Slashdot Mirror
CSS Support Could Be IE7's Weakest Link
Ritalin16 writes "Many web developers may be disappointed to hear that Microsoft decided to hold off on full CSS2 support with IE 7.0. As said by Microsoft-Watch: 'One partner said that Microsoft considers CSS2 to be a flawed standard and that the company is waiting for a later point release, such as CSS2.1 or CSS3, before throwing its complete support behind it.'" More commentary available from ZDNet. Generally related to the IE 7 Acid Test thrown down by Opera.
I guess that's not THAT bad.. Sure it would be nice to have CSS2 support, but security seems to be the #1 thing everyone bitches about around here and is probably more important.
Then again, I can't really see why they don't do both...
We consider the standard to be flawed. So instead we will continue with our flawed support of the previous standard.
What a load of crap! CSS3 builds up upon CSS2.1, and even though CSS2.1 is still a candidate recommendation, it's being pushed as the standard by the W3C (as evidenced by the fact they are linking to CSS 2.1 in the navigation menu of their CSS page)
Of course, some people are actually in favour of IE not supporting CSS any better than it currently does - with IE7 being unavailable on platforms older than XP, and any attempted improvement to CSS being likely to add more than it's share of CSS bugs, it would just make another browser developpers need to work around. The evil we know might just be better...
Karma: Could be worse (could be raining)
Has anyone ever justified these claims that CSS is a flawed standard? In slashdotters experience, is CSS flawed, and if so, how?
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What. Just because their products have their own flaws means they should adopt all technologies that are flawed?
"Ideas without action are worthless."
Let's put two and two together:
Perhaps the new microsoft motto will be "IE's not done till Google doesn't run"
This won't be a huge problem since Google can simply update their code. However, I wouldn't be surprised if alot of JS functionality that would be very useful to google either now or in the future is simply "missing" on IE7
There has been alot of talk of Google launching a new era of computing with the web as the OS. But Microsoft controls the web (through IE), and they won't allow the web to become a competitor to Windows.
I read the title and thought, "CSS will be IEs weakest link? Something doesn't sound right."
This sounds like typical Microsoft logic. "Just wait a bit longer and something better will come out." CSS2 is here now and people are using it. Support it instead of forcing web designers to put in loads of ugly hacks just to make your bloated software work as it should in the first place.
Yeah, I'm bashing Microsoft but it is deserved in this case.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Someone should make a ie "plug in" that handdles ccs. We have a couple open rendering engines (geko/khtml)..
Could this be done?
True. But the experience for IE users can be worse. On the page you can say, "Best viewed with Firefox" and then have a link to www.mozilla.org. M$ has been doing this crap for years. Maybe its time for M$ to get a taste of its own medicine.
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I dislike CSS because it makes the most common layout formatting (columns) hard to implement. I also dislike that it has no inheritance. Just as an arbitrary illustration, I get sick of writing:
instead of, say:
Great concept, mediocre execution. This "flawed standard" garbage, however, is just a lame excuse.
My username does not make me Apathetic. It's irony, get it?
Since IE doesn't support CSS 2, it's really easy to slap a "Get Firefox!" tag at the bottom of a page, then use CSS 2 selectors to hide it from browsers that follow standards. That means that if IE7 actually does support standards, visitors will stop seeing a warning to switch browsers on my page. And why not? If IE actually could render a page correctly, then I wouldn't have a problem with it. Until then, I'm keeping an FF logo on the bottom of the page and hiding it with CSS 2:
http://deadhobosociety.com/wiki/
- The user experience is only so-so.
- The standards are so numerous that it is hard to even have a general idea where all fit into the big picture.
- Writing a reader for it is such a huge undertaking that not even the largest and most successful businesses manage to pull it off well then something has gone very wrong.
then something is wrong.
The WWW should have been able to stabilize at some level years ago, making it possible to actually make a browser with a reasonable amount of effort. The underlying problem is not that hard, it is just a continuos pie-in-the-sky standardization effort ripping everything invented at any point apart in the next revision since they have decided that there are some better way to do it.
People have at this point come to accept it as the way things should work (being worried when there is no new standard for a year or two), but this is really a hopeless situation. If we had actually reached any level of comprehensiveness as far as web-based applications were concerned it would be less to think about, but the web is still in a primitive state.
Consider this coders and software designers:
- Make a presentation format that separates content from layout.
- Allow textual information with embedded images and external plugins/objects.
- Include some basic scripting, some basic widgets (buttons, textfields, drop-down boxes).
- See to that it is decently easy to screen-scrape, use with screen-readers and is resolution independent (may be done by automatic switching of layouting information).
Does anyone really feel that this has to be so complex that one can't complete it in under 15 years and one can't make it simple enough to actually make it possible for a hobbyist to implement a reader for? Sure the W3C has standards for a lot more, but that is part of the problem, the core is too huge. If one had a simple core it would have been easy to throw in MathML later and get people to pick it up, but since it is hard to in any sense even finish the core who is going to have time to make MathML work?
Web standards need a big sanity check.
People tend to assume that every Microsoft action is part of some evil master plan. The truth is that they're stumbling around in the dark a lot. The software development effort is conspicuously out of control, and many of their projects are a total mess.
if by "adheres quite reasonably" you mean "enough errors on the main page that the w3c validator gave up and stopped counting after the first 50", then yes, slashdot adheres quite reasonably to HTML 3.2.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
"he only reason Microsoft doesn't support CSS properly is that they don't OWN it."
Considering Microsoft has sucessfully patented CSS, I don't see how they don't "own" it. Even if they have given W3C a license to it.
Burn Hollywood Burn
The real reason why Microsoft does not fully embrace W3C standards is because they want to move away from browser-based application. This is also the reason why they let IE development go into the tank.
In the browser-based application model, MS does not control the desktop. They have competitions from Firefox and Opera. More importantly, MS also does not control the server. They have competition not only from Apache, but also Google, Amazon, eBay, AOL, and anyone who publishes a web application.
Microsoft's aim is to control both ends of a network application. And the way they are going to do this is to replace HTTP web servers with IIS and Exchange Server and to replace web browsers with Outlook. The .NET platform is just a step towards that goal. If you accept IIS/Exchange and Outlook as a server/client network application platform, there is no need for W3C standards. It also eliminates any competition, or at least make the competition dependent on Microsoft technologies.
Therefore, any effort that Microsoft expends into making "the web" more usable, such as CSS compliance and updates to IE, only enhances the browser-based application model and hurts Microsoft in the long run.
CSS 2.0 (or even 2.1) being *so* unbelievably tough to implement is probably the reason why no one managed to create IE5.x and IE6 CSS "patches"...
oh wait, it's been done, and with only Javascript
Rewrite large parts of the browser, yeah, right...
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