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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!"
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?
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
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.