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MS Urging Developers To Prep For IE 7
Mike Savior writes "Eweek has a story stating that Microsoft is telling web site developers to prepare their sites for IE 7. From the article: 'One area that Microsoft has clearly articulated as being one in which developers can start work now to prepare for IE 7 involves the UA (user agent) string. First discussed in the company's Weblog in April, the code change prompted a reminder on Wednesday to developers, telling them that Microsoft continues to run across Web sites that are not expecting Version 7 of the browser, and urging them to test their UA strings. '"
TFA says it all:
"I don't use IE at all, but I'll test on it because I have to," said Web designer Donna Donohue...."We code to standards to be compliant with Firefox, and then hack for IE."
So if MS is standards compliant with IE7, there should be nothing to worry about. Of course we all know that that is NOT going to happen. IE7 might be standards based, but expect sweet and fattening IE7 only extentions in HTML pages that will break other browsers rendering.
I suppose this is why MS is calling for developers to pay attention to the new IE UA. IE7 might be rendering in a totally different way to IE5/6 and so will need to be treated differently to other browsers. In other words, MS wouldn't need to bother to mention this if IE7 was standards compliant. I'm smelling a hoard of compatability problems in the near future dragging us all back to the dark ages similar to the following.
However, Champeon added that he builds sites from the ground up to work in any Web browser, by following the set of principles known as "progressive enhancement."
Uhhhgghh!! I've met "progressive enhancement" once before. You've never seen such ugly, malformed, duplicitous code. Non standards compliant web site code that tries to be cross-browser is most of the reason I decided not to get into web development.
May the Maths Be with you!
This just makes no sense. A website that is properly designed should not have to get ready for any version of a web browser, since it should already support most browsers on the maket, including, but not limited to: Safari, Firefox, Netscape, Opera, IE and Konquerer. Sounds like MS is encouraging the development of shody sites, which are IE centric, which is VERY bad.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Our website was built by a "website design bureau". We told them it had to be standard, so it would work on Mozilla as well.
:hover on list items?
What they produced was an absolute mess. CSS boxes were built to IE handling, and rendered incorrectly on Mozilla, which they consistently referred to as "Mozarella". They believed all problems seen on Mozilla were Mozilla bugs, and they added browser detection and workarounds.
Of course it still failed on Opera and Konqueror.
They used an awful piece of Javascript to make dropdown menus.
When they were done, maintenance was handed over to me and I gradually changed all their work to make a standards-conformant site that still rendered the same way. It was a lot of work, starting from the dire state it was in.
But finally, it renders OK and the menus work on most browsers without using javascript.
Exceptions:
- CSS menu only works in IE by including csshover.htc (conditional inclusion using <!--[if IE]...). maybe IE7 will support
- IE4 and below don't quite cut it, fallback to javascript code using serverside UA string detect. these are dying anyway, probably I will remove this support when IE7 appears.
- bug 234788 in GECKO means the menu disappears when mouse moves over scrollable text area. this bug has been fixed in GECKO but Mozilla and Firefox keep releasing new versions based on the broken GECKO for over a year.... We want Firefox 1.1 and Mozilla 1.8!!!
What I learnt: use a website design bureau only to make a site design. Don't allow them anywhere near HTML coding. They just use successive approximation towards the "browsers they test with", and try to impress managers with "browser utilisation percentages" instead of standards compliance.
What I learnt: use a website design bureau only to make a site design. Don't allow them anywhere near HTML coding.
Actually, I had the absolute opposite results when I had a website design bureau design our site. They did the design great, the HTML was standards compliant and they actually tested all pages on IE, Mozilla, FireFox, Safari and Konqueror, even in multiple languages and OSes, and were open and admitted where things would have rough edges with the older browsers, and how they worked around to make sure it worked, just not worked beautifully. It was a very pleasant experience.
Then our in-house web-app coding team butchered the HTML to pieces, re-coded parts of it that looked fine in IE6 and crap on everything else. The final HTML code that the web app spat out did not resemble anything like what was originally made. It was terrible.
To make things worse, the web app coders told their manager that the HTML coders were to blame for the problems, and the manager didn't bother to check the facts when he blamed the web design bureau. The designers were (rightfully) pissed off, and basically told us we were not welcome back as customers again.
So... YMMV on either side of the story.