Slashdot Mirror
Opera Claims Microsoft Has Poor Interoperability
Noksagt writes "Opera CTO Hakon Lie has countered the claims that Bill Gates made regarding Microsoft's superior interoperability last week. He points out their invalid webpages, MS's unwillingness to serve the same content to different browsers, IE's poor CSS support, tardy documentation and limitations of their XML format, and more." From the article: "You say you believe in interoperability. Why then, did you terminate the Web Core Fonts initiative you started in 1996? You deserve credit for starting it, but why close down a project which could have given you yet much good will? (Verdana sucks, but Georgia is beautiful!)"
After .Net sucks and Solaris, JVM suck too, I believe we're entering a new era in 2005, where litigation is a past tense.
It's just so much easier, and more importantly cheaper, to attack competitors like this.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
I'm not much into the fine arts, but someone's written an opera about Microsoft's poor interoperability?!
I can't wait to hear the fat lady sing in this one!
I'm a big tall mofo.
MS's unwillingness to serve the same content to different browsers
:-)
Well I can vouch for that: there is just no way I can access my Hotmail account with Mozilla, and it seems a dicey affair with Konq. However, for some reason (ahem...), it works just great with IE
Oh well, nothing new here. Remember the DRDOS case against Microsoft? They claimed Windows couldn't interoperate without MSDOS 7 too, yet it could. It's a classic case of Microsoft trying to maintain its monopolies by messing with standards to its advantage.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Verdana rocks
Sunny Dubey
(not a technical font person etc etc)
Verdana does suck. Especially on paper - it should never, ever, be seen off the screen.
you had me at #!
Except Verdana was designed for lower resolution, to replace small fonts.
I love the way Verdana looks, but when I make pages using it and switch from a Windows environment to my home Linux environment, all the fonts are the wrong size!
Verdana does suck because of they way in which it is disproportionately sized relative to other font sizes... which is why it is great when small, but it does indeed suck when increased in size.
Now you can only get them with Windows. Just like a drug pusher... the first one's free, then you pay, and only from them.
Maybe verdana does suck, but reading serif fonts on a computer screen causes a lot more eye strain than reading sans serif fonts. Of course, serif fonts like Georgia look good on paper, but on a computer screen, I think sans-serif fonts are much better.
Dave Hyatt, who writes a blog about his development on Apple's Safari, has an amusing anecdote about developing CSS2 support in Safari, and how IE's piss-poor support of standards forced him to remove it in Safari.
From the blog:
"Sometimes trying to support the standards can be a real pain.
While trying to improve our CSS2 compliance, I recently did a big cleanup of our block layout code, including the code for handling floats. I made what I believed to be a fairly innocuous correction to follow the CSS2 specification. Here's the scenario.
Lets say you have a div that is set to 300 pixels in CSS. You then put a 250 pixel wide float inside that div. Immediately after that you have a 100 pixel wide overflow:hidden div. All sizes have been specified in CSS.
Now here's the pop quiz. What do you think the layout should be? Should the overflow div:
(a) Be on the same line with the float and spill out of the enclosing 300 pixel div
(b) Be placed underneath the float, automatically clearing it because there is insufficient space for
the overflow div next to the float
Before I give an answer, lets see what the CSS specification has to say on this issue. Section 9.5 on floats, fifth paragraph.
'The margin box of a table or an element in the normal flow that establishes a new block formatting context (such as an element with 'overflow' other than 'visible') must not overlap any floats in the same block formatting context as the element itself. If necessary, implementations should clear the said element by placing it below any preceding floats, but may place it adjacent to such floats if there is sufficient space.'
My interpretation of this language is that there must be sufficient space for the table or overflow:hidden element to fit within the containing block. If not, you should clear. That's what I implemented. So in my opinion the correct answer to the question above is (b).
I decided to see what other browsers did. I started with Gecko. Gecko chose (a). Gecko always does (a). It is at least consistent if - in my humble opinion - incorrect. Gecko chooses (a) regardless of whether you pick strict, almost strict or quirks mode.
Next I tried WinIE, and this is the part that blew my mind. Depending on whether the float was an image or a table, the float was left or right aligned, the table specified that it floated via the align attribute or the float CSS property, and on whether or not the normal flow element was declared as a sibling or not of the float, I could get completely different results! The level of inconsistency was astonishing.
I was able to watch WinIE do clipping in one case, to wrap in a second case, to not wrap in a third case, to overwrite content in a fourth case, all by just tweaking the parameters outlined above. It's no wonder Web designers have no idea how to code a page to standards when they have to deal with a layout engine that is so horribly inconsistent and buggy.
Naively I opted to implement (b) and to hope for the best. Unfortunately the bugs immediately started pouring in. finance.yahoo.com was broken for example because it used an old-style align table and relied on it not wrapping underneath the float. Undaunted, I simply added a strict mode/quirks mode check and opted to do (a) in quirks mode and (b) in strict mode.
The bugs kept coming in though. Next was versiontracker.com, a page that is actually in strict mode and relies on an overflow:hidden div to spill out of a containing block rather than wrapping.
So now I really have no choice. This is an example of where the CSS2 standard simply can't be followed because buggy layout engines have set a bad precedent that the rest of us have no choice but to follow.
It's a shame that Gecko does not do the right thing in strict mode at least, but I suppose they had no choice in the matter either."
That is simply not true. From a customer perspective, I would rather have one good proprietary solution that serves my needs than a dozen mediocre but interoperable ones. I only need one at once!
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
LMAO
I have to say, i really wasn't expecting that hostel of a letter to be put out by opera, but its funny as hell.
This is almost as bad as when Microsoft made IE part of your operating system. before (in win98 ) you could remove IE and get it to still work, now, if you remove it you virtually kiss your OS goodbye.
Its all part of their strategy, like donating computers to schools, your not being nice, your getting kids hooked on MS word at age 8! I have to say, Microsoft is one of the best companies ever if you just look at what they do as a business, but their products are crap.
unfortunetly, its the only crap that will play half life 2 ^_^
"thats why proprietary software is bad. there is no way for the consumer to benefit from the software."
It's also why ambiguous standards are bad. Anybody else read the little blurb a few years ago about how no browser (Netscape, IE, etc....) passed the standards test completely?
"Derp de derp."
I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about what makes fonts easy to read. The reason both Verdana and Georgia are easier for most people to read on a screen has more to do with being well-hinted, being designed to avoid warts at the relatively low resolutions in use, and having a large x-height. None of these is particularly true of obvious alternatives like Times Roman and Helvetica/Arial on most of today's systems. The presence or absence of serifs has relatively little to do with it.
More surprisingly, some research has suggested that serifs don't actually help much on paper either, at least for shorter works. They do seem to boost reading ease in long, blocky works like novels, but for something like a magazine article or a short paper, reading ease isn't much of an indicator one way or the other.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
"Let's PRAISE Microsoft instead."
I'm so glad Microsoft brought Opera to my attention! Go Microsoft!!
"Derp de derp."
The author obviously has never been to Atlanta.
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
It looks like MSN's markup is more valid then Slashdot's is.
How about we stop trying to attach Microsoft to every Slashdot article? Dear god this is getting old. It is a form of flattery to need to mention that company all the time.
i remember the good old days. opera died after firefox showed up - but whenever you used opera, you could just tell by the feel of it, that Windows had bad interoperability... Netscape and early mozilla had the same feel. it felt like it just didnt belong, as if it was a tresspasser compared to IE. Microsoft has 'McInteroperability'. Thats like interoperability only it only goes one way. Eg: -DirectX ONLY runs on Windows (TM), and is the industry standard. -NTFS _was_ only useable by windows. -MS Office only runs on windows -MS programs inherently run 5x faster than any competitors programs (something to do with APIs) Overall, microsoft doesnt really understand what interoperability means in the first place - they probably think it means "capability to run under MS Windows(TM)" - like Apache, PHP, Mysql, Firefox, Openoffice, etc.
It was previously commented that Microsoft is going down the tubes because of several factors, like IE not being updated in years (except for security patches), and Longhorn being way late. This is just another example. The smell of rot from the direction of Redmond is getting stronger.
Nah ... it's free advertising. Why else do you think Microsoft has let Slashdot live?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
...in a state of suspended animation here
:).
I prefer Bitstream Vera myself.
For terminals though, I *love* non-smoothed Lucida Typewriter 9 point. Not the Xfree version though (the 'm' and 'w' look wierd), I like the one which comes with Solaris (the standard font used by OpenWindow's cmdtool).
Mmm, functional
I'm quite frustrated when people hardcode in fonts - even linuxsites code in font's that really look awful on a (my, at least :p) linux system. Use the css attribute font-family: sans-serif instead of font-family: Arial, Verdana, sans-serif! Then we (who actually browse the pages) can choose our favourite fonts. I like Bitstream Vera Sans for sans-serif fonts.
My dog's better than your dog...
Lucida Grande is the new Verdana.
I think you have the right idea about it. Fonts have to be made for specific purposes, and it often takes some careful thinking about which ones to use when, and at what size.
I'm something of a TypeNazi, so I thought it was funny seeing "Verdana sucks, but Georgia is beautiful!" in the story. What most people probably don't know is that they were created by the same designer.
Say hello to Matthew Carter.
Verdana is a better font, but not for the web. The problem is that it has a higher aspect value than most other fonts. This means that at a smaller size it still remains legible where other fonts may not. It also means that at a normal size, it appears to be quite a bit larger than other fonts.
The problem is that web designers can't specify any particular font and assume that the web browser will honour that request. There are lots of different reasons why a different font may be substituted for the originally requested one.
This means that if a web designer specifies Verdana for small text, another font could be used in its place, resulting in unreadable text. If a web designer specifies Verdana for normal text, people will think that it's ugly because it's too big. There really aren't that many situations where Verdana is an appropriate choice for web designers.
None of this is to say that it isn't a nice font; I personally use it throughout most of KDE. But it's not a good choice for the Web Core Fonts collection.
Opera has had first-hand experience with Microsoft breaking interoperability. At one point, Microsoft were deliberately serving broken CSS to Opera that would cause it to mess up the layout for that one particular browser.
Right... until one day your favourite proprietor goes out of business or simply decides there's not enough money to be made on your piece of software. Soon after you're going to need to move your data to some other piece of software because it has this new killer feature. That day you will start wishing you opted for something just a little more interoperable.
but that's understandable. He still has a lot of valid points, and does a *fine* job of raking Bill G. over the coals :-)
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
With the increasing popularity of Firefox, Opera needed to do something to try to reverse its shrinking marketshare of the browser market. It is good to see Opera getting a little of the publicity it so desparately needs.
Last time i checked maps.google.com doesn't work in opera. I don't see the guys from opera or anyone else complaining about this.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
try to validate the www.msn.co.il (it's the israeli portal),
... and... you'll get 1338 errors (on 1 page!!!)
I think it tells a lot about this 1337 (+1) company
It is the other way around. Google should use standards, so it will display good in all browsers. HttpXmlRequest is not standard. XSL/XSLT and XML should be used on the server side. Browsers should only have to deal with XHTML, CSS, and ECMAScript. Not only that the new Google producs are not standard compliant, they are also not accessible under 508.
What a great answer from this Opera Software's executive. I think we all know enough about this subject, but replies like this, from important executives, are helping everybody realize what Microsoft is doing.
Robert Scoble, Microsoft's chief humanising officer has posted a response to Hakon's letter.
Apparently, they are working hard to fix it in IIS 7.0 and the next version of ASP.NET.
Apparently.
Ziga
Thing about Word 97 is that it was unwilling to save in word 5/95 format. This is something that MS refused to fix for the better part of a year.
In the meantime, any company that bought a new PC was only offered word 97 for the new machine. This meant that, the first time they saved a document that needed to be read anywhere else in the company, all recipients needed to buy the '97 version to read it (much less to edit it). You could save your document in RTF format, but the '97 RTF format was sadly broken.... Back to plan A.
MS did, in time, release an official plugin that allowed you to save in word'95 format (as long as you were willing to work your way thru the warning messages), but I don't believe that it was possible to set '95 as the default save format, so -- sooner or later you'd accidently just 'save', and the next thing you know, your recipients can't read your document.
The end result of this is that MS raked in Billions of dollars in spurious sales by forcing people to abandon all older versions of their word processors. This is part of the way that they cemented their monopoly on the office software market.
_____
Then of course, there's the NT filesystem that is sorely short on public documentation, and almost impossible to figure out. As far as I can tell, Microsoft is entirely uninterested in letting others interoperate with it. In fact, I'm guessing that they put in some strange land-mines just to piss off people trying to use it other than from inside of the most recent versions of Windows.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
While I wouldn't know about the 5x speed boost claim, there is a book on the undocumented NT/2000 native API.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
Supports Windows NT/XP/2K/Pocket PC. Now that's interoperability! NOT!
It's like C# being multiplatform... multiple windows platforms...
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= - The Celtic - =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Remind me not to hire you to design a website
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
I'm working on my first .Net project at work, where I have to provide compatible HTML. We spent three hours figuring out all the oddball stuff .Net does to HTML, then I spent a day writing up documentation on it. During the documentation review, we opened a demo page in Mozilla instead of IE, and all the Panel-control-created div tags were replaced with table sets. Imagine our surprise.
As we started digging, we started finding lots more stuff like this; for example, tables get a style of "border-collapse: collapsed" by default in IE, which is a tag that IE uses to tighen up table structures (into non-standard measurements) while other browsers ignore the tag. There's no reason for this tag to be there, except to guarantee that tables will look different in IE as compared to other browsers.
The punch line, of course, is that this "feature" can't be turned off. So now we either have to burn a lot of extra effort to validate multiple sets of rendered HTML, or we have to give up alternative-browser compatibility -- which I am sure was the point in the first place.
(few things microsoftie make me seethe, but this one does...)
Well MSN definitely has poor interOPERAbility. Remember the Swedish Chef browser?
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
You have to admit that they're pretty good at some things
Like making money, getting away with breaking the law, and software installs are a breeze in windows, just browse the web for a while and software just installs itself without any help.