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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."
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)
It does seem reasonable that weekend editors like Timothy should, at the beginning of each day, review at least the headlines of the previous three day's articles, before hitting the accept button.
Failing that, maybe someone should whip up a "check for duplicates" perl script for Timothy, and attach it to the Accept button on his edit submissions page. >:-)
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
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.
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?
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.
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.
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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
Did you add an extra zero? Firefox uses just under 20 megs of ram for me. Less than IE (IE adds memory usage to explorer and IExplore). And yes I have the most recent versions of both, with Adblock and Flashblock installed in Firefox. I fail to see any issues with memory usage.
My brother, who is not a technology buff, uses Firefox. I told him to install it because he was getting drive-by-downloads in IE (back before that was patched to any degree) and he did. It works fine for him, and it has worked fine for anyone whose computer I've installed it on.
I have never had Firefox crash on me. I have very rarely had IE crash on me. However, IE handles my webpages very strangely, mainly to do with CSS of course. Its a huge problem! If we web developers are getting pissed at IE for not supporting what we build, we're going to include links that say things like "download FireFox for best viewing" or just stop bothering designing for IE, I know I have, but of course I'm on a much smaller scale than most.
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.
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.
I think this hits on another point. Most of these sloppy 'developers' are using only the WYSIWYG tools in Dreamweaver, GoLive, or even *gasp* Frontpage. You can create good code with these programs (well, I'm not sure about Frontpage, but I know you can with Dreamweaver and GoLive) if you take over and delve into the code itself, but you can also let the application do all the dirty work with the 'developer' just sitting there, pointing and clicking, copying and pasting....
And the fact is, with this level of interaction, with the application creating most of the code, it's all going to work with IE. Macromedia and Adobe are interested in tools that work everywhere, including IE. These 'developers' aren't going to be helping our case at all, and they certainly won't be convincing MS that they're doing anything they need to change.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
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
Consider this completely hypothetical situation:
Amazon.com rolls out a new site design that's only renders properly in Internet Explorer. How would you think Amazon's marketing people would react if they were told that 6% of their customers couldn't access their site properly? Betcha they'd get that fixed pretty quickly, no?
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
"Apple's got around, what, 2%-3% of the desktop market, yet no one's calling them a major player."
Apple isn't a major player in the personal computer market by any means, but that doesn't mean that the directions they take their product line in doesn't have a noticeable influence on the industry.
One only has to look at how the physical designs of their product are quickly integrated by others. Remember just how far transluscent blue and green plastic spread after the iMac? Look at the sudden interest in Mac mini sized cases.
From the attempts to create iTune clones to making the default Windows XP interface more "colorful", Apple still has some influence on the direction of the market significantly larger than their marketplace numbers, and in many ways the sudden growth of Firefox is doing the same in the browser world.
still got my return on the CD.... found a similar/comparable rate at another bank with a Netscape compatible browser (Firefox didn't exist at the time).
These are things that matter to the end user.
Correct.. external features, not internal technology, are what drive public acceptance. Firefox needs to continue to offer things that IE does not have. However, it should be noted that standards support can create public interest through superior webpages. How many people over the years have downloaded Flash because of the features it adds to their browsing experience or because certain fancy sites required it to display all content? (it's a pity Flash was not standards based.. like SVG + DOM + JS, which will replace it)
Implement something as powerful as Windows Forms (or it's Linux equivelent). It's the thing Microsoft fears the most
Mozilla already has XUL, but it's not a W3C web standard; it's a Mozilla standard. XUL will be replaced eventually by XForms, SVG, CSS3, and other true web standards. From all indication, Microsoft does not plan to implement XUL or the next generation of industry web standards. Why? Because they are creating their own proprietary, incompatible standards such as XAML and Avalon. These are features of Longhorn which borrow tons of ideas from XForms, SVG, XUL, etc. but will only work in Windows. Microsoft hates open web standards because they allow efficient competition. The more powerful web standards become, the less relevant desktop platforms become.
You're almost on the right track regarding the threat web technology poses to MS Office marketshare. However, the threat is not web browser equivalents to an office suite. And it won't entirely be the result of OpenOffice either. The real threat to MS Office is a shift in paradigm away from word processing altogether. In the future, most office workers will not create word processing documents in the sense of files saved to some network share. They'll enter lightly-formatted textual information into a web-based content management system and all layout will be taken care of automatically. After all, secretaries and businesspersons are not professional typesetters. Why should they have to worry about such things? And it should be easy to imagine how much easier revision control and document workflow will be with all information stored uniformly in a database rather than scattered in multiple file formats throughout filesystems and groupware messaging systems.
What about the other components of today's office suites? Well, spreadsheets are already dying out as real database technologies become cheaper, more powerful, and more accessible. Presentation tools are already highly competitive, with many 3rd party alternatives to PowerPoint. There's plenty of room here for new technologies and approaches. Furthermore, presentation documents are often one-time-use so there's much less need for strict backwards compatibility.
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.
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.