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CSS Support IE 7.0's Weakest Link
dilbertspace writes "Anyone who has ever developed a website knows that cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility is a nightmare, mainly due to Microsoft's willful non-compliance with the CSS2 standard. As this eWeek article points out, it seems Microsoft will continue their poor support for CSS2 even in the IE 7.0 release. This may have worked when IE was the only game in town, but now that Firefox is a serious player, it won't help them keep market share as they think it will."
DUPE I emailed the on duty editor when i saw the red bar, nothing happened.
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the frumious Bandersnatch.
From the full story @ MicrosoftWatch:
McLaws, who runs the Longhornblogs network, said a lot of "extra time and resources" had to be expended to make the site render the same way on all Web browsers.
Now this shows how M$ responsibly cares indeed about having people employed. Hmm, they probably think overtime.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
this article was already shown :(
In soviet Russia, Linux compiles YOU!
microsoft doesnt conform to any standards
It's deja vu all over again. You'd think that when it's not just the same story but the same headline...
I am trolling
In other news, bill gates reportedly bit the hand that used to feed him...
Behold, another webcomic!
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/17/152925 8&tid=126&tid=95&tid=113
Pay more attention to your own fucking site.
Do we call this a dupe or a confirmation ?
The following statement is true
The preceding statement is false
This may have worked when IE was the only game in town, but now that Firefox is a serious player, it won't help them keep market share as they think it will.
Don't count on it, sunshine. The reason IE is losing market share to Firefox is two fold.
These are things that matter to the end user. If I'm joe-sixpack I don't give a damn about CSS 2.0 compliance. Hell, I probably don't even know what CSS 2.0 is. The only person who actually cares are the people making the web-sites, and those people are us and in terms of market share we typically sit at the one-percent noise level. To Microsoft, IE not being compatible with other browsers is a good thing. It means people have to design to their feature set and not to the offical standards it simply means we can't ignore their platform.
So what can Firefox do to take out IE once and for all? It's actually rather simple. Do the thing that IE would never do. Implement something as powerful as Windows Forms (or it's Linux equivelent). It's the thing Microsoft fears the most - that Javascript will evolve into something powerful enough to be able to right a Microsoft Office clone in. As soon as this happens, then we suddenly have a platform independant version of office and that means we don't have to run Windows anymore. In short, they can kiss Goodbye to their market share.
I'm not saying anything new here. Joel Spolsky has talked about this at great length in a very interesting article that i'm having trouble finding. We all know this day will come it's just a question as to how long Microsoft can stall the process. This CSS 2.0 issue is a single battle in the war Microsoft is waging to prevent their demise.
Simon.
No shitake mushrooms sherlock!
With close to 90% share of the market and a LARGE unsophisticated userbase (who will not change browsers when the one installed works on EVERY website that joe-nascar ever uses), I don't think Microsoft will be losing any sleep over this.
Sad but true....
..That the story had to be posted twice
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Since when was Competitor B, which holds 6% of the market, considered a "serious player" capable of holding sway over Competitor A, which holds 89% of the market.
Though we might wish it were so, it's time for a reality check.
In Microsoft's short-term thinking, they're less likely to support standards. Despite losing market share, their browser is still the defacto standard on the Internet.
Supporting standards only makes other browsers a viable alternative. How many people use Firefox but have to continue to use IE at work because of sites that only work in IE?
I'm a big tall mofo.
Considering the number of internet users out there, 6% is a rather large number.
Behold, another webcomic!
Actually, this may help MS more than you would think. Sites will continue to be written for a non-standards-compliant browser, which makes them less likely to render correctly in the browsers that do follow standards. If enough pages render incorrectly when somebody is trying out Firefox or some other standards compliant browser, they'll give up and go back to IE.
Sometimes you've gotta roll the hard six.
Its the treu Slashdot effect.... Its not a dupe ITS A REMINDER!
I'm using it now as my primary browser. Make that 6% + 1
But I think I'll polish it up over the weekend and post in for the next dupe
So, Microsoft is exercising their 'freedom to innovate' a crappy non-compliant browser. Way to go boys.
Is there any standard that Microsoft has adhered to and not broken? It seems they're always ignoring or redefining standards.
I hope we're finally getting to the point where they'll keep losing market share by not supporting this stuff; because they've got the worst case of instututional Not Invented Here syndrome I've ever seen.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
For every good use of CSS, such as Google Maps, there are a thousand terrible uses. I have no desire to load a 10K frontpage-generated stylesheet to see what would otherwise would be a 2K article.
The usual benefit, if I'm lucky, is rounded corners, background colors and crappy side banners. I have content filtering taking out *.css and rarely does it need to be taken off for a good reason.
Wrong! The first story pointed to an article on Microsoft Watch. The second story points to an article on eWeek. It's not the editors' fault that the eWeek article is just a summary of the Microsoft Watch article!
Generalíssimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
You see, the old article was "CSS Support Could Be IE7's Weakest Link" and this one is "CSS Support IE7's Weakest Link." We weren't sure before, but now we know that CSS Support is IE7's Weakest Link.
What is the real agenda behind these rumors? Normally elusive, unnamed "Microsoft Partners" assure us that in the next release every feature will be fixed, every security hole patched, and every wish list fulfilled. Rarely do the rumor mongers say "It's true, they're only going to make a half-assed effort on this."
Is this CSS 2 people trying to pressure Microsoft into releasing a CSS 2 compliant browser? That's unlikely. Traditionally their focus is spreading rumors that they've seen a beta version of the next big release and that it has "perfect" CSS 2 compliance. Therefore, people will want to be ready to transition to CSS 2 compliance now since its arrival is inevitable.
Is this Microsoft trying to sabotage acceptance of CSS level 2? Possible, but they rarely do this by saying one of their own products is a dog. They fund studies and research and industry pundits to rail against the problems with whatever feature they don't want to implement.
So I'm a bit at a loss of who is left that would actively be trying to diss CSS 2 and also diss Microsoft's development process? Any rumor mongers want to start a rumor?
This has to be the biggest DUPE in history! .... second to that World War 1 and World War 2 thing... how unoriginal :)
Look at the IE section.
Microsoft hasnt broken the Windows standard yet. Mostly because it IS the standard but thats not really the point.....
No, this is the w3c-css supprted version of the story. The previous one supported only IE.
6% is quite amazing considering its short life time.
While I would love to see all sites rendered the same in all browsers...
don't you think that when a browser has 95% market share others should adapt to it not the other weay around?
Would Firefox, that would render pages exactly like IE, be more usefull then it is now?
That actually sound like a tv show.
-Sorry for you Bill. You are the weakest link. Good bye.
-Arrrggg, that's not fair! Everybody voted againts me! Linus, even you can think of good competition? Remove your vote!
No sig for now.
Read your history, FF/alternate browsers have been around for years.
You seem to imply that FireFox supports IDNs. This is no longer true.
M$ will provide a "security" patch that will check for the presence of "potentially viral" software (read Firefox) then provide a solution that will cripple Firefox's functionality. This might be in form of FF always crashing or even closing some ports that FF needs to work well. When this happens very few users will dare use Firefox again. Maybe the Europeans will tame M$ this time.
If you're reading /. then FF is NOT your primary browser since /. will not render correctly in FF (I've always found that very amusing--that OSTG doesn't care that their premier website doesn't work in the "uber geek browser" and similarly that the FF developers don't care that one of the prominent geek websites doesn't display in their product).
This whole CSS and IE7 issue has shown that MSFT is worried about the threat that projects like these pose. Even if Firefox has a lot of support, its installed user base is still very small. MSFT has 90% of the market, logically why should they care enough about that small 6% of market that won't use their product? If they thought that the fox doesn't pose a threat, then they wouldn't spend millions of dollars crafting a new browser, spending the time to make sure that it works on all different types of computers, etc. But this just proves that they do.
Not really, especially given all the media attention, ads, geek-speak, etc surrounding FF. I'd have thought market penetration would be considerably higher by now, a real disappointment.
But not nearly as large as 90%
I am not a number - I am a free man!
What, and simply give up and hand them the rest of their friggin' monolopy so they can finally completely ignore consumers? Why not just give them a law that says all software must be Microsoft and all the money goes to them too?
No, it would be more broken than it is now.
It's the IETF and the W3C that get together and define standards. It's not Microsoft dictating all the standards to the world.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It's the greatest thing since sliced bread, I will be able to legally watch DVDs in Internet Explorer. w007 w007.
and if IE gets tabbed browsing I'll probably switch back.
Then I probably shouldn't tell you about the popular IE wrapper known as Maxthon.
You're either sorely misinformed, or you are outright lying. I am using FF on a Debian system right now, and
About the ONLY site I have trouble rendering is microsoft.com, and since they last changed the site even that is no problem anymore.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
strange, it renders quite well in FF on my computer.
Behold, another webcomic!
This would be made much easier if there was a way to transparently provide Mozilla users with a XUL interface while everyone else gets a HTML interface.
Would this UA-sniffing policy work?
Dupe, Dupe, Dupe of Earl
Perhaps someone can make a movie about Slashdot.org... The plotline can be copied from Groundhog Day.
Last time I checked, Mozilla Firefox supported input of internationalized domain names but converted them to their underlying punycode representation when displaying them. This is a temporary strategy intended to stave off homograph attacks until somebody suggests a better strategy.
The absolute worse thing about Microsofts CSS support, is that its not even consistent between different versions of IE!! there are really irritating things that differ between 5 and 6 for example and IE for the Mac is just a totally different browser with Microsofts name tacked on the end. Firefox wins hands down - even tho its CSS isn't perfect it still works the same across all platforms (plus Mozilla ;) and version wise i've yet to see a problem - or even see wildly out of date versions in use.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
First of all, bad rendering is not always the case and even when it is it's easily fixed with combination of ctrl++ and ctr+- key strokes. Secondly as someone who follows FF development I can assure you that this bug has been fixed on a trunk long time ago and nightly build users must have alread forgotten about this rendering issue. see bug 217527 for more information.
Bet let's get real: MS still controls over 90% of the browser market. Web developers will develop sites that function more or less identically in IE, FF, NS, etc. CSS will not break MS' monopoly on web browsers.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Sorry, me and millions upon millions of other people still arent going to switch.
"..when IE was the only game in town, but now that Firefox is a serious player..."
Uh, so don't get me wrong, I loathe IE like the next guy, but how does - at best - 6% of the browser market already make Firefox a major player?? Apple's got around, what, 2%-3% of the desktop market, yet no one's calling them a major player.
Frankly, we should be blaming all those web 'developers' for their lazy and frankly, filthy, coding. I've worked in quite a few places and only those on the outside or real passionate web programmers care much about anything non-IE.
This will become more and more of an issue in the coming months and years as people start catching on to more of the Google halo effect: the DHTML/xmlrpc sorta 'fat' web client app. Customers and company higher-uppers are going to start saying more and more "why can't we do that like Google Suggest or Google Maps?". Be prepared.
I just have to also say it really pisses me off, as a enterprise developer, that I have to deal with a market like this. I mean, we have standards for a reason. And the fact that you IE only guys out there take quiet joy in your coding lazyness is beyond me.
Take a little more pride in your work and look at the bigger picture! Regardless of what Micro$oft may think, the world should not revolve around IE! Hopefully some day, for real, Firefox will change this.
No.
The Slashdot motto is "if you don't like it fuck off."
... CmdrTaco
Where do I mod this story -1 Redundant?
I used to wonder why Microsoft created JScript, since, it's pretty much JavaScript. Actually, I still wonder about that. Perhaps they aren't fully supporting CSS2 because they don't own it? Nuts.
This is a question I wanted to ask on the other post so I'm kinda glad it's a duplication...
Besides firefox default for searching on google, how much actual revenue is lost for M$ with alternative browsers? I'm not looking for a figure I just don't quite understand why it would be worth it to have a full-team of developers and testers working on this over the next year/two?
Are they afraid of it just being that much easy to switch to Mac or Linux? MSN search revenues? What outweighs the cost of development and embarrassment of more security problems?
Hey look no pointless curley braces or semicolons... just like Python
Now the next time you put your foot in your mouth, bite down-- after awhile you might stop.
transmission_err
dupe of url.
God doesn't it get boring that /. has nothing better to do than dupe more MS bashing? Come on guys there must be something better in life than constantly looking for stories which cast MS in a bad light?
i'm reading it on linux with firefox and it render's perfectly only a few select people have probs with /.'s rendering and i belive someone made a patch.
It seems they're always ignoring or redefining standards.
This seems to happen so much, I propose a new verb to describe it: ignorfining.
Seems especially apt in Microsoft posts.
- shadowmatter
News to me, and apparently quite a few others, if you read some of the parallel responses. It sounds like you have a font problem outside of browser rendering. What were you saying about an oral-podiatric condition?
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
What we need is for a high-traffic site (ex. Google, Ebay, Yahoo, etc) to make it so their page will not load completely in browsers that do not meet standards like these. I'm thinking a page that says "Your browser (Internet Explorer) is not XYZ compliant. Please upgrade to a browser that follows accepted standards, like firefox, opera, etc" with a link that would take you to the page anyway.
I know that this would take a lot of balls on that company's part but action like this is the only thing that Microsoft is going to understand. The first big site to do it would lose some amount of visitors but it would also generate more non-IE users and pressure on MS to follow standards. Eventually MS would wise up and comply as the amount of people switching away from IE becomes too large to ignore. The end result is that either IE will be made compliant or it will lose some of its dominant market share, both good things.
unzip ; strip ; touch ; grep ; find ; finger ; mount ; fsck ; more ; yes ; fsck ; umount ; sleep
What works without adjusting the font size up and down is to set the font sizes "differently."
/. rendering issues and result in a cleaner look on webpages where the designer has gotten carried away with font choices. Which is about all of them.
Using a setting of 10 pixels (for example) for both mono and variable pitch fonts, with a minimum set to 12 pixels, will avoid the
Yeah i'm sure the lack of css2 support in IE7 is really what joe user is going to switch to firefox because of.
For every good use of the .gif, there are a thousand "home pages" with animations that hurt your eyes.
For every good use of flash there are a thousand blinking red and yellow banners.
For every good use of any simple system related to web design, there are thousands of bad ones. Its not a problem with CSS, its not a problem with Flash, its not a problem with .GIF. Its a problem with lazy people and bad web designers.
This is a rumour. The fact is that Microsoft has made no definitive statements about IE7. They have been very tight-lipped about it, even within their internal-only IE discussion lists. Let's not waste our breath propagating this rumour.
Letter
Indeed. They are more like outovators me thinks.
It's really getting quite pathetic.
... or isn't ... or might do ... or might not do ... something that is ... or isn't ... or ... might be ... or might not be ... cool ... or a threat to Microsoft's OS hegemony ... or evil ... or not evil or ... the future of thin client computing or ... same old stuff different name ...
Can't we please have something new, like hmmmm... how about something about hmmmm... Google that says that Google is
And that ladies and gentlemen, is what is known as "someone who doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about".
"Ooooooooo"
They're saying that to dampen the adoption of firefox. They don't want people writing code that supports alternative browsers, code that puts other browsers on an equal footing with ie, code that follows a standard that ms has shuned.
Don't expect truth out of these people. Just because they're admitting to stupidity doesn't mean they're actually stupid.
You see, CSS x 2...
I just want javascript to function the same on all browsers, its so much easier to work around CSS problems then Javascript, you have to write two functions half the time. This I don't even blame on Mircosoft, its Netscape fault back in the late 90's when they didn't care about standards for Javascript and messed the whole thing up.
Just another day at dupedot!
Doesn't MS own the patent for CSS, and if so, how does its patent factor in?
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
if it's a dupe story, why not really push the bounds of redundancy and dupe the comments as well?
If Microsoft fixes their CSS support in Internet Explorer 7, every single little CSS IE hack used around the world will break.
The problem is that all these years, Web developers have had to resort to these little IE-specific hacks to compensate for years of neglect on Microsoft's part. Sure Microsoft can add more security or tabbed browsing... but CSS? It'd be too risky on Microsoft's part to send out a new IE that *breaks* exisiting websites. (Although to be honest, they done it before - twice - IE:mac and later, IE for Windows. But this time they can't rely on DOCTYPE Switching anymore.)
Microsoft's mantra of backwards compatibility would be at odds with releasing a fully CSS 2.0 compliant IE browser.
If you are on a slow dialup connection at 9600 baud, the difference between 2K and 10K is approx. 8 seconds, but with compression this is likely to fall to less than half that, and you're likely to be waiting far, far longer for the images (like the icons by every slashdot story).
You will still download the content for the side banners, since that's in the main HTML document and not CSS (CSS is too limited in generating content to make actual ads with links in them).
So really what you're doing is making a few pages download faster but making a lot of pages look uglier or be harder to navigate and use.
A well-designed site using XHTML and CSS downloads faster, because there's no need to use <font> elements, there are fewer tables, fewer images.
Rather than trying to make other people's Web sites break for you, have you considered writing to the webmaster of the sites that cause you problems, politely explaining why they should spend more money developing their Web site?
How did you gather statistical evidence suggesting the ratio of useful to bad CSS is 1:1000? Most people don't notice CSS at all when it's done well, so opinions tend to be skewed here, I suspect. But I'd be very interested to see some independent research in this area.
Liam
Live barefoot!
free engravings/woodcuts
About the ONLY site I have trouble rendering is microsoft.com, and since they last changed the site even that is no problem anymore.
That doesn't have anything to do with standards, but with Gecko's quirks mode. The only way to make sure that the page does render according to standards is using Opera which AFAIK doesn't have the quirks mode.
I remember there were a hell of a lot web pages that looked broken in FF 0.9. With 1.0 almost all of them worked. Did they suddenly all convert to web standards? No, Firefox developers spent more time developing their quirks mode.
Actually I've been saying this for some time. Slashdot readers are one of the most brute when it comes to standards. Everything must be a standard, if some company doesn't follow it - bash it. And I agree to this, we _should_ be following standards so we don't end up in a mess.
But the thing I find funny about this, is that they are (a) writing this from their Linux distro which doesn't follow any LSB standards and (b) on the site that doesn't follow any W3C standards.
Now tell me if you expect someone to take you seriously.
(a) - http://www.linuxbase.org
(b) - save slashdot as html and upload to W3C validator = currently 200 errors
Wrong. Using Firefox means "im an idiot" because you dont know how to pay attention to spyware. Even now there are more flaws announced weekly for firefox/mozilla than there are for IE. Its a balance. It will go back and forth. Whoever is popular will be plauged.
I have lots of friends that are computer illiterate. Their computers usually get bogged down with viruses and spyware and I'm often obliged to help them fix their problems.
Every time I do this I install Firefox, set it up with my favourite extensions, then show them how to use it (basically how the tabs work and where their download go). I haven't had a single person complain about it, in fact they all rave about how much better it is and often suggest it to their friends.
Just telling people about Firefox is no way to get them to convert, demonstrating its power is.
Do the thing that IE would never do. Implement something as powerful as Windows Forms (or it's Linux equivelent)
XUL... it's already there
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Slashdot's motto is "the more page-views the better." When they still get 100+ comments for a dupe story, there's no reason for them to do anything about it. If you really want to stop dupes, stop adding comments to them. Only when dupes get few page-views and just waste space on the front page, will the "editors" get serious about it.
...from what I see this would then be World War 0. Multiple battle theatres, boatloads of deaths...sounds like a World War(TM) to me.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Uh, IE 7.0s weakest link is that Microsoft will be programing it.
So it looks like IE7 will not be ported to Windows 9x/ME/NT/2K, just Windows 2003/XP?
:p
I don't know about the rest of you but Windows 98SE (Second Lousy Edition) works fine for my web browsing needs. Unless I wanted to play the latest PC games I have no reason to EVER upgrade from Windows 98SE and I think FireFox will be supporting my web browsing needs for a long time.
Why should I care if IE7 will have good CSS 2.0 support when I can't even run it? (Insert some zealot comment here about Open Source being supported as long as some programmer with way too much free time on his/her hands gives a d@mn.)
Okay now I pissed off the Windows zealots and the Open Source zealots. Mercy?
For some of you IE7 CSS 2.0 support may be a big thing and I am not trying to belittle it, but for me CSS 2.0 support lives in the shadow of being able to actually use IE7.
Okay, my subject title is just plain silly. If it made you laugh then I have done my good deed for the millennium.
Losing faith in humanity one person at a time.
> The only thing that can get MS to change their browser
... exhibition or ... museum site. Even though the site has recently been simplified to make it accesible to the disabled and overal faster to load the new Microsoft browser still cannot even display it correctly while several other browsers have no problem.
> is website developers. If they design CSS2 compliant
> websites that break IE, MS will fix it.
Create a template with the features from CSS 2.1 you think must be added in a page which for the rest of it IE 7 should no problem with. Team with others to use this subset in as many sites as possible, then send out press releases from all these sites as IE 7 goes into beta:
While MS seems to have improved their browser it still can't even display
The weakest part of MSIE is not CSS support, or support for any other standard. This is because Joe User has no idea what CSS is. All they care about is whether the page shows up the way it should. And 99% of the time it will, until Firefox becomes the dominant browser, and even after, web designers will have to design with IE in mind. If it doesn't look good on IE, then it's not a good website. Designers will be forced to make their site look good on IE, and the IE users will remain just as naive, in thinking that IE is good enough for them.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Quite a few websites today uses open source developed software for wikis, blogs, forums etc. Chances are that quite a few of these, will use CSS2 regardless of microsofts move. And simply include little "Best expericed with Mozilla firefox", somewhere on the frontpage.
I seems like Microsoft are hoping the users wont be able to download and run firefox, and bitch to the siteadmins that the layout is broken.
I'm not sure that this will happen, since running a setup.exe is pretty much common knowledge today. And especially windows users, seem to have nooo problem what so ever installing a bunch of different apps to do all sorts of thing (like im clients, p2p, etc etc). I think the site users will simply just install firefox.
This is true for some CSS, but they could possibly improve other things. IE for instance thinks that there's some mysterious element that surrounds the HTML tag so, you can pass styles to IE by using * HTML {}, while other browsers will ignore it. If they fix both the quirks that the hacks are fixing, and the method of passing the hacks to IE, it would be no harm no foul. It's just that they'd have to make sure they got everything right. So that the new IE doesn't end up ignoring a hack it needs...
This is a followup story. It's interesting to note that Slashdotters profess even more contempt for corporate media's eyeblink attention span for stories than do the majority of news consumers. We're always whining about how broadcast news is just a mass of infotainverts, published solely for headline "sensationalism". But when Slashdot follows a story, according to its own format of accepting a series of story submissions as a story develops, Slashdotters freak out about "dups" or "beating a dead horse". Even when the story sometimes has editorial noting that it's a followup (this one doesn't). And why should it? Do Slashdotters need an editorial voice telling us that we're following a developing story, when we read it ourselves? Do we need a new version of "Slashback" ("Slashup"?), a topic ghetto only for developing stories?
--
make install -not war
*empty*
What I really don't understand is why the W3C doesn't make the standards referring to browsers following the special (and great) features of the owner of 89% of the market share?
If all other browsers were forced to follow that standars, someday it will be *exactly* the same to use one browser or another. Today it is not nearly the same to use any browser apart of IE because many many many features of web development are only possible using Microsoft standards.
IE appears to retain 90% of the general market share. How would not following standards hurt them? After all, W3 standards complaince is only an issue to web developers; to the general public all that matters is whether it's compliant with existing pages. And to these people, IE is the standard.
It appears ignoring standards would do more to hurt Firefox than hurt IE at this stage. Which from Microsoft's perspective...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
The article makes a false statement when it says that CSS support will be the weakest link. The weakest link is the fact that its a Microsoft product that will only improve when given a threat. i.e. security.
XeRo
Is there any standard that Microsoft has adhered to and not broken? It seems they're always ignoring or redefining standards.
Standard MS has not broken, The Golden Rule:
"He who has the gold, makes the rules."
-kgj
-kgj
Let me start by saying I am not an M$ fanboy nor do I appreciate the amount of extra effort I have to go through to support IE's broken CSS.
Several of these articles say that M$ doesn't really consider CSS2 to be a fully fleshed-out standard or has reservations about it. I work with CSS every day, and I develop on Firefox first and then "backport" to less-compliant browsers, but I still partly agree with M$: as a standard I think CSS is rather sucky.
I love the idea of CSS, I love having beautiful clean content/presentation-separated code, but I think that CSS itself is still a pain in the ass and often simply gets in the way of what I want to do rather than helping me along. There are lots of things- centering, differing implementations of padding vs. margin, the positioning mess- that simply don't work as they should. Some of these are the fault of browsers, and some are the fault of the standard.
I assume there are "good" reasons why CSS2 was designed the way it was, but there are simply things that should be much easier than they are in CSS. These inexplicably difficult parts of CSS are what I think ultimately drive people to throw up their hands and just say "I can do this in five minutes with tables and it will work in all browsers. Screw this."
The problem is larger than just M$ and IE: I think it's partly the fault of the browser makers interpreting the standard differently, partly the fault of browser makers not supporting the standard at all, and partly the fault of the specification itself.
...it's eweek's web master, saying, "You script kiddies think you're so tough?! Come on! Bring it on!! I'll show you who's 1337!". He just wants to go at it for another round. That's all.
testing out my trending skills
How did you gather statistical evidence suggesting the ratio of useful to bad CSS is 1:1000? Most people don't notice CSS at all when it's done well, so opinions tend to be skewed here, I suspect. But I'd be very interested to see some independent research in this area.
Quite simply, people should just not know if a site uses CSS or not without looking at the source. CSS is designed to separate structure and style, which has more advantages than I care to list. Really, the only time people look at a site and say "oh, this must use CSS" is when it's one of those cookie-cutter blogs covered with rectangles and sharp corners. And while some sites abuse CSS or do only basic things with it, others like ESPN.com make you wonder how they pulled it all off using nothing but divs.
If you get nervous, just remember that there are a few billion other people who don't really give a damn.
I was searching online to see if IE7 will have decent CSS support. I found a post saying it would, when it is released in a few months. The post was from early 2002.
As Opera and Firefox would say.. "You are the weakest link, goodbye."
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Which is the standard, the 98% one (or 86%) or the 6% one. That's what I "joe nascar" think. That's what I like about standards, there are so many of them.
Maybe not entirely threadrelevant but still, this seems like the correct story to post this link.
Microsoft's fix for cross-browser problems.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
The spokeswoman instead pointed to Microsoft's IE Weblog, where company officials are highlighting Microsoft's partial CSS2 compliance in IE 6.0, the most recent version of Microsoft's Web browser.
Even 'partial' is an overstatement here. IE6 does not even support simple things like 'border-left' for table cells. So unless Microsoft really does something about that, I won't even consider keeping my homepage IE compliant. I wish that every webmaster does the same thing to force Microsoft to support CSS2 or, if necessary, to even cause a massive abandonment of IE by the public. Microsoft still has a big lesson to learn in social responsibility.
Some of IE's features actually piss me off. I do not like typing in a valid URL into IE or a valid Windows share name into Windows Explorer and have it suddenly search the web.
In my opinion IE6 has been around so long (even after tabbed browsing became popular) is because Microsoft was happy with IE6. Now Firefox and Mozilla (but not Opera?) have Tabbed Browsing and people don't like going back to IE because it lacks that wonderful feature. I guess enough people have complained loudly enough about Tabbed Browsing, but not about CSS 2 support.
If you really want IE7 to have good CSS 2 support then start yelling at Microsoft like they are a deaf person who doesn't give a rat's ass. If enough people do this then eventually they will get tired of being yelled at and do something. (I mean no disrespect to the deaf or rodents.)
Losing faith in humanity one person at a time.
By far, the biggest problem in IE is activeX. Period.
ActiveX is the long standing technology of choice for installations of spyware, addware, trojans, and god knows what else on your Microsoft Windows based machine. Thanks almost entirely to Microsoft's activeX, it's done silently, efficiently, in the background and without your knowledge or consent.
Thanks to Microsoft the company, who has always been aware of the problem but (at least of yet) never lifted a finger to seriously address it, addware/spyware/trojans, etc. has become a thriving booming industry. And, as of now, solely because Microsoft didn't do a god damn thing about it, it's here to stay. Software companies will always be preoccupied (and making money) with trying to build a another better spyware removal mousetrap, but every solution they come up with is inherently stale. Spyware, Inc., has been allowed to constantly evolve, it grows increasingly sophisticated and clever, and due to the nature of the game, every removal tool is going to be post facto. Too little, too late.
I don't think most people realize (or are willing to acknowledge) just how serious this problem is and its potential for further havoc in the future. When Microsoft announced it's own free spyware removal software, that should have sent ripples through the technology press, not because of potential competition issues with other spyware removal software companies; but because it represented Microsoft's most overly avert attempt to date to shift attention (and blame) away from it's own technologies (i.e., activeX, the crap they should have fixed long ago) and instead portray itself as a just another victim of the spyware/addware/trojan bad guys. You see, it was never our fault at all, and here's some free spyware removal software for you buddy because it's going to be a long cold day in hell before we ever get around to fixing the problem at the front end of our OS.
Regarding CSS support, for once I can agree with Microsoft. It's the least of their worries right now.
However, not everyone is clamoring for full CSS2 support. "CSS 2.0 has a few nice features, but realistically, I don't think it being in there makes much difference either way," said a Windows developer, who requested anonymity. ...Wow. I can't believe they bothered to put that in the article.
Tluin natha Linux xxizzuss uriu olt bwael mon'tun.
I've been curious why Microsoft has continued to resist industry web standards. Asking seriously, what do they have to gain from this? It would seem they would want to be able to tell their customers that their browser is compliant with industry standards. Granted, they like doing their own thing and pushing their own standards, but have they really pushed anything new along the lines of css type capability?
The only thing I might suspect is that somewhere in Microsoft development they are working on something rather radically new that departs from traditional web methodology, so they don't consider it necessary to keep up with web standards since their new product won't have anything to do with traditional web standards.
While this is possible, I consider it unlikely. So what else? What does Microsoft have to gain by not updating to css2 and other standards?
I love my sig.
And yet it works just fine in IE6. Also, I dont believe CSS has anything to do with Google Map's internal rendering. It works fine, even with CSS turned off.
As it is not fully supported on 80+% of users machines? (just under 90% from the last Slashdot/Firefox story)
Microsoft apparently thinks that CSS2 is a flawed standard, and are waiting for CSS2.1 and CSS3 to be official before supporting it.
Granted, the argument is a bit specious because Mozilla Foundation has been incorporating bits and pieces of the 2.1 and 3.0 candidates into Gecko. Waiting for something in the future doesn't help web developers who need to design good-looking sites using CSS now.
FireFox could support as many as possible of the bad html code specific of MS IExplorer, but each time it encounters that bad code it can put a warning note in the status bar advertising wrong or non-standard html page (with red blinking letters). This feature need the posibility to be dissabled in the configuration, so to obtain a pure standards compliant browser.
The question wasn't 'how many roads must a man walk down?' .... it was 'how many times must the same story be reposted on slashdot until slashdotters give up writing hundreds of comments on it?'
Most average users DONT CARE. What they do care about is that a majority of the sites they go to work, and ironically enough, it seems Netscape and to a lesser extent Firefox seem to balk at the CSS or Layers used in some sites. IE can pretty much handle everything you throw at it.
When are you propeller heads going to realize this?
Couldnt have said it better myself. Slashdots pretty crappy anyway. I mean talk about a messed up jumble of thread tweaking.
Ignoring all the political reasons that it's a terrible idea; it could work, but MS would have to actually document their "standard". Which is part of what they were supposed to be doing as a member of the W3C.
Their statement seems to imply that they are only trying to defend themselves against patent litigation. This is consistent with Microsoft's use of patents in the past.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
They could use MIME type switching though. If they actually cared. Which I'm quite certain they don't.
The gift that keeps on giving
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
Well... Without IE, I cannot play with the Cute Microsoft Agent ! Can you imagine a talking Merlin talking to you on a webpage? Who cares about CSS2?! Let's wait for CSS 3 !
I am Who I am. http://www.happyam.com
Microsoft not supporting standards is in microsofts interest because it supports and keeps afloat their Front page market. They want people to use front page so they don't care about standards. I deal with making standards complaint sites day to day. The process of getting positioning right across browsers is the biggest pain every. I wish they would quit playing their greedy marketing game and give us developers a break.
Linux is like a teepee. It has no windows, no gates, and there's an Apache inside.
Every time a web page fails to render in a CSS2-compliant web page, we should file bug reports. Every single #$@&(@$& time. If you're a developer, file one for every page you write that follows CSS2 and doesn't work properly in IE.
Make them suffer by not complying. Cause them enough grief to change their mind.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Never! Why? Because this is exactly the whole point of its own existence! Since IE is free in itself (ie. comes at no additional cost) and does not particularly promote the Windows platform, the reason is very simple: Microsoft has been pushing IE to sell corporations/developers development and deployment tools that are very pricy - and that specifically target IE as browser.
Microsoft has no incentive to make a fully compliant browser, because then web developers can start using other tools - even free/open tools. The other point is (in my opinion) that Microsoft thinks the more coverage they get with IE, the less people will use other tools, as developers as well as end-users. Thus, it's probably in their agenda to make standards (at least some of them, amongst which CSS 2 might be a good candidate) irrelevant. It's no real secret, Bill Gates has repeatedly said that he didn't care about standards when those were "hindering" Microsoft (pretty much any standard but theirs). But anything you have to comply with is "hindering" you at some point, so that basically means "I don't want to comply".
Yeah, grandma is thinking, "if it doesn't have CSS2 support, I'm switching to Firekitty!"
And if you do like it, then FUCK OFF!
They seem to havce fixed it :-D
I really wanted to change my sig to something witty, but all I could come up with is this.