on your computer and use a browser of your choice under Windows: you can't. If you want to use the M$ site for Windows bugfixes, you'd better be using IE. So you can't remove it for that reason. And if you don't care and try to uninstall, it leaves behind more registry keys than most programs have total.
Didn't Netscape do exactly this when it was new?
BLINK wasn't a W3C standard (or strictly a good idea), and don't get me started on the WIDTH tags in tables, I'm still not sure whether I could use 100% as a valid width...
It seems that it's OK for an Open-Source Friendly (TM) Company to do this, but everything MS does is evil?
This isn't like Kerberos, where they tried to extend a standard and keep it secret - if they want these tags used, they have to tell everyone about them, just like Netscape did.
I agree that MS should focus on proper compliance with published specifications first, but if they add a useful feature to a standard, people will use it. If they add a stupid feature, people will also use it. If this annoys you, submit diffs to Mozilla, write to the people who 'lock you out' of sites you want to go to.
Some of these enhancements are useful, some are not, but if you need a calendar on your page (don't ask me why you would) would you rather stuff in a Java applet which crashes Netscape once an hour, or a 5 byte tag (<CAL>) which the browser sorts out for you?
I don't work for MS, I don't even like them, but I don't like to see anyone bashed by hypocrites.
Well, that ought to get me moderated to -99, but I feel better for saying it.
Liked this comment? Why not buy me something nice
With this info, I can guess where the BIG stockholders are going... With IE.
IE is a programming language, a desk top, a window to world, and the next cash cow.
Once IE is no longer "part of the OS", but an app on many OS, it will be the new "Desktop" like KDE or GNOME, but better!!! KDE and GNOME sit over their own small space... IE sits over the NET.
Now can MS get the IE to take tolls to access information on per click bases. Or what about selectable routing -- 10 second responce free, 1 second responce via the "expressway" $.01.
At this point in time, no matter how strong your ideals or principles are, the very sad fact is that if you aren't compatible with the 86% (as quoted here at least) of people using MSIE, you are putting yourself at a disadvantage.
Though our company policy is still to create web content which will remain compatible with established standards, I personally doubt that will hold true, as so many users crank up Front Page and whip out an incompatible page with no idea of what the term "standards" even means.
I think this whole MSIE 5.5 thing bothers me a lot more than it probably should. To me it seems like quite a blow to my hope for the opensource and standards-based future, at least as I had envisioned it.
________
If Microsoft wanted to actually create a standard, they need to release it and make it available to all operating systems and browsers.
Realistically, with 85%+ of the marketshare, most anything MS/IE chooses to do becomes standard--witness Word as the standard for business documents. This didn't come about by releasing information about the format to competitors, but rather by dominating the market so completely.
Many people are opposed to their "embrace, extend, extinguish" practices, as am I, but is this so different from a dominant compiler writer releasing proprietary extensions to a programming language? Some of these language features influence the standards committees and consequently lead to improvements in the languages themselves.
Didn't Netscape do the same in the early days of browsers (i.e. when they still enjoyed a dominant place in the market)? IIRC, this is what brought us blinking text....
While everybody knows that Microsoft likes to take standards an mess with them, I find it kind of funny that people around here are claiming that it's this sort of action that isolates Netscape users. I use Netscape myself, but I'm also a web developer, and the more I hear about Microsoft's browser dominance, the less I want to continue to support Netscape.
That's because supporting Netscape and IE doesn't mean maintaining strict standards compliance- all of my pages adhere to strict standards- but working around a list of bugs and horrid design decisions the size of your arm just so that Netscape won't mangle your page while IE users can see it just fine. Even though Netscape invented Javascript (as a way to lock out IE users? I don't know), IE does it better- I'm not talking about the incompatible DOMs, I'm talking about simple things like the fact that Netscape won't let you dynamically change the size of form widgets without a PAGE REFRESH, something that I'm sure my users would love.
It's quickly becoming an IE-only world, but it's not because Microsoft uses proprietary tags- honestly, why would Microsoft care about squashing Netscape 4.7 at this point? The only people who use it are die-hards and people without any IE option anyway. It's because as bad as IE's compliance is, Netscape's is ten times worse. Netscape is just suffering from the fact that it used to be the big dog and so it thought it could get away with anything, and it was right, but now it's not the big dog anymore, and developers are tired of putting up with it.
Sorry, it had to be said.
--
-jacob
-jacob
Why should it wait for the W3C to spend years and years coming up with standards that no one wants, when MS can just go ahead and create its own?
If those "standards" are open for anyone to include in any browser, I don't see way not.
Bjarne
I am so sick of M$ pulling this propietary (sp?) stuff and ignoring standards. I work for an e-commerce firm and we are stuck using HTML 3.2 on our web site because of browser support issues. If both browser could at the very least follow the standards, you would see some great e-commerce websites out there. Instead, we are stuck with the same flat, everyday websites. Where did NS go wrong??
I hate proprietary extension to things which don't need them. The web is a medium to transfer information, a function which it perform pretty well right now. Sure we should continue upgrading our standards and increase the amount of information which can be transfered but not at the cost of incompatability.
I don't care which company tries to create these extensions but when Microsoft does it, given there large market share, it is almost sure to catch on. And if a Microsoft extension (closed protocols, et al.) catch on then you know other vendors will be playing catch up for a long time. The internet does not need to progress so quickly that it breaks compatability. Do we really need to have pages which feature only Flash plugins, which I can't see in Lynx for example. That is not what the internet is about.
Companies and organizations should decide upon standards (at least a general outline) before they
implement them in their internet client. This way they won't force users to believe that things must be done a certain way. For example if Microsoft came out with MHTML (Microsoft HTML) which is exactly like HTML except every tag begins with '$', they could use there large market share to convince a large number of users that what renders in IE is correct and all other pages are broken. This would leave all other vendors playing catch-up and make the internet full of pages which rendor correctly in some browsers and not in others.
Keep the focus of the internet on open standards which allow information to flow easily and of course SLOW DOWN in the pushing of new extensions; were not running a race towards multimedia nirvana, I for one just want to be able to read my slashdot.
Oh gee! Look at these new web browser features that Microsoft made! Aren't they great. Look at all the cool stuff they do!
Two years down the road...
Darn Microsoft!!! They never released the API's to the general public. Now I am going to have to buy a new library of MFC(for Explorer) books, and I will have to use their nasty development tools. This sucks! And I can only implement them on servers running BabyBill_1 and BabyBill_2 software.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
jacobm writes:
It's quickly becoming an IE-only world, but it's not because Microsoft uses proprietary tags-honestly, why would Microsoft care about squashing Netscape 4.7 at this point? The only people who use it are die-hards and people without any IE option anyway.
At this point on my Mac I mainly use Netscape for Slashdot, as IE 5 tends to choke at the level I usually read at (uncut and raw). But otherwise I use MSIE 5 as it's considerably more Mac friendly than Netscape and for particular feautures such as one button minimise and AutoFill.
One particular annoyance about Communicator is the new insistance upon installing everything as opposed to the formerly customisable install, including versions of AIM which are a lot older than the release I have already installed. The other is the stubborn refusal to update the browser only version of Navigator.
That's not the point. If IE was compliant, nobody would be bitching about new features.
It's a matter of priorities.
Browser? I barely know her!
Then when they finally go to the Supreme Court, they could decide to break them up into 18 different companies, all of which would have to publish all of their APIs for the foreseeable future.
Yeah... that'd be cool...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I posted this ealier but was a bit vociferous, here's a calmer version of my earlier post:
The article is belaboring something that has been a fact of web development for at least the past year or two. Both browsers have had things that only work on only their platform for years. Anyone remember BLINK and MARQUEE? How about javascript? They use different DOMs so different code has to be used to do the same thing. Sites like Dynamic Drive have been seperating their scripts into IE-only and Netscape only for as long as I've been going there.
Netscape has been flouting standards for as long than MSFT with their proprietary LAYER tag and inventing Javascript. Frankly as at now (but not for long with Mozilla in the works) MSIE supports more of CSS1 than Netscape for proof of this check out this page and use this image as a reference. In MSIE it renders with few flaws while in Netscape it looks like a Picasso. The problem is therefore not with MSIE's support of CSS1 standards at least not now.
The problem is that MSFT's proprietary additions to their browser such as the XML parser built into the browser which is available for scripting and others are so tempting to developers that they ignore the fact that these things work only on IE and rationalize (if you can call it that) this away with "Most people use IE." The fact that W3C takes a long time to ratify standards has not helped this either. PS: For all those who do not realize how long both browsers have been incompatible and flouting standards read Dynamic Html : The Definitive Reference by Danny Goodman for an informative read.
PS: The above post is very correct, MSFT doesn't force websites to use it's proprietary additions or to script only for IE, bad web developers do this. If people didn't use the IE specific things in the browser for websites on the world wide web (as opposed to a local intranet were such things can be mandated) then this would not be an issue. Web developers are more to blame for the browser segregation than MSFT.
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I hope you don't have a mass market product, because making something that *only* works with Netscape is just as asinine as whining about new features in IE.
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Humancasting
OliverWillis.Com
An Operative with an Agenda
Microsoft's closest competitor in the browser market is Netscape (AKA Mozilla), which is owned by AOL, who uses MSIE as their embedded browser. I don't think any recent developments in the browser market can be considered anti-competitive since AOL can turn the tables in a heartbeat by using Mozilla instead of MSIE in their own software. As soon as Mozilla is complete, it will have a market waiting to have it spoon-fed to them via an "AOL Update."
A 'sudden shift' in IE6 would cut out Microsoft's install base at the same time. So that's not gonna happen.
The standard is imposed by the content developing community. To claim otherwise, you have to also slam tools like GCC for 'extending and embracing' the C language with all the little goodies and proprietary extensions inherent in the Gnu C compiler.
Any source for this statistic?
"the last role call looked something around 80-85%"
I just checked my web logs and I'm getting only 54% MSIE, and that's counting MSIE4 and 3 as well.
--
"You despise me, don't you?"
"You despise me, don't you?"
"If I gave you any thought, I probably would."
When a webpage author dosn't have access to IE he can only test against Netscape.
It is the norm to test a website against Netscape OR IE to see if it works. However with websites usually running Linux or BSD and MSCE saying that diffrent operating systems can't co-exist (BS*) managers are being forced to pick between NT and *nix systems. With people successfully premoting Linux while NTs flaws become painfully clear NT quickly becomes a NON-answer. Macs user friendly legend (Not BS but heavy on the myth side **) putting it out of the running *nix systems become the solution.
What this boils down to is. If the website is develuped on-site chances are good Windows is banned by management becouse "Operating systems can not co-exist". This means no testing for compatability on IE. If the feature dosn't exist on IE then it dosn't work.
"IE supports more standards than Netscape"
Well apparently even this too is a load of BS. But as long as website authors believe this one and can't access IE then they might as well test against Netscape becouse if it works on Netscape it works on IE right?
Microsoft may yet fud themselvs out of the market.
* Mac, Unix, OS/2 and Dos co-existed before NT existed.
There was a time when a LAN could contain Macs, and Dos machines with the network server being a Sun i386 or an OS/2 box.
LANs being the WORST setting for standards and compatability. Internet servers being the in the "IDEAL" catagory.
** Mac is know as "The computer for the rest of us" as yes it is very easy.
But people came to believe Mac wasn't for "Power users". Quite the opposate. Macs strongest userbase is in the power user segment.
Just as "Linux can't be user friendly" Mac "Can't be powerful". We have seen recently user friendly Linux distrobutions comming out. Simmilerly Mac has been a power tool sence day one and more so over time.
To prove the point....
I discovered my webcam dosn't work on IE...
Well it works becouse I made a workaround but it works as well as the KDE browser.
I use a perl script (I didn't write it) that lets Netscape load the new image as soon as it's uploaded. I didn't know it didn't work on IE at first. Later I read the source code. Whops...
The workaround displays the image.. sans update...
hit refresh...
I don't actually exist.
Everyone (espescially MS) knows the future is to "web enable" everything. Now, whether that means using HTML/DHTML/XML/WAP/Whatever remains to be seen. I think that releasing a browser with more features, that works only on certain platforms gives MS the "future" leverage they need. When was the last time you opted to just use Netscape over Mozilla on your Linux box because "you are use to it" and don't have time to "learn" a new browser. I think this is the kind of attitude MS relies on, and the attitude that will carry them into the web/PDA/wearable/whatever future.
I want to get to as many customers/visitors as I can, so why would I build an IE-only web site? It just doesn't make any sense.
Because if you build it, they will come. Microsoft enhancements will become standard because the standard IS Microsoft. This isn't exclusively a bad thing - many W3 compliant features of today are a result of non-standard additions of yesterday. Without new, non-compliant features, there'd be no evolution. What's wrong with MS is that they don't liase with the rest of the world about their 'enhancements' - they assume that everyone will follow suit. They're not interested in the evolution of HTML/CSS/XML/whatever - they're interested in the profit of Microsoft. Which is fair enough, considering they're a business, but you don't have to sacrifice altruism and cooperation to achieve that goal.
News like this is always depressing, because it emphasises what we're up against...
I use mozilla every day, but my employer has 'standardized' on IE. Normally, this would be something that I could shrug-off, since mozilla displays everything correctly that I can throw at it. Unfortunately, intranet documents are being mounted on NT servers configured to use the "NTLM" authentication method, which neither mozilla or netscape classic can do...so I can't even get to the documents. Trying to get the web administrators to use another authentication method is like pulling healthy teeth. "Why should we? We've standardized on IE!" There is a bugzilla report about this, and it seems close to being resolved...so there's hope I guess.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
All of there software is written by programmers who have never ever been outside the Microsoft campus. With no experience in the real world, other peoples standards mean nothing to them and, since they believe they are on the bleeding edge of technology, whatever they do should be the standard.
I'd love seeing people complain to the MS help line, "why is YOUR web site the only one I can read with IE?"
There need to be more web sites using CSS. That way we can say:
The internet treats incompatibility as damage and routes around it.
In post-9/11 America, the CIA interrogates YOU!
Thats more like saying would you buy a HTML editor that works only with IE, a more appropriate analogy would be "Would you drive on a road that was 'Ford cars only'" If you owned a Ford, damn right you would. Dont blame consumers for falling for microsofts tricks, since for consumers that use IE it is to their advantage to continue to use it. Its just the rest of us that have problems. Lets have three cheers for David Boies!
Did you hear the news? A factory added a weaving machine threatening our talents of weaving fabric by hand. Did you hear the news? A browser added a tag threatening our talents of coding calendars by hand.
I was thinking MIcrosoft would either leave the us for canda, to avoid the laws here. it would not be great for the us economy but they could stick it to the us goverment and revoke all there licences
If we refuse to be flexible, we are in effect opting out of the game of life. The world moves on without us.
No. Wrong. Earlier builds of OS/2 Warp 4 shipped with an icon on the desktop to download Netscape Navigator to replace the god-awful WebExplorer. As Netscape "improved" and got to the point where you could even get Communicator for OS/2 (which made Communicator for Linux look absolutely rock-solid, BTW) IBM discontinued WebExplorer. Good riddance.
Of course, OS/2 usage has dwindled so much that users are left without a decent web browser, but that's another story.
For more information, click here.
Quite frankly, if a page won't load in Netscape, I'll go someplace else .. lot easier than putting up with MSIE's silliness most of the time, and if a site can't be bothered to make their code run on all the browsers, I'll go to their competitors. Simple enough ..
73 de N5VB (ex-KD5BIV) AR SK
>Linux users force themselves to play catch up by using Linux.
Windows 95 was designed for the 386 in 1995... now in 2000 Win 95 (Same os) requires a Pentium.
Who is forced to play catch up?
Linux still runs on the 386 and has sence been ported to 286es.
Yes 386s and 286s are obsolete.
But then Osborns are even more obsolete... people still use them becouse they don't need anything more than a wordprocessor.
And obsolete 3B2s were used up to last year (Y2K bug) and people still play with Commodore 64s.
(Lunix.. Unix for the C64.. was last updated a few months ago)
Linux develupers are playing catchup.. Linux users need only download updates secure in the knowladage that they need NEVER update hardware...
Windows users have no such luck...
I don't actually exist.
So the solution is to complain loudly to the sites that use it. Tell them that their developers are lousy. Point them to other sites which do equally cool things using non-MS crap, and they will understand!
The original scheme (boycott) requires a very large percentage of users to take action. That won't happen.
Your scheme (complain) takes a large number but 1) they don't have to be MS users and 2) it can be much smaller than in the first scheme.
There are a few keys:
1) Don't just say "it doesn't work"--give a fix if possible.
2) Don't just say "I had problems"--say you won't be coming back.
3) Don't burn yourself out complaining to big companies (especially MS-friendly ones). For instance, don't bother email Fox or NBC about their pages. Try local business, tech-savvy companies and so on.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
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The real question, then, is did the tools serve some real purpose, or were they there just to obfuscate things, be a nuisance or have otherwise ulterior motives? If the former, fine, if the latter, it's a problem. I know which I suspect Microsoft of.
Two examples spring to mind. I take the steering wheel off my 1967 Valiant VE using a specialist tool, consisting of a bar and two bolts which when screwed into the steering wheel center will prise it away from the column. It's homemade, out of necessity, but the sockets in the steering wheel it screws into indicate that that's the intended way of taking it off, and that Chrysler probably sold them once upon a time. That's fine because it's basically the only way to get the steering wheel off; I'd have no problem paying for one if I needed it and one was available.
The other is those triangular and hex-star screws they use on Gameboys and heaps of other consumer electronics when they don't want you to get inside. It's merely obnoxious, because the screwdrivers are still available, just harder to get.
I also think I remember seeing photocopier and other technicians having vast arrays of specialist bizarre looking tools to open and prise things open. Dunno if they had to pay for them or not, but still reminds me of the "car hood welded shut" analogy.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
It also has the advantage of being more accessible (for people and cellphones), easier to lint and easier to write.
I have written more--plus some tips--on MeatballWiki.
Standards compliance and the MS anti-trust violations are really mutually exclusive IMHO. MS's anti-competitive business practices have nothing to do with the technologies they use and everything to do with HOW they use it. IE doesn't have 85% marketshare because its free, it has the marketshare because its better. Availability is not a real arguement, because everyone has the choice to go and get any one of numerous other browsers available. But why should they? IE works better!
:)
If MS wants to develop new techs, and their browser is the only one that supports the new techs, good for them! As long as the other companies have the opportunity to provide similar or superior support, why should we shake a finger at MS for being evil. I say to the other companies (hello Mozilla) Develop Faster!! Stop slacking, because it is your inability to deliver that is limiting our choice!
I guess I compare this to the auto industry. There are many good car choices around, and if one manufacturer is ofering a better product at a competitive price, that mfr. will get the business. Simple. If a manufacturer came out with a fantastic solar powered car that performed similarly to a gas car, cost the same, and was cheaper to maintain, don;t you think people would flock to buy it? What right would the others have to cry "No Fair, they have more features!" Boo Hoo, and get to work
Rant deceased
It'll make sense when they lose the god-awful MDI design. Or at least allow me to tear off windows. I hate Excel for this, I hate Word for this, I hate Access for this, I hate mIRC for this and I hate my ICE software for this.
Lose MDI. You know it makes sense.
Really, this is not that difficult to combat, considering how good Mozilla really is -- and therefore Netscape 6 will be.
Anyone who cares a whit about the issue: start designing your own sites now to use only standard technologies (XML/CSS/DOM) as far as Mozilla will let you. Mozilla itself has a few things that are non-standard -- don't be tempted!
Worried that this will lock you out of MS's 86%? Never fear. Sniff the browser in your configuration file and return the exact same code, except with the tag stripped out, when IE-anything or Mozilla tag was new. Both people can still use your site without problems, of course.
It sure beats maintaining two separate versions of your site -- which is what you'll have to do when AOL merges Gecko into their next major rev. The reason it's worth waiting for standards is because CSS, when properly used, is nice like that.
This is my plan for the next version of my site.
That's the problem. There aren't many "right thinking web developers" in the world left. Publishing web documents is becoming easier and easier using MS Office and Frontpage, so more and more people are making pages. They don't have to think about them AT ALL, much less think about them the right way. Making it easy for grandma to create a web page is good. Making it easy for grandma to go against standards is bad. She doesn't know or even care about the standards. Now I'm not going to be able to see the pictures of her grandkids.
"Together, the proprietary innovation and the purported faults in standards compliance mean that Web pages created to work for IE--widely considered to be the dominant browser--won't work with browsers from Netscape, Opera Software and other providers."
Really? Seems to me that since IE 4, _most_ of the web has been equally accessible to Netscape and IE. Even the latest version of Opera works well with DHTML pages I've made. With 5.5, you would have to go out of your way to use the new Flash integration features so they would not work with Netscape. Some may use it in Intranet environments, some may continue to offer multiple views of their site. Some may decide that 86% of the potential audience is enough.
No matter how you slice your GIFs, it seems to me that most of the extra work web developers have had to cope with since IE 4 is because of Netscape 4's proprietary almost-a-real-DOM.
And after all that work, I wonder how many Netscape 4-compatible pages will break when Mozilla finally ships?
As for CSS1 support: while MS is far from perfect, IE 5 is wayyyyy more stable then any version of Netscape I've ever seen. I keep downloading Mozilla builds. It's getting better, but, we have been waiting a looooooong time!
Forgive me if I don't think of the W3C members as Olympian gods dispensing truth from the mountain-top. These people also have their own corporate, political and personal biases. Headbutting is what it is! So calm down! If MS follows through on their "software rental" plans, the entire Windows platform will probably self-destruct: MS Software Rental plans
Hey, what's that sound? 500-million CDs spinning up to install Linux! (they would have downloaded it but Mozilla kept crashing ;)
Is this sig nificant?
And considering that Microsoft makes $0.00 from their browser
I'm not so sure about that. Now that they pretty much own the browser market they have a lot of leverage, which they are starting to use, and that leverage translates into $$$$.
For instance, one of the best uses for Linux is to surf the web and do email etc. It's free, stable and your mom could use it once it's setup. But... does your mom want to surf the web with this old netscape browser that randomly dies and fails to render pages on all these neat web sites? No way...adios Linux and hello MS Windows for Mom! And it will just get worse from here my friend...this could kill Linux (on the desktop) more than anything and MS knows it.
Hold on a sec. When AOL 6.0 is released, it won't include IE, it'll include Mozilla based. Assuming that most of their 23 million users will upgrade (who doesn't like shiny things?), it'll be a whole new situation. 80% will quickly drop to 40%. I'm sure when you install AOL 6.0 you won't even have the option of using IE, it'll just disable it. IE only specs will mean anti-AOL, and thus definitely anti-consumer.
Not yet, anyway. Quote from Opera's website(http//www.opera.com):
Opera does not "understand" the character encoding needed to automatically switch between and show some character sets for languages such as Russian, Polish, Greek, Hebrew, nor does it render the multi-byte characters of Japanese, and Chinese. support for Unicode and character encoding is planned for Opera 4.1.
Otherwise it's a quite nice and not the least portable browser. Hey, it runs on my Psion 5mx too :-)
My opinion? See above.
The Internet Explorer vs Netscape issue is a good example of where we'd be in operating systems if MSFT wasn't dominant. I develop web pages, and the incompatibilities between browsers is what gives me the most headaches. And, I have to say, most of the genuine problems I have come from NS. I can have a page that conforms to standards and renders exquisitely in IE, and NS will turn it into pooch poop. If NS vanished from the face of the earth, I'd praise the day. I have no love for Gill Bates, but if MSFT wants to use its market share to carjack the standards, based on the superiority of their product it's ok with me.
Some details:
:-)? (BTW, at http://www.w3.org/Amaya/, amaya version 3.2.1 is out...)
You haven't looked around if you believe IE is the only XML tool around. Also, Amaya isn't really intended to be a normal browser. Note that it's an editor, and is used as a test-bed for w3c standards. A nice toy for instance is MathML, which it supports. Want cool looking formula's
Anyhow, you may be interested to know that smil, a pretty cool language, is what RealPlayer and so on are based on. So if you write your smil correctly, and are aware of realplayers multitude of limitations, I suggest NOT writing for IE, but for realplayer as that actually works on many platforms. Incidentally don't use the smil tag, it's somewhat undefined in behaviour (I don't think it'll be in smil 2.0). Also realplayer's realtext and realpix formats are xml and pretty neat.
HTML formatting bit me. Sigh.
I meant to say, strip the STYLE tag out.
That's what I get for writing on wikis all the time... :-)
I congratulate you on your effort, but not all of use have the time to devote to Mozilla. Don't get me wrong, I'd like to help, I really would. To be part of devloping something that huge, in however small a a way has got to give warm fuzzies. But, I'm stuck here in the UK on the end of a piss poor modem line which I'm still paying by the minute for, and a very crap machine. Even if I could spare the time it'd kill my machine. It brings my work machine to its knees and thats a better specced box.
These are the people who will use these new features. They're the ones who design web pages that suck and that doesn't look like its going to change any time soon. This is going to be a problem for a very long time.
P.S.: I'm a user of IE 5.0, this story just convinced me to switch to Netscape when it finally comes out. Whenever the hell that will be.
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AbiWord: The BEST opensource word processor
Check out AbiWord.
After all, a standard is what everyone uses. A standard is not something cast in stone that's handed down for everyone to follow. Well, it is, but it becomes irrelevant when the majority of users don't need it.
.EXE files, .DOC files, and so on. Windows is the standard on PC operating systems. If 90% of users use it, that's a standard. It doesn't really matter what the pedantic arguments are. you can split hairs all you want, but if you want to live in the real world, a standard is what everyone uses.
It's a bit like Open [pick your standard] vs. Windows. Even if Sun, IBM, DEC, HP, etc. band together and their committees agree on an "open" standard, it doesn't really matter, because by that time everyone is using
real video is a standard. pdf is a standard. flash is a standard. mp3 is a standard. Maybe these aren't rubber stamped by standards committees, but they are standards, because they are what people use.
Increasingly, w3c seems in danger of becoming another irrelevant body. If the majority of users end up using software that bypasses the W3C, then the W3c is a standard no more.
w/m
I don't care if Mozilla or IE put proprietary "standards" in, BUT you first have to support the basics -- the STANDARDS. IE doesn't support all of the standards, therefore they should fix those *before* moving on.
At least Mozilla sticks to the standards. And if they don't then they'll be blasted too
Fuck David Boies. What a two faced shithead. Napster is such a big piece of lame shit, it's not even funny.
Can you metamoderate?
Learn to spell.
Nobody complained when Netscape added new "features" because it didn't stop them viewing sites that implemented them. The real point being that Netscape was cross platform. It was available on many operating systems and was always being ported to more. Netscape might have been tying you into their browser but not into an operating system/office suite etc etc.
Regards
Bad_CRC. Good_Pizza.
Can you metamoderate?
Learn to spell.
Note the key word...businesses. There's no law saying you have to use it (yet at least). If you don't like it then make your own.
Almost every windows user (as in Mr. Generic Customer) uses the browser that came with windows. There are a decreasing number of people that bother to download any other browser.
Why bother checking to make sure that your site works with any other browser when you know that a significant majority are going to be using IE?
I use Netscape, myself, so I don't like this practice, but that's the way some designers think.
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"It was people! People soiled our green!"
W3C wouldn't succeed in this for one simple reason, MS has more money than they do. MS is arrogant enough to thumb their noses at the government, why should they care about the W3C.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
like webdesigners are the people who still try to support level 3 browsers, still use the font tag instead of CSS beacuse there is better browser support, and somtimes avoid frames beacuse of support.
/*
I think that as long as *someone* uses a non-IE browser, people will still stive for compatibility
*Not a Sermon, Just a Thought
*/
*Not a Sermon, Just a Thought
*/
Somebody please define "standard."
Seems to me that if 9 out of 10 people are using IE, then IE is the standard, and Web sites should be IE compliant.
Netscape is behind the times. Its products are bloated, unstable, and lagging behind IE both in performance and features. IE, on the other hand, is stable, somewhat lean, and feature rich. And nearly everyone is using it.
I'll stick with what the standard is--the browser that everyone uses, IE. It's my choice and keeps getting better with every release. It's an example of something Microsoft has done right.
This validator is so buggy it isn't even funny. 30% of the complaints are about values that aren't encapsulated in quotes, which is completely legal (i.e., color=#123456 as opposed to color="#123456"), and another 30% are matching tags that it says are not closing an , but the is mentioned in the line it quotes as having the error! (maybe it didn't read the because it had un-quoted data in it.)
Without federal intervention, Microsoft will surely stamp out all other software.
If I need to use MSIE to view even as little as 20% of websites, chances are I'll use it, and forsake Linux as a result since much of my computing time is web browsing, and without a browser that can show me the sites I need to see, linux becomes much less useful for my home computing needs.
I've already been forced to give up netscape completely on my windoze box because it crashes constantly, due to what I'm assuming is some unknown spyware which was installed without my consent. I hate M$ and MSIE, but not enough to cripple myself in a world controlled by them.
________
(he says, loosing the ability to moderate this thread)
If MS uses "features" that aren't standard and people don't like them, don't use them. If everyone decides to use them then they become the new standard.
You sir, would probably loose a battle of wits with a stuffed iguana - "if people don't like them, don't use them" arrrrrgh! That is so imbecilic!
There is a small group of people who design web pages (compared to those who read them), THEY may like these "features" and use them, FORCING me to use some damn browser that i don't want to use! And don't tell me this is progress much of it are things we could live with out, and generally Microsoft following what has been revealed to be their plan; to make the Internet proprietary MS software
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If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
If you implement a web site which 85% of the population can access, the other 15% will simply not use your site. They will use some other site.
Your sales (on a sales oriented web site) will only be 85% of what they what they would be if 100% of the population could access the site.
Now, how many companies can afford to throw away 15% of sales just because a site designer is incompetent?
BTW. I dispute the 85% figure. My stats are closer to 70/30.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
The whole adherence to standards argument is based on an entirely different premiss to that which motivates Microsoft. You guys all think Microsoft should adhere to standards in order to make the web a better place, and to make the work of web developers and designers faster. If MS produced a browser that was compliant across several key standards (lets say (X)HTML, CSS1, DOM1 and XML) then design time would be drastically shorter, web design as a discipline would advance and the web would be a better place. There would also be a large range of user agents with which you could view all this standardised content, and IE would have a smaller market share.
Why would Microsoft want to do anything that might open up a market to competitors? If you can come up with a compelling reason for MS to give away market share (and you aren't Government) then let them know. If it standards-compliance guaranteed better dividends for MS stock holders, you can be damn sure they'd be doing it.
As regards MacIE5 - total standards compliance got them a lot of coverage and I imagine increased the MacIE userbase considerably. In this scenario it suited them to follow that course. Why should they act any differently?
In a sense Bill isn't out to fracture the web space, he's out to unify it. Somone once said we needed a Techno Czar to unilaterally declare one standard for the technologies we need to use in life. By the time all the appeals are done and the dust has settled. William H. Gates the Third will be that Czar by default.
I recently complained to a webmaster that the primary function of his site did not work on IE 5 for the Mac. He told me to buzz off, they only support the "dominant platform". I fear this will become a common attitude, write for the 80% using IE on Windows and screw everyone else.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Not so. Everyone who had to actually markup pages then knew what two radically different browsers would mean. I don't know where you were hanging out then, but ratio wise (since there are so many more people do web stuff now) I heard the same about of bitching back then as I do know.
Yes, some things were asked for and to a certain extent Netscape and early IE 3 did tend to push the envelope. But now look where that has gotten us. Netscape tosses its code base and goes back to make a standars complaint browser and Microsoft goes ahead and tries to create the next BLINK tag.
For a while, no one will be able to ignore netscape simply because of install base. Hopefully...
-- Are you an EFF member yet?
This is why I hope the breakup goes through ... the logic puzzles alone will entertain for a thousand years.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
The reason MSIE is the embedded browser in AOL (and Compuserve) is because AOL wanted to be included in the default Windows install (and on the Desktop) Therefore, M$ told AOL you will use MSIE for your browser or you will not be in Windows. Kind of a nasty trick, eh?
A wealthy eccentric who marches to the beat of a different drum. But you may call me "Noodle Noggin."
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
Talk about missing the point.
The point being if there is enough I tried to use your website, but it laughed at my browser, so I trundled over to your competitor who writes web pages readable by everyone and I've been quite happy spending money there, money you would have gotten had your web team done a proper design since this is the WWW not the MWW. HTH. HAND.
And yes, voting with your $$$'s -- and letting the victims know -- works.
James
The standardization of web browsing takes way too long. I think that if Microsoft wants to introduce new features it is a good thing providing that they let all the other web browsers know how they did it. If it takes Netscape 6 months to get their browser up with IE that's fine. Most people won't readily use the new features that quickly. It's a hard call overall. On one side it makes Netscape look like crap but on the otherside if we tell Microsoft "no" then technology is being withheld. I hate MS just as much as the next /.er but I think if MS gives some specifications to Netscape thus giving Netscape a chance to catch up it's all fair. I mean... look at the blink tag! IE still doesn't have this great tag as far as I know.... I love blinky text! (note: you must have netscape to view the superb blinkiness)
I keep hearing more and more from web developers that Microsoft isn't supporting all of the standards and pushing forward with their own (proprietary, at least at the moment) technologies. But folks, you need to start to see the big picture.
First, Microsoft owns the browser market. Owns it. 86% proves that. So they're taking the arrogant position of not working hard enough to implement the standards (although I hear the Mac version of IE does it stunningly well). But guess what, they don't HAVE to (as ugly as that is).
But the point is, there's more to a browser than browsing web pages. In the next versions of Windows (yeah, it's not Linux/BSD/whatever; I hope you're still reading :-), the browser is going to be where you run *all* of your applications. ALL of them. No more Win32 APIs (in the client application, that is; you'll still need them to create Web Services), no fat installations, nothing. Just go to a URL ( anything you need will be set up for you) and voila, you're up and running. That's what part of the .NET strategy is about. MS is leveraging all of the existing code out there (thru XML-compliant SOAP calls) to push themselves towards the end game (where all applications run in the browser; namely their browser). Why do you all think you keep hearing about renting your applications thru ASPs? Because you'll access your applications through your web browser.
That said, MS is innovating in ways that are currently irrelevant to the "web developer" (read: the guys who develop web SITES not web APPLICATIONS). They're bringing along their standards compliance at a slow pace so they CANNOT be accused of doing NOTHING, but (even I admit) they're support is coming along too slowly. Those "colored scroll bars"? Applications, not sites.
In their grand scheme, the standards aren't what's critical to their future. It's the _applications_. Not some clunky little web site. Think "rich, immersive applications." Not anything like we have today and you'll begin to see what's going on in Redmond.
I have used any kind of browser on a lot of platform for years, from Mosaic to N+. A lot of people here are right that IE5 is more stable and very very faster than Netscape to render page in windows, and it's sad but a lot of website actually looks better with IE, even those W3C compliant!
And of course a lot of linux people says "microshit" IE is shit etc etc etc. but a lot never used it, they are just the "linux rulez, M$ suckz" community. But let me tell you that if IE were available for Linux/X11 like it is available for Solaris and HPUX iirc, maybe 86% of linux users would use it! it's not flamebait, it's just a truth... i use N+ under BeOS, Voyager2 under QNX, IE/Netscape/Opera in windows. And the best is IE period.
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"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
>Didn't Netscape do the same in the early days of browsers (i.e. when they still enjoyed a dominant place in the market)? IIRC, this is what brought us blinking text....
... and failed...
Yes...
Netscape had to "crush" Mosaic...
The IBM preinstalled a webbrowser in OS/2. Thats when Netscape said "We can not compleate with a preinstalled browser" and discontinued Netscape for OS/2....
Then comes IE.....
Microsoft has attempted this trick for a LONG time
You can argue the increasing popularity of "Not Windows" as a good reason to not develup for the 90% wops I mean 85%... and dropping...
It's all well and fine to develup for the majority but Windows is a decresing majority.
True Windows has greater marketshare...
But compare that to the marketshare of Win2K vs the latest Linux distros...
Most people stick with 95 or 98 but upgrade to the latest Linux...
It can be argued that Windows isn't moving forward...
I don't actually exist.
This is truely ridiculous. Microsoft knows that most of the internet population is full of morons, and that they believe just cause one program has a higher verion number of the other, it's better. IE has many new "features". In my office, we use the word "features" when sometimes talking about a defect in the program. MS is trying to squash a lot of things with this new release. I hope that this is the smoking gun that can be used to tear Microsoft apart. I'm glad the product we're developing here only works with Netscape.
That? That's not a bug. It's a feature!
"0101100101? It's just jibberish. *looks in mirror, gasps* 1010011010@!? AHHHHHH!!"
Browsers are just horrible. Why? No one implements the standards properly. And once a company manages to get a lead in their market share, they ignore the fact that their browsers are broken by design, and add features that the marketting department orders.
..
The Day the Browser Died by Jeffery Zeldman illustrates quite nicely how this happened with Netscape v4, which fails to support CSS very well at all (IIRC, it turns CSS into some sort of Javascript style page stuff).
People have never had much choice when it came to web browsers. In the early days, it was Netscape or Mosaic, and Netscape was the clear leader. Because of this, people didn't care that Netscape was horribly broken, and wrote HTML which was broken by design (such as elements without terminating semicolons). Then Netscape would release an updated version which fixed the behaviour, and a lot of the web would just "not work"
Enter IE. IE came along as a half-baked licencing of the Spyglass Mosaic source. Think Mosaic v1, but in 1996 when it had to compete against Netscape v2. It didn't get any better until IE v4 in 1998. But IE 4 (and 5, and 5.5) also have gaping holes in their support for common, well known standards.
So what's a web designer to do? Because the two main choices (ignore Opera, 99.99% of people will not use shareware when all other browsers are freeware) are both so poor, the web designer is stuck using the lowest common denominator standards, using horrible kludges to work around the broken feature sets of the browsers used to render their work. Worse, once one of the two browsers gains more than a certain percentage of market share, a lot of web designers will go ahead and write broken HTML using the features of the most common browser out of exasperation (not to mention all the "web programming" programs targetted at absolute newbies, such as Front Page, which produce highly non-portable HTML).
Microsoft (and some other FUDsters that remain) like to talk about Linux and fragmentation of standards in the Unix camp, yet they go ahead and do EXACTLY the same thing in their own little places. The balkanization of the web is well on its way to happening, thanks to the standards-incompliant browsers out there.
You think it's bad having to spend 799$ on MS Word to be able to read the macro viruses that most companies use for documentation systems? Wait until one company (in this case, Microsoft, but Netscape was just as bad when it had its large percentage of market share) has control of web standards. How much will a good browser which supports the latest MS-HTML feature cost in 2003?
Dr. Jakob Nielsen did some research into browser usage patterns that could present a way to avoid the problems of incompatible HTML. It's simple: get a browser with standards support available before Jan. 2001. If you can get it into that window, people will start using your browser.
Mozilla looks like it can make it, if they get some help from people in making sure that they have good standards compliance out of the gate. Right now, Mozilla has some notable problems with CSS 1 (such as conflicts between CSS margining, paragraph indentation, and HTML 4.0 tables) and other parts of its rendering engine interacting badly.
Web designers want to use standards in their daily business. It lets them be free to write sites that work the best possible way. If you give them clients using standards compliance browsers, they will make standards compliant websites.
If the free software programmers help get the gecko engine working properly, and provide a nice wrapper to it (such as the Galeon Gnome wrapper for Gecko), people will switch to it. Provide stability, provide standards compliance, and give it away free. People will download it (especially since gecko+wrapper should be a lot smaller than Mozilla itself, which has so many other things people might not need, like YetAnotherMailClient). The only catch is that you also need to have a Windows version, or you can bank on MS being able to force people into using IE 6.0.
We have a headstart on MS because Gecko is here today with the source open to people who can help fix it and get it out the door. Don't let this opprotunity go to waste. We can beat the marketters at their own game.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Actually, IMHO netscape handles tables better then IE. IE has a technique that displays as it renders while netscape renders everything then displays it. So it's a lot easier to catch html problems with netscape. So if you made a mistake in your html in netscape it won't display anything whereas IE will display crap. Making it a little easier for the developer (most of the time) because you may not know that you made a mistake in IE until something bad happens (like a form that didn't submit a variable etc.).
Anyway, the reason netscape won't follow IE is because the ultimate goal with Mozilla was to create a 100% standards compliant web browser. MS is instead (as we all know) trying to set it's own standards. Something that the netscape generation dispises. The other problem with trying to "match" IE is that MS tends to "reserve the right" to their "innovations". In other words: you can use it but you can not implement it. It really is a monopolistic strategy.
My $0.02
Garett
But couldn't Mozilla have been released as a stable standards compliant browser first, and then add all the Toys in afterwards?
It seems that all of this cruft; XUL, skinning, Sidebar novelties, etc. have caused Mozilla to be delayed time and time again.
IIRC, the original Mozilla plan was for a fast, stable, low-profile browser. But now it's running out of control as more and more crap's being added to it.
As the other postings here confirm, IE's gaining in marketshare every day. To Joe Surfer, there's no other competitor.
Sad, but true...
MS != W3C
They don't set the standards, that's the point. However, what they are doing is using their market domination to ignore the standards and write their own, leaving the rest of the market out in the cold... thus forcing even more people to use their products.
I think they might even have gone to court about this recently... guess they didn't learn anything from it.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
Two points
Konqueror; it's quite nice and does such nifty things as use your QT widgets in rendering web pages (i.e. your web page will conform to your desktop theme -- KDE 1.91 can be made a lot prettier than previous versions, so expect 2.0 to be very good in this department)
The fact is, this is MS using its market power to attempt to bend the market into the shape advantageous to MS; now, as long as the browsers they produce are AT LEAST W3C standards compliant (mostly) it won't be a big deal as long as web page designers are smart.
The big issue, IMO, is that Mozilla isn't out yet, as nice and Opera and Konqueror might be, they're not in a position to capture anything like 20% of the market share. Since IE 5.5 is out, and will be a big player for the foreseeable future, the competition has a mountain to climb. In fact, at 86% of the market, it looks like they may have a monopoly here and ...
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
if browser developers aren't bothering to implement it, I doubt that there's a whole lot of demand for it
Have you even read any of the comments? There is obviously a demand for it.
Browser? I barely know her!
Standards are whatever the majority of web sites choose to use to display and allow access to their content, and whatever transport mechanisms the infrastructure will support. Unless there is going to be government regulation of standards for such things as http and html, then the market decides.
If Linuxers don't like the fact that 85% of web surfers use MS Internet Explorer (though I find that figure hard to believe - it seems high) then get the 1 billion Chinese, 1 billion other Asians (Japs and Koreans seem to love Linux) to use browsers which adhere to WC3 standards or whatever other standards the unix community adopts. Oh, and I forgot about the teeming hordes of Latin Americans, Africans and left-leaning Europeans.
Look, Linuxers, so long as you let America dominate the net, MS will define the standards. Well, nobody is forcing you to visit sites which only work right with Internet Explorer. Avoid those sites and don't do business with them.
Clean up your own act before you start flaming MS. Redhat's rpm has become the defacto standard for Linux packaging. Was this decided upon by any standards body in the Linux community? No. It was decided by Redhat's percieved lead in market share at the time and the adoption of rpm by most other distros.
For years MS has been forced by the market to adhere to standards of the unix community - tcp, ftp, http, and the list goes on. Now that MS has a significant share of the server market and that the internet has become a medium for ordinary commerce and entertainment, the tables are turned.
I've been using those tags for years and now W3 comes along and says, "Oh, we changed our minds. You'll have to change it all." Fuck that.
What happened with the /A>? They were petitioning Microsoft to support the rest of the standard before moving on. Have they failed (not that they haven't tried and tried hard)? Well, at least they're mad about it as well.
And why isn't Microsoft implementing the rets of the standard. Is it really thatmuch more thna what they've already accomplished? Perhaps Big Daddy Gates is pushing the .NOT^H^H^HNET initiative too hard?
So what can we do about it? WSP has not worked thus far. Why should a big behemoth like Microsoft bow down to them? Can we sue Microsoft for one reason or another related to not supporting standards? If so, what does that say for every less-standardly-implemented browser out there?
I think I'll take up farming until this whole thing blows over.
Now if more webdevelopers had that attitude life would be grand. I am not impressed when I go to a site using Opera and get some page saying to update to the latest version of Netscape or IE. Any commercial site worth it's salt should know better than to isolate users.
Don't you know that the King is the slave of his people?
the decision to integrate IE into things like windows, visual studio, and especially office was a brilliant move on their part.. think about it: their latest policy move means making a net-centric OS, which is basically tied in to ASPs for usefulness.. but wait--what if the DOJ is successful in breaking them into an OS company and an application company? what if suddenly people have wider choices in the OS dept? simple--IE is the tool for using .NET, and it's integrated into their major products, OS and apps. so M$ still wins.
i hate it, but everytime i turn around, they have another incredible strategy to hold on to market dominance. that's where their only innovation is.
--
Has BillG really forgotten that either the appeal court or the Supremes are going to be asked to judge his actions? That one of the main reasons for the original breakup order is that MS has shown a long-term incorrigiable pattern of behaviour? Doesn't he realise that more of the same is not going to help his case?
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Look at Netscape release schedule. You can't expect everyone to sit around and wait on them. If MS uses "features" that aren't standard and people don't like them, don't use them. If everyone decides to use them then they become the new standard.
The network admins actually found that those features that "required" IE were easy enough to implement in a browser-neutral way.
I don't think this is always too difficult, but remember you have hoards of lazy folks. Hoards of lazy folks in the MSDN who will get marketed this stuff like mad, probably get a few working web apps so they can cut and paste. Then they fire up IE5.5 and go "wow, that's cool." (because it is) and then they are finished. Microsoft makes it real easy to get sucked in, and just when you thought you were out.....
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+&x
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What role will the most frequently used web development and (particularly) design tools have on this? I don't know many (real) designers who use FrontPage so I assume widespread use of these IE-only additions will only really start being felt once they are integrated into Dreamweaver et al.
...weaned, as it were, on the webs of ritual... (Mervyn Peake)
Are you in business to cater to your customer needs, or are you in it to play catchup with MS?
Figure it out yourself. Software is flexible. It is the developers which are not.
Oops... gotta remember that preview button... This validator is so buggy it isn't even funny. 30% of the complaints are about values that aren't encapsulated in quotes, which is completely legal (i.e., color=#123456 as opposed to color="#123456"), and another 30% are matching tags that it says are not closing an , but the is mentioned in the line it quotes as having the error! (maybe it didn't read the because it had un-quoted data in it.)
Newsflash:
"We now interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to bring you news that Microsoft, in a surprise move, has flouted industry standards in the new version of the Internet Explorer browser. Analysis and commentary at six."
My take on this is simple: As a user, I will use whatever is 1) functional, stable, small, and fast, and 2) doesn't piss me off. At this point (Yes, even in its beta stage) that browser is Mozilla.
As a web developer, I will try to make my pages appear on as many browsers as I can (including lynx et al). Even with the market share issue, this still means DE FACTO STANDARDS: the products that 'innovate' (IE) ALSO support the industry standards, to a degree. What I do is pick the lowest common denominator of the standards that all of my target browsers support, and design with that: you'd be surprised at how nice you can get a page looking while keeping functionality. If you absolutely need some of the extended functionality, make it an option, and allow ways around it for everyone else.
I don't mind what Microsoft is doing with IE; this is the way we get new standards introduced in the first place (I just won't use them when I make my web pages). The sorry thing about IE is that they made all of these useless innovations, and still neglected to complete some basic standards support, which they claim they have already anyway.
I personally don't know what CSS is, but...
*mustnotflamemustnotflamennnnghhh...*
CSS = Cascading Style Sheets; a way of defining the look of a HTML document either in the head or in a separateAs long as there is more than one browser in the market there has to be a uniform standard and if one group is going to set that standard down it might as well be the W3C - impotent in the face of the MS capitalist pigs though they may be.
No standards would mean that gradually the Web would begin to fragment into different areas, each viewable only by specific browsers. A standard set by one company means that all the other competition will be squeezed out; said company gains full control over the direction of the Web - and then they start charging for browsers, server-side technology and ultimately their own Web language.
I have no desire to learn MSML which is why I'll be boycotting MSIE 5.5
The conclusion of your syllogism, I said lightly, is fallacious, being based on licensed premises
Compaq has/had those screwdrivers...
Netscape tried to do the same thing. If they owned 86% of the market, they would introduce propietary standards like they did with blink and frames.
--
Humancasting
OliverWillis.Com
An Operative with an Agenda
Does that mean that those pages also won't work with the Macintosh version of Internet Explorer, frequently praised as being the most standards-compliant browser available?
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Joy. Thanks Microsoft for making my job easier.
Bunch of #$Q#!@#)(*+@(*#$ assh*les...
So, while the W3C would like us to all use CSS2 all the time - we can't. The browsing audience can't handle it yet, thanks to MS and Netscape/AOL.
Now, there are some developers who will inevitably jump on the bandwagon and use all of IE's little tricks. We won't. Not because they're MS tricks, but because they won't work on all the browsers out there (IE: Netscape, Opera, etc...)
All crap like this does is waste time. Had MS/Netscape spent their time working towards the common standards, we'd all win. Instead, each wants to "own the web" and they throw this proprietary crap in there -- which we can't use.
As a mater of fact I have bought wrenchs that only worked on Fords. And others that only worked on GM, and others... Which means I now own some tools that are useless, I don't own the car they work with, and the newer cars need a different tool.
That doesn't mean I like it. I always waste a couple hours trying alternatives before I break down and spending $10-$50 on the right tool for the job.
I know its not the ideal solution.,.. but cant netscape just comply with what IE does? it would meen alot more people would use netscape (i would).. because frankly, IE does deal with webpages better.. even look at netscapes tables, terrable! cheers craz netscape: JUST DO IT!
stuff
I don't see what Diana Ross her two scabs touring has to do with it. Oh, you mean the Supreme Court! D'oh!
STOP! In the naaaaaaame of Renooooooooo!
ack.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Wops... Not Moasic... Mosaic stopped develupment when HTML 2 specs were being made... I'm thinking KDE.. :)
But just slap any HTML4 browser in place of Mosaic in my post.. it's all the same...
I also use Arachnie... It's all the same
I don't actually exist.
I love IE. It's stable (usually), powerful, and is the only useful XML client out there. Where the features it provides are generally helpful and likely to be (or become) mainstream, then I'll happily use them. I write SMIL that only works on IE 5.5, because it's my only option for SMIL, and in my particular context that's enough reason to change browsers. As SMIL is standards-based, then I have no guilt about doing it (Mozilla can play catch up as soon as they feel like it).
I'd love for there to be more good browsers. I'd love Mozilla to do XML (Yes, I know what it does, and that isn't useful enough). I'd love Amaya to be more friendly than a rottweiler with toothache. I'd like Opera to understand Unicode (big Doh! on that one, guys). These are business issues though, and as a web-geek, I'm not in a position to fix them. Hey, I'm just a red-shirt, and I know what happens when they go up against the Borg.
OTOH, M$oft "innovations" are evil, not part of the standards process, and should be shunned by all right thinking web developers. If M$oft want to use them on their own site, then that's their privilege and their problem if it goes wrong. No-one else should touch them with the proverbial bargepole.
PLEASE, browser makers - give us working, reliable CSS and a standard DOM before you fool around with anything else.
I can. At our company, the final checks for all intra/internet development is on Netscape browsers. We must be able to continue to support clients (internally) running Netscape browsers on Solaris (Sparc), and designing to IE just breaks a lot of things. So, we don't.
IE is, strangely enough, part of a normal desktop install, as well as Netscape. However, IE 5.5 will not change what we're doing since rule Nr 1 is to develop to standards on the client side.
Readers from Microsoft should take note: These kinds of shenanigans have not gone unnoticed by our company and will continue to prevent the use of IE as a primary browser for years to come. I guess it doesn't matter too much to Microsoft that they've locked themselves out of 40k+ desktops when they've got millions of others they can control. But it matters to us.
Is anyone else realizing this problem?
...
/nutt
Windows losses Market Share to Linux.
MS builds IE into Windows.
MS refuses to release IE for Linux.
Linux users use netscape.
IE takes 86% market share.
Web Developers code for IE.
MS refuses to release IE for Linux.
Worst case scenario for the future:
IE takes 95% market share.
Mozilla stops development.
MS refuses to release IE for Linux.
Linux users forced back to Windows.
This doesnt look good!!!
I think this is a case of a double standard.
Netscape did this quite a lot years ago: the introduction of cookies, numerous tags like and all the stuff.
Nobody seemed to cry "you're not standards compliant" then; instead, they hailed Netscape for their "innovation" (now a tainted word after Microsoft abused it so.)
The thing is, both companies have always shirked the standards bodies, if for no other reason than they are slow. The Web moves fast, especially web technology. In just the past year I've learned or been exposed to at least 7 new web-development technologies/frameworks. I can't think of another industry that even comes close in terms of speed.
I believe it is wrong to shrug off the standards bodies until you have already implemeneted/forced your standard on the world. But we aren't going to change that corporate mindset (at least, not until we get rid of the single-vendor dominance of web browsers.)
I don't support Microsoft's actions (in fact, I am ideologically opposed to using IE because I detest their behavior surrounding it so much) but I do think we should remember that Netscape did this too; they aren't the innocent here. And sadly enough, they will have to continue to do it in order to win market share back. A pure standards compliant browser just isn't enough to make it these days, I'm afraid.
First off, IE's standards support isn't nearly as bad as some other browsers we all use (*cough* Netscape *cough*). As far as supporting the DOM and various CSS attributes, IE does a pretty good job. I can write pages that render perfectly in both Mozilla and IE with very little hassle by abiding to standards. That same code won't even show up in Netscape, much less render properly.
When Netscape had the browser market share, they did the exact same thing. Do we remember the tag? Do we remember the tag? Those were proprietary additions that took off and made pages completely unrenderable to browsers that didn't support them. IE's additions, on the other hand, are mainly aesthetic (e.g. alpha filters on CSS objects) or direct object tie-ins to the operating system. Face it, if you're writing web sites that strictly target one browser on one platform, you're not gonna give a damn about industry standards or what other people think.
The fact is, MSIE doesn't make it any harder nor does it make it impossible to write compliant web pages. Personally, I'm happy that someone is pushing the stodgy W3C forward with ideas, cause without moves like that, we wouldn't have the graphic oriented web pages that we have today (I know, some of you think that's a bad thing).
I use MS Products and I personally was very excited originally when I read the story on the Mac version of IE5.5 a month or two ago. Now, obviously, I'm very much disappointed with the turn of events.
:-)
.sigms, I just believe in me"
So, I was thinking earlier this morning about what it was that could be done to let them know how we (the people who use their products, willingly or not) feel about their decision.
Consequently, I decided to be a minimalist: I wanted to let them know that I was angry, but I didn't feel like writing them a big, long-winded email about it, so I decided to just copy the press release from WaSP and send it to them a couple of times in different departments (since their comment system for 5.5 was broken and their other comment system only allowed you to comment on 4.0), just to make sure that it got there.
I think that if they got enough of a response to this, something might actually be done about it. Even if it takes until the 6.0 version, or some later SP.
What do you guys think?
"I don't believe in
Think about it... Imagine you are a semi-responsible web developer trying to make a "standards compliant" page. Right now, you could design the page and test it with either Netscape or MSIE 4/5 and be pretty well assured that it would look pretty much the same in the other browser with a couple minor changes.
HOWEVER, if it becomes a well known fact that MSIE 5.5 is completely incompatible with Netscape (and even MSIE 5.0 for that matter), then development will turn towards Netscape. Responsible developers will never use the MSIE tags, and instead will develop their pages using Netscape because they can feel assured that the page will look pretty much the same in MSIE.
The fact is that no good website is going to use the proprietary tags. When I am developing my site (ahem... ubersite.com), I do all of my development in linux/netscape because then when I go to windows, it looks pretty much the same in either netscape or MSIE (with the big exception of font sizes).
So, much like VBScript, MSIE 5.5 proprietary tags will never catch on.
A choice of masters is not freedom
As long as browser makers -- all of them -- fail to support existing standards while adding on frou frou crap for lame-o coders and dreamweaver drones -- they don't have a basis of quality or comptetency on which to innovate.
If browser makers stuck to these standards, the jobs of web developers would be MUCH easier; CSS alone would help tremendously. But I don't care! Because when shitty coders like you make broken sites, I can rake in the $$$ fixing your insults to their users. While I might make less, the web would be far less shitty if there weren't so many sites broken by browser makers' lack of standards.No browser maker or microsoft sycophont has any right to complain about W3C slowness when they can't even catch up to the standard. No extensions to the standard are useful while they require coding for two or more browsers to use them.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
create interactive, useful web sites.
Given the track record of those web developers who parrot the word "interactive", I'd say this statement is an oxymoron.
Oddly, IE5.0 on the Mac renders PNGs correctly.
Typical greedy bloody Micros~1, always adding new features to embrace and extend, without fixing things that are known to currently be broken.
The argument is clear-cut and to the point. The web was designed to be a platform-independent repository of information and services. The W3C has done an outstanding job to give commercial vendors the tools and standards to even implement extensions to them for vendor-specific documents and capabilities through technologies like XML and DOM. These technologies were designed specifically so vendors could release new technologies and not have to wait on the "slow" standardization process to catch up. For Microsoft not to use these well-defined and documented technologies to implement almost any equivalent Win32 capability is to say they do not believe in a vendor-neutral standardization process, but believe in a Microsoft-generated standardization process.
And that process is the reason why no API lasts more than 2 years in the Windows world, no program is stable for more than 2 days in the Windows world and no independent thought exists in the Windows world more than 2 seconds. And this is coming from a former Win32 developer and enthusiast.
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
Independent Author, Consultant and Trainer
NOTE: This is not flame bait
It's funny to watch everybody blast IE for incompatabilities with standards when Netscape is the biggest offender of them all.. Anybody every try to write cross-platform browser DHTML before? That's when you see how in a rush to beat Microsoft to the first 4.0 browser (Whatever the hell that is worth), Netscape tried to create their own DOM and not wait for the w3c's specifications to be ironed out. What happened from this? Netscape has THE WORST AND MOST INCOMPATIBLE DOM!!! I mean, jesus christ, you SUBMIT BUTTONS AND HYPERLINKS don't work in relatively or absoulutely positioned div elements! How could you not see that being a problem?
This is where it's funny though -- after 10 more releases, did netscape fix this horrible DOM? Nope.. But they gave you a real cool shopping button, AOL AIM, What's related, etc, etc..
Untill someone creates a better browser than IE, that's what I'm using.
If Microsoft GPL'ed their browser and Netscape GPL'ed theirs, this sort of problem wouldn't happen. MS could just use the CSS bits from Netscape, and Netscape could use all the IE only features. Result - Everyone wins.
With people like AOL and SUN behind netscape it should rise to back about 40/60 share by the end next year if Mozilla comes out this year and AOL and SUN pushes it right.
I'm bloody tired of this. Did microsoft ever agree to be under the control of the w3c??? they exist to provide a service to their users. If they can add something to the browser that makes my surfing better, then they bloody well should!
/. crowd complaining then, huh?
Should I not have feature X because it makes life harder for some netscape employee??? Fuck that!
Also, how many "standard" tags were put in because netscape had them? I'd say just about all of them by now. But nooooooo, microsoft is doing it, they are bad... If netscape were anything resembling a decent browser we'd be using that instead and microsoft would have to play catch up with netscapes innovations. Bet we wouldn't here the anti-ms
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
It sucks, but I guess the only way to combat this is to not use those features, but then again - it won't do your company any good not to exploit features that by far the majority would be capable of using and that would enhance your site. So all we can do is hope that a good competitor emerges that can take some of that marketshare back from MS, making their proprietary features less widespread (and with that less of a standard.)
This can only put the Mozilla guys under more pressure. The longer they take to release their browser, the more people will develop their pages for IE. It will happen because people don't have inifinte patience. Mozilla may be standards compliant, but if by the time its released those standards don't mean anything it doesn't help much. If I could help them I would but it's way out of my league unfortunately. I wish them luck, and hope they release it before its too late.
THAT is a most excellent idea!!! Let us just see what the headlines would look like if other people did the same thing...
The Army today finally released it's 2674 page causualty list from it's recent exercise training in South Carolina. Unfortunately for the Army, the think tank "innovating" new techniques forgot about the importance of digging in your troops AFTER advancing friendly tanks have stopped. They also failed to recognize the elusive threat of sending Airborne troops up without parachutes.
And here's another one from another Corporation
GM today announced the recall of over 36,000 light trucks that were built and sold as 2001 models, before the DOT established it's safety standards. GM's stock plummeted today as well, as a class action lawsuit against the company was filed in a circuit court. Seeing as how many of the deaths in GM light trucks were caused by either hypothermia, due to a lack of windows, or caused by carbon monoxide emissions in the cab of the truck. The exhaust was routed through the cab through a new GM innovation called exhaust heating. The lawsuit is expected to cripple GM.
And here's one from a utility company...
The entire National Power grid was taken down today unexpectedly as both the Detroit Edison, and Consumers Power switched over to a 500 hertz, 260 volt power system, innovated last week by the US Government. Although the system wasn't due to come online until 2015, Both Detroit Edison, and Consumers Power thought to get a jump on the market by converting their system early. Trillions of dollars are thought to be lost, and it is not known how long our batteries will....
krystal_blade, shooting first, then asking what sized bullet he should have used for that gun later.
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
What to do about it?
:)
If I were a developer I'd start by trying to incorporate some of the Samba code into Mozilla to attempt to create some kind of compatibility there. I'm talking browser/client side here, I know Apache has mod_ntlm.
If Mozilla/Netscape is going to gain any kind of share back it's going to have to start someplace. It won't be on the user desktop, as you can bet IE will still come with Windows for a while. If corporations can easily switch back and forth without worrying about 'I can't access my dept. web site!' calls to the help desk...they just might.
(Original poster of this thread BTW)
I'll preface these remarks by saying that I've been doing web development (not that it was called that) for many moons and that it's only very recently -- with much pain -- that I've started to give up on Netscape.
It goes without saying that if this article were about Mozilla or Netscape the mass of the the posts here would have a very different spin -- probably something along the lines of "C'mon, W3C, get with the program!" or "They're a powerless body that's trying to dictate our code!"
Really, folks, is anyone going to tell me that Netscape was "standards compliant" when they added JavaScript into 2.0? (Speaking of that, why is it that most folks here that lamblast the web for turning into a "all-show-no-content" fluff-fest never point the finger at the company that started it?)
And let's not forget that wonderful belch that Netscape made when it came up with "layers". Is that in the specs? Nope. Netscape wanted to beat M$ to the punch, so they rushed to release with a bunch of new non-standard features. Then they got screwed when the W3C went the opposite direction. What about IE? Oh, Microsoft waited until the standards were fixed, then released. Hm...
And to cap off, looking through my trusty O'Reilly's HTML 4.0 reference, if I'm looking to code as close to the standard 4.0 spec as I can, I can very nearly code for I.E. only. Netscape with choke with some features, but so what? ony 9% of our visitors are using NS -- down from 15% last year.
No one's compliant -- though I.E. is at least as close as NS. But that ignores the real point: It's not 1994; the web is a market-driven industry now and thus out of the control of academia.
Trial? That was a sham.
So they were guilty and now they are going to get nailed....
What was their punishment? Break up into two (maybe three) companies that each will have a monopoly in their field. So much for "the worst offender since Standard Oil". Judge Jackson/Dept of inJustice are all a bunch of wankers with no guts.
As much as I hate M$ products, I've started buying their best product (their stock) again since they aren't going to be hurting anymore.
Let's be fair here. Back in the day, Netscape released its own fair share of non-standard tags. is easier to ask permission than it is to ask forgiveness.
--
hymie
Guns don't kill Flash developers, being bludgeoned to death with their own Macs kills Flash developers. 8-)
Sure, Flash isn't always bad. And sometimes Microsoft does something useful for the whole community.
As to "play time" vs. "download time", that's a luxury for you guys in countries with cable modems and ADSL.
The vast majority of web "designers" are bound by what their "clients" want.
Fact: Most "clients" know jack shyt about design.
Fact: Most "clients" want "gee-whiz-did-that-move?" features that most "designers" would NEVER use.
Fact: More than one outstanding design has been replaced with a crappy one because a "client" thought they knew more than the "designer"
Don't blame the "designers" entirely - they have their hands tied by the "client" 99% of the time.
Actually I remember a massive amount of people complaining about how Netscape was destroying the web with it's proprietary changes. 'NetRape' was a fairly common moniker in the circle of people who were strong standards advocates.
Unfortunately Microsoft is in a much better position of power than Netscape ever could be. They have millions and millions of users who don't know what they're doing, and don't realize that their calendar is only visible with IE and why that's not a good thing.
Sometimes I wonder when Bill Gates will finally say 'okay, now I've shown those kids who used to beat me up that I'm better than them.'
----------------------------
Firstly, I thing MS have a lot more people working on IE alone than there are on Mozilla. The problem is the Mozilla folk are also trying to create XPToolkit, XPCOM and a few other things which make Mozilla more than a browser. Hell, somebody even made a Mozilla-based IRC client.
Now, you really don't seem to understand Mozilla's history or position do you? Come on, admit it. I tell you what, I'll explained what happened:
1) Netscape began work on Netscape 5 around mid 1997 IIRC
2) Netscape release what they had done so far as Mozilla.
3) In October 1998, after more than a year of developing their version 5.0 product, they scrap the old code and start from scratch using NGLayout (Gecko). This is the real killer, along with the development effort that went into Netscape 4.5.
4) After a lot of discussion, the Mozilla developers decided that to remain portable, they'd have to reinvent the wheel in the form of XPToolkit and XPCOM and XPFE
5) After what is now around 1 and a half years of development *from scratch*, Mozilla is finally maturing into a usable product.
6) There will be a Netscape 6PR2 and probably PR3 before Netscape 6 final. After Netscape 6 final, Mozilla 1.0 will be released, and will not have the same feature set of Netscape 6.
<br />, with the embedded space.
Works fine for me, everywhere except Slashdot !
I wrote an essay a while back in laymans terms arguing the importants of adhering to open standards such as those provided by the W3C. It uses such historical examples as email (SMTP) to argue that interoperability and peer review are crucial to the continued usability of the internet. The article can be fount here and can be used as a kind of ammunition for convincing people who otherwise might not know any better than open standards really are necessary and that Microsoft's "innovations" really aren't being done with the users' interests in mind. I hope the article can be useful to people, and I would appreciate feedback on it. I am interested in continuing this argument with more articles if people are interested.
Noah
As every slashdot reader knows, everything M$ develops is commercial in the first place and according to standards in the second.
Why are we still bothering with IE while they will fail sooner or later? There is not such thing as stopping a big company in making their own standards.
They will step themselves on the tail as soon as they realise that the road they've laid themselves is not accessible by other cars.
I wonder how much of these new features are to be seen in their website. Just as much i wonder how long this road is.
I've always thought that distribution of information is the most important thing on the Internet, of 2nd demand is frames, stylesheets and whatever the big companies invented for us.
This is a replacement signature.
Man, whatever you do, don't install it. For a .5 upgrade, it totally fscked my webbrowsing. All the animated gifs broke.. They became all _Flashy_ and half loaded. Rollovers would reload the page, and lots of other annoying things.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Imagine this: IE 6.0 with a 90% market share is coded to include a hidden API that allows MS server software to identify itself. Any server that does not identify itself has a few milliseconds of latency added to each packet. In subsequent pseudo real world tests, MS server software proves to be by far the fastest.
This isn't as inconceivable as some might think. Remember how early versions of Windows could identify the DOS version it was running on (MS-DOS vs DR-DOS) and give the user a false warning that any DOS other than MS-DOS would cause problems.
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Gort! Klatu Barata Nikto!
HTML was a success because web browsers politely ignore tags that they don't understand, not because HTML itself is well thought out. Web browsers' laissez-faire approach to non-standard tags (and mistakes, which are practically the same thing) lowered the bar so that secretaries and middle managers were suddenly "programmers"...which is why the web caught on, which is what is now paying our bills. Mine, anyway. So I don't mind if there are a few cornball tags that I'm free not to use.
IE sucks as well.
Give me a standard HTML4 complient web browser anyday.
I don't actually exist.
Microsoft has long stated its commitment to following industry standards, including CSS and HTML. But preliminary data collected by the WaSP showed that IE 5.5 performs poorly against compliance tests, failing 7 out of 13 in the case of CSS.
When will IE be compliant?
---
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I know AOL is a pariah among /.ers but the only possible way I can see the IE large market share being reduced is if AOL makes Mozilla/Netscape their default browser after their current agreement with M$ runs out. Using the skins in Mozilla they should be able to make it look close to what AOL users are used to seeing at the moment (so they wont scare AOLers with something that looks radically different).
The whole point of a "standard" is that everyone will conform to it. Microsoft has this habbit of not conforming to standards, and makeing their own standards.
So what is there in place to keep a company in line with today's standards. The standards are great, but with no way to enforce them, they don't do any good with companys that feel they can do whatever they want.
Since there is really no way to get microsoft to take these 'new' and 'better' features out...
If ya can't beat them, Join them!
This has already happend to mozilla with the "microsoft specific" DHTML. Why not continue on this trend by adding new code to deal with the extras in 5.5.
I was doing some research on natural language recognition for a course and I turned up a few hits from M$'s personna project. The funny part is that going to microsofts reseach department homepage crashed netscape every time. I know they did it on purpose... I finally had to use lynx to get the document I wanted.
-- http://thegirlorthecar.com funny dating game for guys
Actually, XHTML is based on XML, so attributes *do* have to be quoted for your document to be valid.
ian.
As long as the pages work under Lynx, I'm happy. .gif's and don't even get me going on Shockwave!!
But I really hate adding another roll of paper for those damned ASCII animated
So you think it is rational for a developer to decide to only offer the customer feature A, when they can use Microsoft stuff and offer features A,B,C,D ... Z.
Wake up and smell the money!
Amazing magic tricks
color=#123456 will need quotes, because there's a "#" in there. Dropping quotes is only valid for pure numerics.
To quote the latest HTML 4.01 spec from W3C.
In certain cases, authors may specify the value of an attribute without any quotation marks. The attribute value may only contain letters (a-z and A-Z), digits (0-9), hyphens (ASCII decimal 45), periods (ASCII decimal 46), underscores (ASCII decimal 95), and colons (ASCII decimal 58). We recommend using quotation marks even when it is possible to eliminate them.
I've never found a bug in the validator.
Unfortunately, I can imagine my work, in response to heavy negative feedback to the website doing one of two things: Wanting to put up a splash page and have the user click on the link defining their browser (heaven forbid we run the code that identifies the browser and direct the user without their knowledge) or strip everything down to basic HTML with the rationale that it may not be as pretty but at least people can get the information. What Microsoft is trying to do is leverage their share of the browswer market into controlling the internet. If they control how people interact with the net, they essentially control the net. Oddly, if they have 86% of the browser market as the originally article claims they do, then why in my weblogs do I see a 60-40 split on browser platforms? IE is definately dominant, but I think their 86% is counting the number of people who use the web once or twice and simply use the IE installed on their machine. I wonder if Netscape (AOL) were to send out the Netscape browser with each AOL disk how many people would switch over?
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
Why is it that slashdot can work on both Netscape and IE?
Because IE cloned all of Netscape v3's "de facto" standard features. (That were only submitted to W3C after they'd been implemented.)
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Every page should load acceptably not only in Netscape and IE, both of which are very guilty for adding their own tags and features which are not standars, but also every other browser out there.
I should be able to navigate a page in every browser, including Lynx, and get to the content I want. If Microsoft's features make this impossible (which I'm sure some will), then they should not be used.
This is typical Microsoft practice. Now that they have 86% market share, they're going to try to force competition completely out of the market by extending the standard. They are so bold to do this sort of thing even when they are being persecuted by the Government for such practices.
Web Designers need to say "NO" to Microsoft's extensions and remember that there IS a standard, and that they should follow it.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Microsoft's newly released Internet Explorer 5.5 is trying to do something Microsoft was worried that Netscape might do -- make the browser a platform.
So now they theoretically make 2 OSes: IE and Windows. Which means when the dust settles after the antitrust appeals, IE will remain with the Windows side, because IE will (arguably) be an OS, and therefore will have to be part of the OS company under the terms of the breakup. And therefore they will still be able to bundle IE with Windows.
I don't have to tell you which one of the two companies Bill will want to stick with.
--
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
The normal reaction from microsoft usually is "we set the standard for others to follow".
This is an excellent example of this. By forcing in all these extension, and by having a large market share, they will force other developers to include these extension in thier products or force people to use IE 5.5.
When I come across a site thats IE oriented I either try to ignore the complaints that mozilla puts up, or I hunt around for that sites nearest competitor and use them instead.
One doesn't have to look too far back in the past to remember when Microsoft was not interested in the Web... remember using Lynx or Mosaic or early versions of Netscape. Once the Net started looking like it would be a big hit, M$ hopped right on the bandwagon. And today, they have 85% of the browser market???
Either this means that they are making really high quality software that everyone wants to use or they are pulling this kind of strong-handed business that we're used to from them.
But the thing to remember is that M$ is just a company and all they want to do is make money. Despite the best intentions and the sweet words that BG says on TV, they don't really care about innovation. So, rather than moving the capabilities of the Web forward, they are making their own advancements and forcing others to come along with them.
Maybe Supreme Court intervention will make a difference, but I'm not counting on it.
Repeat after me: contempt of court. One or two more of these and there will be no appeal court to grant an appeal. One should not shit where one eats.
IANAL
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
My guess is that it wants all URLs enclosed in quotes (mainly because I can see a few links where the URL IS enclosed in quotes and it didn't give an error).
<A HREF="http://slashdot.org">slashdot</A>
versus
<A HREF=http://slashdot.org>slashdot</A>
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if (ismoderator(reader)) hidemessage(this);
* Q
P.S. If you don't get this note, let me know and I'll write you another.
Macromedia, whose Flash animation technology is the de facto standard for lightweight vector graphics on the Web,
Flash ? Lightweight ? That'll be why boo was such a resounding success then.
listen you bloody filthy wanker, grow the hell up
If we refuse to be flexible, we are in effect opting out of the game of life. The world moves on without us.
With Apache running the majority of web servers... bah, nevermind. Just a passing evil thought.
Thank you. Drive through. (:wq)
I read somewheres that Win 2000 service pack 1 comes out next week and IE5.5 misses the party.
Seems that MS isn't convinced that everything with IE5.5 is tickety boo enough.
"You can catch flies till the cows come home, but wasps are a totally different kettle of fish."
Now that MS has, for the moment at least, gained the vast majority of the market for browsers (the last role call looked something around 80-85%) it quickly poses major problems for the existing standards. Web designers are currently faced with a bad mess of broken or degraded HTML implementations from both sides of the fence - Netscape and IE 5.5 offer different renditions of the same HTML code to the point where the page is no longer anywhere near the original intention in some cases.
Why is this bad? For all the other browser developers on the market, such as Opera, Mozilla and others, compliance with the existing standards is an important part of acheiving good page renderings and thereby gaining users. Compliance with an unpublished metamorphed standard as evidenced by MS IE 5.5 on Windows is difficult and if this were a level playing field, unnecessary. This is not to say that MS does not know what they are doing. I have it good authority that MS IE 5.5 on MacOS is almost completely compliant with the CSS standard level 1, so the differences between the two IE browsers can only be through design.
Of course, once you acheive 80% of the market, you have a degree of control of the standards implicitly. Web designers who wish to quickly develop pages will gravitate to the most popular browser and support that, rather than working towards the open standards and fighting to make the pages work on Win' IE 5.5. The result is often that a large proportion of web pages adhere to the defacto Win IE standard and we're all the poorer for that.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
The vast majority of web "designers" should be shot.
As a 'designer' (studied Architecture), I concurr. Most designers, as I see it, want to be original, cool and be noticed. Like, "hey wow, you did that cool design...", so they try to invent stuff, just for the sake of it. They'll do stuff not because it's necessary, or because it's needed, but just to put their "personal" signature on it. And lord forbid they re-use a solution that is known to work, it all has to be new and fresh (and often crap). It's new crap vs. tried and working.
So they lap up all the new proprietary gizmos, looking to impress -- so all MS has to do is create the impression that it's browser has better usage and more gizmos, and the designers will revel in their new 'expressive power'.
This was not a problem in print, because whatever tool you used, the end product was universally compatible paper. But on the web, we have no such luxury.
This has to be the best reason ever to construct web pages as downloadable executables. Fsck the "browser". It just doesn't work. Just give me a tool that lets me create content that cross compiles to a dozen different platforms natively, auto indexes itself with the search engines, and to hell with waiting for money grabbing companies to agree with each other.
Ok, ok, so there may be some security issues, but that's just an opportunity for better network filtering software...
Am I talking from where the sun doesn't shine?
I'm sorry, but:
a) I live in Europe, where that whole MS trial thingy isn't very big news.
b) I've just spent a week in France, away from anything even remotely connected to the internet.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
To err is human, to moo bovine
I agree with you for the most part but I still believe that we have the power to change people's minds without compromising their business. I worked for a little ISP a couple years ago and we had a client who was tired of his secretaries mucking up their computers with viruses and buggy screensavers, so we gave him a Linux networked office package. They use WordPerfect, and the office girls can't figure out how to do anything with their machines except the work they're paid for. They have no problems communicating with other offices/clients/businesses. It was hard work and all, but we believed in it (not to mention not having to buy a zillion copies of Win98 saved them a ton of ca$h).
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
If using the tool means your car can go much faster and to places other cars can't do, then yes, the tool was important.
MS doesn't need to "extend its monopoly" with IE. The extensions to IE allow web developers to do things that they couldn't do otherwise. If they are right and these are things that developers wanted to do, they will use the extensions and MS will succeed. If they are wrong, they won't. It's that simple.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Microsoft launchers another Embrace and Extend wave, using words like "technology" and "innovation" to describe it, and this is News for Nerds? This kind of thing has been going on for many years; everybody know about it by now. Next you're going to report that some guy in Finland is working on a GPLed Unix clone.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I hear a lot about "putting MS in a worse light than they're already in", but honestly, the only people seeing M$ in that light tend not to use MS products unless we have to (for work reasons or whatever). The rest of the PC-using world (roughly the other 90% I would guess) doesn't care, nor do they know any better. The average PC user is little more than a sheep doing what he/she is told is a Good Thing. Sorry if I offend some people with that statement, but what's the biggest complaint against Linux? The learning curve is too steep. Why is that? Because people want point and click, they don't like using a keyboard.
M$ gives them a rough approximation of what they want. Because of the dummy-friendly windows interface, people don't care whether IE follows standards, or whether windows has more security loopholes than a child's Hot Wheels race track and more bugs than week old deer carcass.
I think things would change if the W3C was actually given some teeth. So many other languages/professions/protocols have set standards that everyone follows, why should the web be any different? How to give the W3C teeth is not something I have an answer to, but I know as long as they can only make suggestions, M$ won't feel the need to listen to them.
/Sig/
Right now they don't:
Validate Slashdot.org HTML.
It's my job to make sure that the browsing experience is the same, regardless of whether you're using a PC or a Mac, running Win9x, WinNT, MacOS, *nix, or BeOS, etc...
Thank you. Design is so full of value judgements, and I doubt that there are many designers who make compatability a high priority. I share your view.
I work on simply avoiding use of any feature that doesn't work in most browsers.
I don't buy it for a moment. When the site you *have* to go to to get basic information won't display without IE under windows, MS is forcing me to use their platform. As an end-user, they are forcing me to do something that, frankly, I have a fundamental problem with.
As a developer of web content, MS can bite my fur-bearing ass. I'll keep on churning out basic HTML driven by PHP, and it'll view under any browser for any platform.
I wish everyone would stop whining like Microsoft was making them download IE at gunpoint.
As soon as the option to totally ignore IE is real, I'll side with this. Until that day, you're going to hear (quite legitimate) complaining. Until the day when MS stops bullying web developers around, as an end-user, I'll have to either hope the developer knew what they were doing (and the page will display in O or netscape), or I'll have to chomp on the shitbger that is MSIE (and the page will display in all its annoying glory).
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Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken.
That's if someone manages to clue Judge Jackson and the DOJ into what's happening. It sure would be nice, though. I'm getting tired of trying to make sure websites are either generic enough for everyone to read or add enough browser-specific code to do the job.
All the world's an analog stage, and digital circuits play only bit parts.
Wisdom:
Our best stop-thrust against embrace-and-extend is to point out that Microsoft is trying to close up the Internet.
-- Eric Raymond
Commentary:
So long as one bit can be transmitted from node to node, the Internet will remain open. With strong crypto and decentralized control as your only weapons, you are undefeatable. Continue hacking.
Microsoft tries to damn the ocean as it would a river. There is no understanding.
How can one define a standard (or set of standards), when there is no product to benchmark against that is 100% standards complient. This would be like NASA trying to talk about the "standard" way to travel to and live on Pluto....
Also -- I assume some of the brightest programmers around are working on IE and Mozilla, and they have had little success in meeting the standards....This should be a clue that either the standards are not feasable, or the path to meet those standards is not defined well enough...
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
We have a perfect right to blast Microsoft over this. They promised time and time again to comply to the standards and they haven't.
Well, first, it's their software, and, second, what's complaining about it going to do? Why don't you take action -- make sure that others don't use the software?
They can't even claim it's not possible because IE5 for the Mac does comply.
This is an entirely different platform -- are you sure this would apply on Windows? The fact that there's such a large difference at all suggests that the codebases aren't even remotely similar.
It's a fairly obvious case where because they no longer have to compete fairly on the Windows platform they are able to apply embrace and extend to lock in the monopoly.
What keeps Mozilla from adopting these features?
I don't see the worry... dumbass web designers will use all these wonderful M$ extensions, using crappy design tools like FrontPage, and I'll browse their sites using Opera and not see their sucky design and flaws My experience shows that web pages with useful content tend to be written by people with a clue about cross-browser interoperability, and that the only pages to use M$- or Nutscrape-specific features tend to be content-free wastes of bandwidth.
Am I the only one who immediately noticed that the initial letters for "Works Only On Ford" make WOOF ?
"Microsoft WOOF : The Wrench that bites!"
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Another Bloody piece of Pikachu Dung from microsoft. IE only tools etc. That seems like its going to be a pain in the a$$ and I see it as just another reason to use linux and leave MS alone. I mean damn what the hell is their problem, who thinks of this $Hit Really ? I mean the case meant nothing it looks like... I waiting for microsft to move to Canada Myself and leave the u.s. laws behind(just and Idea) then we will really see the Heir Gates take over...
If we refuse to be flexible, we are in effect opting out of the game of life. The world moves on without us.
When I first came to this great campus and was introduced to networking on such large scale, I had to choose a network name for my mighty computer, and I chose Voyager, and it was good, and I saw that it was good. A login had to be created for this mighty computer, so Chakotay was chosen, and it was good, and I saw that it was good. And thus came to pass that I used Chakotay as a nickname online. And thus, when I was finally converted to the great Linux, it also became one of my email addies. And it is good. And I see that it is good. And I also see that you're a troll, so please get off my back. Thank you.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
To err is human, to moo bovine
I can write a web page using whatever HTML and CSS and be fairly sure it'll appear fairly close to what's expected-- things it doesn't support, it'll ignore. With Netscape 4.x, such a cavalier attitude is very likely to crash the browser.
I want Mozilla! Guess I'll be sticking to Opera...
those of us who refuse to use IE could benefit from some way of knowing before we follow a link whether that link leads to a page that relies on Microsoft's proprietary extensions.
although I am not competent to design such a service, one way to implement it is probably with a "web proxy" like crit.org.
moreover, the same service could be used for other political goals, like helping people avoid Web servers running Microsoft's IIS or NT/W2000 when servers running open-source software would do just as well (links to pages served by Microsoft software could be a different color, for instance) or helping Lynx users avoid wasting time downloading pages that dont display under Lynx.
some will object that this will fragment the Internet. but fragmentation of the Net is inevitiable: e.g., it is already fractured along the Realtime Blackhole List. fragmentation for frivolous reason or to help some dot com make a buck is a bad thing, but fragmentation to fight Microsoft is noble. the time has come to realize that boycotting Microsoft is not enough: we must start boycotting the sheep who willingly drink Microsoft's Kool-Aid. and we need tools that make that boycotting easy and flexible.
Thing is, presumably the site using the IE-only "standards" will get more of the IE users. (I'm assuming that they're using the tags because they add something, not because they're designing their site with FrontPage.)
So let's say there's 3 competitors: One designs an IE-compatible site. One designs a site for IE and Netscape. One designs a site in completely valid HTML 4.01, usable by every browser.
The IE users like the additions that the first two sites offer. Half use the IE-only site, a third use the IE/NS site, and a sixth use the HTML site.
Netscape users can't use the IE-only site, but like the little popups and stuff on the IE/NS site. Two thirds use the IE/NS site, and one third use the HTML site.
Users of browsers like Opera and Lynx are inconvenienced by the extensions on the IE and IE/NS sites, and all use the HTML-only site.
Under this model, assuming 86% IE, 12% NS, and 2% other, the IE site gets 43% of the audience, the IE/NS site gets 37% of the audience, and the HTML site gets 20% of the audience.
Yeah, I know that adding the proprietary tags doesn't usually make a site more popular. But if designers think it might, you'll see it.
No, the vast majority of people use IE because it came preloaded on their computers.
Are people forgetting that a new web page feature is pointless unless web page authors actually use it? If you go to a page that doesn't load on Netscape, Voyager or a dozen other non-IE browsers, don't load IE to read it ... send mail to the WEBMASTER saying their page is broken. If the webmaster gets twenty e-mails a day, perhaps they'll get the hint! After all, it's a matter of business. Another point that needs to be made; if you're going to browse the web with a portable device, feature support only eats up precious memory.
The locked out ones take the much easier route of just getting and installing IE - it's not exactly difficult to get your hands on a free CD...
The conclusion of your syllogism, I said lightly, is fallacious, being based on licensed premises
Agreed.
Also, a web browser isn't like some sort of black box. If you put code in it that doesn't work, then find the modified tags that will and then you have essentially discovered all the new 'features' and incompatibilities. Thus you can release draft specifications. AFAIK, browser technologies can't be classified as trade secrets because every one with HTML4 know-how can figure out what the quirks are.
NS sucks. And when the rest of your organization uses stuff like Exchange Server with M$ authentication, you can't even check your email with Nutscrape! NS for Linux and Mac lags behind IE so much. I just wish there was an IE port for Linux (which if I were Mr. Gates would do - increase the market dominance by another 10% or so)
Same goes for linux/bsd versions of Office. Hey Corel did that!
Actually, that's not true. IE 5.5 is less standards-compliant than Netscape 6 or, ironically, IE 5.0. And it's the latter that's most disturbing. They had it right; they embraced the technology. Now they're extending the technology in a proprietary way.
What's next? If Netscape is, in fact, dead, then we're in trouble. We'll depend entirely on MS to tell us what languages we can use to code on the Web (look for IE6 with... Visual Basic support!). Microsoft will, literally, control the Web.
So complain. Tell your boss. Don't install IE5.5. This is a Very Bad Thing.
I don't know if there's much anyone can really do about how Microsoft designs their browser except let the justice system do whatever it does.
On the other hand though, what happens if people go after the businesses who make everything Microsoft only? Corporations are Microsoft's main customer base after all, and personally I see them as (stereotypically) at least as dumb and irritating as Microsoft itself in this area.
Unlike internally used applications, websites are where businesses have to interact externally with their customers, so the choice of how they do it should be an important decision for most of them. What sort of impact does it have if and when businesses get flame mail about their propriety-based websites?
Are there any IT people out there who can comment on this? Maybe getting enough negative (but constructive) correspondence could help convince some management people that cross-platform standards design is a good thing - irrespective of Microsoft's market share.
Call me crazy but I trust W3 standards development more than Microsoft standards development, and the last thing I'd want to see right now is Mozilla to have to implement a "Microsoft mode", because then there would be no going back.
===
W3C is not always too slow. Take CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). How many browsers even implement CSS2, never mind extending it?
If HTML's not difficult, then they should have no trouble fixing the errors. A browser doesn't help by rendering incorrect code, it helps by pointing out mistakes. Say the HTML writer makes a mistake that his browser renders properly. So he thinks this is correct and gets in the habit of using this. He writes tons and tons of pages. Then he publishes, and his browser is the only one that works, on every (or nearly every) other browser, whole sections of the site are missing or garbled. Now he has to go through every single page and fix it. I can guarantee you the HTML coder won't be thanking his browser then... (and this can be Netscape just as easily as IE.)
ufdraco
I really don't think there is too much too worry about, browser specific items will most likely only be used in Intranet application where it makes sense, but not in an open Web Site environment, since you would be cutting off a large portion of people. Too much hype, not much to be concerned about.
What?
Would you buy a wrench that said "Works only on Ford"?
If I had a Ford, then I probably would. Is this metaphor the right way round? I wouldn't buy a Ford if I knew I could only use Ford wrenches on it. Maybe I would if I had a complete set.
What about Mozilla ? I believe that once up and running (IE not so far from today for the running version I have installed with the SuSe 6.4) this could be a *very* good thing for "alternatists".
If this is not enough, then I'd also bet on Wine, Amaya or, simply the Java browser.
Of course, if people worked more on an easy-to-integrate platform then with a solid browser engine and lots of external components we could do marvels, like in Acorn RiscOS !Browse or !Oregano...
Remember that IBM recently got involved in delivering Linux freaks a promising JDK1.3.
So, just encourage Mozilla developper whatever your way (test, code, design, art, ideas, or just love letters) and I'm sure they will b so happy we'll finally have a browser as good as Gimp is in his own software category.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
If Microsoft wanted to actually create a standard, they need to release it and make it available to all operating systems and browsers. Of course, why would they do that when they can use it to maintain their monopoly?
kwsNI
I've seen this as a major problem since IE 4. While IE 4 didn't have as many new IE only tags, it's way too lenient on HTML coding. That is, it lets you make mistakes in HTML (like not having closing table tags) and just continues to draw the web page anyway giving the web page designer no mention that there is something wrong with their code . Many people claim that this is good, that it means that IE can parse HTML better than NS, I disagree. Here's where the problem comes: suppose other browser makers like NS and Opera also start to let sloppy code slide. But since there are no standards for sloppy code, they may parse the HTML differently than IE. Since it's incorrect code to start with, any implementation would be ok. This would just lead to a mess of pages that only work on certain browsers. MS should never have let IE gloss over bad HTML.
So what should be done? I think IE and NS both should popup error messages when there is broken HTML like they do when there is a JS error. This notifies the coder to go and fix the error, rather than letting it slide. I see too many new HTML writers using sloppy code just because IE lets them.
W3C should get off their lazy asses. For once, I agree with Microsoft. They are giving the developers more options. Don't cry about, beat them to it. Sure, they're a bunch of monopolistic bastards, but they are really pushing the others to keep up. If you want us to use your product, make it better. =P the enemy is years ahead he's tapped into the phone he hides beneath the furniture knows all the special codes the enemy is our destiny (hyperform)
cant netscape just comply with what IE does?
If that worked, and Netscape could write code overnight, then in the morning you'd have a Netscape that was exactly like IE. Some people would use it because it's not M$oft, others wouldn't bother (they have IE, and what improvement would they get from another download). If Netscape didn't "embrace and extend" what IE did, then it would only ever be playing second fiddle to it.
Secondly (and this is the killer), using M$oft as a de facto standard is incredibly dangerous. M$oft have a demonstrated ability to pull huge U-turns when they want to, no matter what the cost. Imagine having a Netscape that had stopped tracking the W3C standards, tracked IE5 perfectly, then got entirely stomped by a sudden shift in IE6's behaviour.
These people looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
If you don't like it, don't use it.
I'm not trying to troll, but as far as I'm concerned microsoft can do whatever they like. If you don't like it don't buy it. Use Netscape. I don't give a fuck. 5.5 will probably be even more standards compliant than 5.0 and have some cool (proprietary) features. Right now I use 5.0 for Macintosh and it is way better than 5.5. I haven't had any problems with it. People who have problems with CSS not working right need to get a grip. normal font tags aren't that bad. The web will be all Flash in about 3 years anyway.
One seldom addressed problem about conforming to standards is that conforming to a standard released at one point will frequently BREAK pages that were released prior to that point. As a result, 100% conformance to standards is not as cut and dried as it sounds. Additionally, a company may release a browser that conforms to a standard that is "close" to release. By the time the standard comes out, it has changed, and the browser is not not compliant.
Step 1.5.
Embed "feature X" by default in development tools. Give development tools away free to non-developers (pro-sumers), and sell them to developers, but make it a very compelling deal - put a lot of effort into making it a very good product, (unlike the crap OS it runs on), make it as easy to use as possible. Lower the bar on brainpower required to use it at the professional level (BisualVasic), to increase the number of people using your "feature X" by default. You don't even have to tell those people about "feature X", better if you don't, they'll use it by default, and not care what the standards are, "it works in my Win98/IE5.5 browser - that's good enough for me".
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
All that seems to do is make them change the "does not support Netscape" message from regular to bold typeface.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The problem here isn't that MS introduces new innovations, the problem is that functionality that exists (or should exist) between all browser equally is slightly different, forcing developers to have to code applications twice or more.
... this is the way it should be. Even to the point of warning the person viewing the page that there is a bug in the code.
If MS decides to 'innovate', all power to them - we still have a choice to use it or not. But if they make their own version of a function with no support for the standard, that's what screws people up.
Take this - HTML is a Programming Language. How many C programmers do you see having to allow for slight differences in compilers? C is C, it IS the standard. That should be the same with HTML.
Plus, as Netscape does, a compiler will NOT compile a program if there is a slight flaw in the structure or syntax of a program. Netscape ignores anything that has any contact with a bug in the code - for example, tables without correct syntax
Ideally, each browser SHOULD be equipped with a standards compliance algorythm that checks all code, THEN debugs 'enhanced' features that are unique to browsers... and I mean each browser, to legally be released as a web browser, should implement this standard module, perhaps released by the W3C. How about that? Comments?
Why bother checking to make sure that your site works with any other browser when you know that a significant majority are going to be using IE?
O.K., work with me on this...
You and 3 competitors are vyying for the same market. with 86% ofthe market using IE, if you all go with IE-only web sites, you miss out on the other 14% that aren't using IE.
Now, if you make your web site with correct standards, so everyone can use it, no matter what browser they're using, you not only get a share of the IE market, but you'd proabably wind up with 14% more than your competitors, since they'll only use your site, since it's the only one that they CAN use....
Now, 14% + 1/3 of 86% (about 28%) = 42% of market share. And if you were investing in a company, which would you pick, one with 28% of the market, or 42%?
So would I.
The sidebar is tiny. Skinnning isn't much work either, once you have XUL.
XUL is the thing that adds weight. But it makes development much easier because now, each part of Mozilla's UI only has to be implemented once instead of three times as was required in Netscape Classic (Win, Mac, X). It also means that ports of Mozilla to other platforms (OS/2, BeOS, and others) are far easier.
XUL means that when some Linux user adds a nice UI hack, Windows users get it too. XUL means that if you want to hack the UI yourself, all you need is a text editor and and some knowledge of Web standards (Javascript, XML, CSS, DOM), plus a quick tutorial in XUL:
http://www.mozilla.org/xpfe/xulref/
Explain why they need to be forced to open their standards (without using FUD.) Don't get me wrong, I agree that it would be good thing if they did, however I don't see why anyone should be forced to give up their advanced features. As the IE program director said in the article, they are actually innovating (being serious on this usage). If the features prove to be good, then the other browser makers will somehow incorporate them. If not then they will go the way of the BLINK>.
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
-Jaron Lanier
If only companies actually used new features to make their sites better. As things stand currently, this is extremely rare. Too many sites these days make you wander through 300 clicks of gee-whiz-wowie-did-that-just-move bullshit in order to get through to any content whatsoever. The vast majority of web "designers" should be shot.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
I don't know about anyone else, but if I'm coding HTML, whether it's for my job or for myself, I make sure it works in practically every browser I can get my hands on - in fact I might go so far as to say I have to - mainly because the majority of the people where I work use Netscape. 9 times out of 10, I go so far as to make sure than even Lynx users get something of value. It causes a lot more headaches, but if 3 or 4 more people are able to see this or that site because of it then I consider the effort to be with it.
I'd like to think that anyone out there who's serious about web development, or runs a site that is widely used, would have the same attitude.
So Microsoft add these new tags. So what? It only becomes an issue when people start using them, and if people have any sense then they wont.
I just hope I'm around to laugh if ever IE ceases to be backward-compatible. Wouldn't that be something....
I wish companies like Microsoft would quit using the word "technology" to mean "feature," as in "element behavior technology."
I also wish publications like CNet would quit quoting such language abuse uncritically.
Here's the REAL MS tactic, you tell me how to get around it.
1) Release a browser that has non-standard (and difficult or impossible to reverse engineer) feature X.
2) Now bombard your loyal developers with information on how cool X is, how to use it best, how to "migrate" to it, etc. Give them ZERO information on how to NOT use it. That is, give no information on how to achieve the same effect without using feature X.
3) Now visitors to these sites have use X OR be locked out of these sites. In some cases, this is just not acceptable. When it's just a matter of protesting standards non-compliance I will shut off the feature. But if it's a matter of no longer being able to check my hotmail mail, or shop at Amazon, or check my medical condition at DrKoop.com....well, you get the picture.
What I'm trying to say is that sometimes the long-term optimal solution (get another browser) is not the same as the short-term optimal solution (turn on feature X). And how many people do you know that behave optimally long-term even for their health? Arguments from "think long-term" rarely work. Arguments from "if only everyone would..." rarely work. Used together they NEVER work.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
As IE becomes more dominate and web developers begin to more and more develop for IE only (especially for intranets where one can dictate the use of a browsers), MS will undoubtable tie the enhanced features to IIS. I think when that happens Apache market share will drop like a rock. This is the scenerio that concerns me and it is the obvious busness plan.
But what to do about it ? But MS stock ? Cheer Mozilla ?
In defense of w3c standards:
If we stuck to them, we'd be living with a less flashy web, possibly. Thing is, we'll never know - it's the old story of "It's not been tried and found wanting, it's been found difficult and not tried." The full W3C DOM can do everything Microsoft's DOM can do, and more; check out the descriptions of the Mozilla samples. As for coding for both browsers, it should be a simple matter to build a bunch of wrapper script to make stuff work on both IE 4/5 and Netscape 6. (So long as you don't get _too_ fancy with complicated InnerText and InnerHTML manipulations - I still think it'd be possible to convert that code, but it would be more of a pain)
My guess is that if the browser implementors had cared about the standards process, we would have a workable MathML by now; SVG (or some similar related standard) would have been out last year or earlier; sets of related documents would be easy to navigate through (remember ?); we'd have browsers using a sensible authoring model instead of IE/MSOffice's frontpage server extension trickery; etc.
The fact is though that you're right - Microsoft doesn't give a rat's ass about standards compliance unless the people they consider their customers (that is, people selling fancy flashy business websites - not those people trying to find information on the web) insist on them.
I guess I should have looked this up before posting, but ouch, bother... Doesn't it have to do with what's the characters in the value are...? Alphanumerics are OK, others are not. Anyway, the validator is based on a rigorous parser, the SP, I'm pretty sure it reports only the things that are wrong. :-)
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Would you buy a wrench that said "Works only on Ford"?
No, but I would buy a Ford that said: "Also lets you use those really cool new wrenches!" Which I think is a much better analogy. --Just cuz it's proprietary doesn't mean it's not innovation.
I don't get it. IE doesn't correctly support all the W3C standards - but it gets much closer than anyone else, especially Netscape.
Why are MS adding non-standard new stuff? Because it needs to. Why should it wait for the W3C to spend years and years coming up with standards that no one wants, when MS can just go ahead and create its own?
The only thing MS does wrong here is not release the specs to its unilateral innovations. That way they are proprietary innovations rather than open ones. That sucks. But the 'standard' has nothing to do with it. Ever since day one on the web some company (mostly Netscape) has been creating non-standard enhancements. That's fine by me. I can't honestly say that there's any evidence this has hurt the development of the web more than it has helped it.
IE4 and later have by far and away the fastest renderer, and most standards compliance. It supports Java far better than anything else, and faster. It is obviously the best browser around, even if you choose not to use its proprietary features. I look forward to Mozilla overtaking it, but until then kudos for MS for creating software that actually leads this particular field.
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I will not spend my time doing extra work just to get more functionallity out of slipshod browsers. If the browser can read a standards compliant site, tough, go get a browser that can-- its not my job to fix MS's browser with tweeked code (ditto for netscape).
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This is a case where people are going to take what Microsoft gives them, regardless of its imperfections. Like I said before, it's the most pleasant to use, and doesn't render your page as garbage. It may not be "as intended", but it will be close. If precise page layout and formatting are so absolutely important, why not use PDF?
I registered my hate for Jon Katz
Um.....those PNGs seem to render perfectly on my copy of IE5.5.....
Sure they do, check out this example (IE 5.5 only).
NO CARRIER
While 86% is impressive, does anybody know how is this broken down between versions? Except for intranets, web designers will probably avoid cutting of 14% of potential customers, but they will certainly avoid using features that even a sizeable chunk of IE users cannot see. I assume this gives some breathing space to Mozzilla and the justice department.
-- look, cheese ahoy!
Perhaps the better comparison would be to the League of Nations rather than the UN. IIRC, the League was formed after WWI, like the UN was formed after WWII, and the two had similar goals. One of the reasons the League failed was they were unable to get the US on side. Now replace "League" with "W3C", and "US" with "MS"...
To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three persons, two of them absent.
I don't think it would bother people so much if they'd comply with established standards. XML, CSS, DHTML, whatever - follow the standards. Unfortunately, Microsoft refuses to follow the standards - why? Because they don't WANT to be compatible with everyone else. They want to be an island unto themselves, where they can reign supreme and unquestioned over their platform, with no one to compete with them over who gets what.
_____
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
I work in an all MS shop and I can say that people are dissatisfied. Poor networking, non existant security, applications that crash, and most importantly ever changing "standards" are insults. It stinks and people openly curse their computers. No, they are not just lusers, they are tomorows bosses.
These people are dying for things that work better, and are amazed that it has not appeared. What innovations are left for general word processing that require a new file format? They have no need for the blinking bullshit that breaks their browsers, but want simple, funtional and infomrative web sites. "It used to work, what happened?" they ask.
If any government agency publishes file formats and standards for documents submitted to them and demand compliance, Microsoft is toast. People will flock to it, and much less work will be lost to "enhancements."
The other big area is having a web browser built into the tv, not buying an extra part(like web TVtoday). Turning on the TV will place you on the Internet so you may seemlessly flip between the Internet Browser and TV station. (And you thought channel surfing was bad now). Those web browsing tv's will not have MS software on it because they are expensive and proprietary. Linux has a much better chance with this market, but don't be surprised if another custom OS makes its way into the tv instead.
In a nutshell, MS may dominate the home/corporate computer market, but that market will be small compared to what is really available (tv, cell phone, kiosks, ...) and their dominance may be short sighted and short lived.
Yeah, it would be nice if the W3C could sue Microsoft - then we'd have another lame-ass trial to watch, that took years to solve, and ended up being reversed on appeal once the lawyers all had enough fees to buy new Lexuses.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
You know, if I had Gate's balls, I couldn't walk because I'd be nailed to the floor from the weight.
The company has done what it always has done: Use its dominant OS position (an accident of history if ever there was one,) to wedge itself into another market and eventually shove everyone else (including standards comittees that were in place before it even knew there was a market,) off the 'level playing field.'
If you drove as wrecklessly as M$ conducts business, you'd be in jail before you got a mile from the dealer showroom. M$ drives a steamroller through other people's parking lot and complains when people point at the wreckage.
This behavior is beyond outrageous, Bill. Its CRIMINAL. And you belong in jail along with the other bullies.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I was a bit pissed that it didn't support keychain. They copied the option-click from iCab, which I don't mind, but they still don't support keychain which iCab does support. Keychain is a central repository of passwords and such which is held seperate from applications and is only given back if the user allows it. The keychain is encrypted to a file on disk with a passphrase (I believe with 128bit RC2, but you'll be able to use any cipher when Apple is finished adopting CDSA) then has a veriety of methods to lock the keychain like when you're idle or if you sleep the machine. It also keeps track of your trusted certificates. I don't think Mozilla supports keychain either, but Anarchie does, as does Apple for storing AppleShare passwords.
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>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
Sorry but Java support in IE sucks big time, it is not even fully 1.1 compliant. Hence we are using the 1.3 plug in to get proper support for java applets as opposed to the mangled mess that is the Microsoft JVM.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
The trail was about anti-trust infringements. This is about standards. Sure IE 5.5 doesn't meet the entire standards but neither does any Netscape/Mozilla browser. And for adding tags who cares? When I write a webpage I use front page express, adobe pagemill, and notepad ( all at the same time, just have to update them all) With front page I insert my objects, with pagemill I clean up the layout and with notepad I clear out all unnecessary bloat from my page. This has nothing to do with the anti-trust case and everything to do with standards, standards that are slow in coming that are never fully supported
I/O, I/O, its off to disk I go, with a read and a write, and a bit and a byte, I/O, I/O, I/O, I/O
I don't get it...Microsoft builds a browser that is incompatible with certial HTML/Javascript/whatever. If I'm running a web sight, I want to get to as many customers/visitors as I can, so why would I build an IE-only web site? It just doesn't make any sense.
With all due respect, the W3C and Netscape are 2 different bodies entirely. Also, if you code the tables correctly, Netscape seems to deal with them fine. It just goes a bit apeshit when you throw the tags in all screwed up, but then, most browsers do.
Eh...
It's a bit rough, isn't it 8-)
Personally I stopped writing HTML in '99 and since then everything has been XHTML. My XML parse tools like it, validation is easy, and I haven't had a single compatibility problem (although I avoid <?xml?> prologs, as Macs don't like them).
a damn funny thing just occurred to me. people in other comments have been quoting IE5 as having about 80-85% of the market share. so. if EVERYBODY said they used IE they might give it a monopoly status(90% marketshare if i remember right, at least according to monopoly laws). having an operating system monopoly AND a browser monopoly will just make it that much more uncomfortable for them. maybe even another anti-trust trial(concerning the browser) so we could stick it to them that much more.
thsi may sound a bit extreme but those of us who do some web developing and have control over what goes on on a website can simply put scripts to block users that are using ie, and direct them to the netscape page or even mozilla. If enough people do this, the average internet user will get fed up with seeing "your borwser is incompatible with this page, try upgrading to soemthing else" whenever they go to a web page, i know this is real easy with php and i'm sure it can be done in perl.
Of course they are moral entities. Everything anyone chooses and does has moral implications. The only entities that are not moral are dead entities. Corporations are just groups of people. They can ignore their moral responsibilities; they can fail to be up to them; but they just cannot evade the fact that they are moral entities, the fact that their actions (or lack thereof) have moral implications.
Of course, in absence of the Rule of Law, a lot of big corporations have managed to become big because they behaved in immoral and unfair ways that ought to have been repressed but couldn't by a flaw of Law or of its Rule. But that's the problem with Legislation, Law and Liberty; it isn't in any way specific to corporations.
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
Reflection & Cybernet
Perfect! You got all the troll characteristics down pat. It's all in on paragraph, there are *plenty* of misspellings, you spout nonsense as if you knew what you were talking about, you pander to an unpopular view (which is not a bad thing), and you prove short-sighted stupidity is mightier than intelligence and wit.
And, yes, you are right. Any time you can hand a company your freedom, privacy, and money, you should. Look at all the shiny things we get in return!
Just remember-- Manhattan Island was purchased for about $24 worth of glass beads (though I should point out that, in today's terms, that's about $1024 worth of beads).
What a deal!
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Code the damn standards. If MSIE doesn't work right, it's not your problem. People will go to a browser that does.
IE still does a better job than anything else available now. I can't wait for Mozilla, but it's taking them SO FREAKING LONG to come out with a final release.
It'll happen; give it time. I'm already seeing sites I can't view thanks to pap like shockwave (which works horribly on my Linux system, thank you very much) and full-blown Java (which is garbage.)
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I'm not so sure Mozilla taking a "web platform" rather then "browser" approach is so bad. The goal of Mozilla is to be a very portable platform. They want to be able to use it in everything from PCs to set-top-boxes and maybe even as far down as cellphones. Plus it will help them in the long run (Getting to Mozilla 2.0 should be a lot easier than getting to Mozilla 1.0).
Your point about XMLTerm is rather invalid BTW, since it's an outside project. So is the IRC client.
Oh, and one thing I forgot to mention, creating XPToolkit was the only way to ensure a standards-compliant browser. Netscape don't have the luxury of being able to change, say, the Windows toolkit to be more standards compliant while the IE team can.
You should, and here's why.
You don't remember the "bad old days" before the web when nobody could view documents from other computers, when just conecting to another computer was a chore, when the very thought of a multi-platform, standards compliant, hyperlinked file viewer would have been laughable, when sharing information was a futile strugle of incompatibility and broken conections.
This is the world ms longs for. This is the result of implementing anything proprietary on a public network, and it's what ms is spending millions of marketing dollars to get developers to buy in to.
Tim Berners Lee has given the world the web and has dedicated his life to making sure everyone can use it.
Pay the man his props.
___
Is DHTML the name of a standard? Or was it XHTML 1.0?
I've recently been examining some of the literature on XHTML, CSS and XML. These standards are now very
mature and very usable if they are properly impemented in the browser and in authoring tools. And just as soon
as I begin to understand which parts of the standard are supported in which browser and what's proprietary in
each, somebody goes and changes the rules.
Microsoft appears to be more concerned with innovations that will keep people locked into their products than
they are with standards. In fact, the standards are already so good that if somebody implemented them fully,
people could probably be able to do 80 - 100% of what they do with browsers and web-servers without even
touching an MS product.
Mozilla / Netscape, on the other hand, appear to be steadily working towards implementing as much of the
standards as possible. BUT they're taking WAY TO LONG to get there.
The result is that just now there is no standards compliant browser. And in the future? Well, if you design your
documents to use the full function of the standard in order to be useful and maintainable, you'll be able to use
Mozilla/Netscape but not IE. But since "everybody" uses IE nobody will probably ever fully use the standards to
their potential.
You mean, a cross between Judge Dredd, and The Matrix?
I do use Netscape, and I keep IE around for the one or two sites that don't work in Netscape, and also two corporate apps we use that were coded in Java (they install the Sun JVM), that for some reason require IE.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I don't think it's a problem for Microsoft (or anyone else) to release software which has new features and can do new things. This isn't the issue. I mean, we all want innovation, right? The issue is that they are creating these innovations at the expense of existing standards.
The problem here is that crucial phrase: sites designed for Explorer will be unviewable in other browsers.
A good site designer will ensure that any newer features he incorporates into his site have a fall-back alternative for older browsers to use. This applies from <NOSCRIPT> tags, right down to simply using ALT text in your images.
The only way Microsoft can really cause a problem in this regard is to make it impossible (or difficult) to offer a fall-back option.
The real problem is all the lazy site designers out there who simply don't bother to code fall-backs, or maybe don't even realise that they should be coding them. The more popular "site design" tools are also to blame for not making it clear, and those of us who use 'other' browsers are also to blame for not complaining enough when we come across a site which does this (not buying from them simply isn't good enough - they won't even notice).
Having said all that, I do believe that Microsoft could and should have submitted their enhancements to the standards authority. I mean, come on MS - how many times to you have to shoot yourself in same foot before it hurts??
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
I don't like Bill.
Mr. Ska
Why couldn't the W3C act more like Sun instead of like the UN?
I'd love it if they had some actual *teeth*, and control over the market. Even if they had to rigidly define both the standards (HTML, XML, different versions, etc.) and maybe even some browser behavior, I'd love it if they could sue Microsoft for claiming that IE5 was a compliant web browser instead of sitting idly by and letting them uglify the web.
I mean, how can you claim that your browser supports CSS when you can't pass the tests for it? That's exactly like claiming that "Microsoft Java" is Java. How can you claim that your products generate HTML when in actuality they use Windows-only, Microsoft-only character sets, and often can't display a quote to save their lives in any sort of cross-platform manner?
Standards are good, and I wish that companies would stick to them. Not break them; certainly not patent them. They can be involved in the standards process, but if they add anything non-compliant, there should be an option to turn that *off*, like -ansi mode on a good C compiler; and there should be rigorous compliance tests.
Of course, I also wish I were rich, and we had world peace, but...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Don't just use a competitor.
Fire off emails to both sites saying which you are using and why. One pair of eyeballs they will not notice, or even if they do they won't know how to interpret. A letter saying, "I will avoid your stuff" they will notice and there is no question how to interpret it.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Hasn't anyone else figured out really why Microsoft keeps extending IE? It's because they need more features in it for it to do what they're trying to do with it - make it the be-all and end-all application deployment and integration widget. Notice how IE is integrated into Office and Visual Studio, not just Windows - Microsoft made a bad decision by choosing to integrate IE (they know it wasn't right for the task, but they had to do it to force Netscape out of the market) and now has to keep extending IE for it to be useful as an integrated product.
Sounds like a security hole waiting to happen.
The sheer fact that Micro$oft is adding new 'features' is really going to make it tough on developers.
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
Mozilla and Opera need to shit or get off the pot. You cannot use them for any serious authenticated connections, so they get ignored...
What's truly sad here is that MS is completely capable of creating a standards-compatible browser - their Mac group demonstrated it with IE 5 for the Mac. Instead, they choose to perpetuate the browser hell that web developers have had to live with for years because that validates their whole business model.
Microsoft's whole spin is that their products are better because of how easily they interoperate, and adhering to standards would only make it easier for competitors to offer this feature.
Until Mozilla, Netscape was no better, though, and I'm sure they wouldn't have embraced standards and open source had they not been driven to it by MS's monopoly.
Opera 4.01 renders it just fine.
all microsoft is doing is making a better browser.
name one bad thing about enhancing the features of internet explorer? 'but it doesnt work in netscape!' i hear you say. who cares? if netscape cant keep up then why dont u use ie. netscape is a slower, more memory hungry browser than ie. it cant do frames/tables properly and almost any site will look fine under ie, but half of the net looks fucked under netscape.
if you ask me, long live internet explorer!
so many lamers, not enough bullets.
grow a brain
How many millions will be lost because IT deparments can't prevent people from going to http://www.iloveyou.com or http://www.melissa.net???
Oh I forgot. Netscape good, Microsoft bad. How silly of me...
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
boycotting IE 5.5 is not enough. I don't use windows anyway. But what I have done is modified my webpages to deny anyone with IE 5.5 access. I tell them to download the older version or netscape, and I tell them why. Imagine if a lot of site did this, Microsoft will hear to us. I hope slashdot will do this!
Time does not wait.
Alright my big question is this: How is this different from what Mozilla is doing?
Microsoft is turning IE into a programming platform which is (unfortunately) proprietary. The Mozilla Group is turning their browser in a similar programming platform and they announced that they were doing it months ago. I find it interesting that when Mozilla says this the reaction on Slashdot is "great what a wonderful ambitious idea." When Microsoft does it, the reaction is "Its a monopoly. This is horrible."
The only difference I can see between the two of these is that mozilla is using open specs to do what they want. They basically have to since they are Open Source. Microsoft used Closed Source development because they always do.
Just something to think about...
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
While I certainly believe in open standards, it occurs to me that standards bodies are attempts in part to control software evolution. Imagine if there was a standards body that needed to deliberate before homo sap models with extended brains could come on the scene. :-) I recognize this is a bit busted as an analogy. But perhaps the rest of the world could more profitably be embracing and extending what innovations are being produced or be busy building adaptors to make these things interoperate in addition to wringing its hands over lack of unified development to the uber-plan.