Slashdot Mirror
Quiz Microsoft's IE Team Leader
About as timely an interview as you can get: Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7 last week, and today we're gathering questions for IE team general manager Dean Hachamovitch. As usual, please follow Slashdot interview rules when posting or moderating questions. We'll publish Dean's answers verbatim as soon as he replies.
Doing some WebSite development I found that with IE 6 (I havent been able to test IE 7 Yet) I always had to wander away from the standards and the only reason I have gotten is that MS just doesn't like them. Is IE 7 going to make sure that they follow the stands much more closely so when I make HTML and I test it in IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera they all look the same, I normally get the Last 3 to work without much fighting but IE always decided to do it differently. Giving us New Windows Only features is not useful for the developers, but following the standards is. As well our custerms weither they know it or not like it better when we follow the standards (Less junk and warning messages, Or misaligned stuff).
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
"Why did you go half way implementing CSS instead of fully supporting standards all other browsers have for some time now."
I believe that NO browser fully supports CSS. Am I wrong in this assumption? Even if you're asking them to support the standards to the same level as all other browsers the implementation would still be incomplete.
There's a built-in derogatory slant to your question. I believe that IE supports more than 50% of CSS standards, which would mean they went further than half-way. Your choice of words is subtly antagonistic.
It's not a "Have you quit beating your wife" question, but neither is it a suitable one for a serious discussion.
A better question: Are you aware that no matter what answers you give here, they will never satisfy the anti-Microsoft Slashdot crowd?
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
IE7, like IE6, renders a lot of pages significantly differently than the other main HTML rendering engines available (Geko, KHTML, and Opera). At the same time, IE7 requires WGA to run - so that applications like Wine are unable to run it. This means that web developers who are using Linux and Mac OS X will have an extremely difficult time testing their sites with IE7. Was this intentional? If so what was the reason behind it (do you want to force developers to move to Windows for web development, or simply set IE aside as something different that isn't a regular browser and must be specifically developed for), and if not how do you plan to rectify the situation?
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
Acknowledged by what authority?
Why do you assume that pro Open Source equates with anti-Microsoft
... reality? There can BE no peaceful coexistence between Microsoft and anyone else, open source or not. If you don't understand this, you don't understand Microsoft.
Because of
Can your software fully handle PNGs yet, or is 11 years still too short of a time to adopt a very-well-documented standard that has been fully published along with a reference implementation?
If 11 years is too short, I understand and you have my sympathy. I imagine the development portion of your company is quite understaffed, and more importantly: underfunded.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
They cannot even make IE work well on their own OS, how much can we expect for supports of other systems?
And this is why we don't make drug jokes to a crowd like Slashdot...
WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
What on earth is "100% W3C compatibility"? The W3C is an organisation, not a specification. They have published hundreds of specifications. No software would implement the lot, nobody would even want to.
You are asking a nonsensical question. A better question would be whether they plan on complete support for specific specifications, such as HTML 4.01, HTTP 1.1, CSS 2.1, DOM 2, SVG 1.1, etc.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Just wondering, but what kind of answer are you expecting here? "Dang, yes, you caught us in our secret ploy! Oh well, back to the drawing board!" :)
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Hi,
I understand that the argument (based on the IE7Blog) for IE7 not supporting CSS and ACID2 to the same level as modern browsers like Opera, Mozilla, and Konqueror/Safari is that doing so would break to many existing websites which were developed to support IE6's non-standard quirks rather than W3C standards. I understand the business requirement to protect this existing user base which is dependent on the flaws in IE6 being propogated to IE7, but there is one thing I don't understand:
Few if any of the web sites which depend on IE6 specific features state an explicit doctype - if they do, they're doing so pointlessly, as they almost never adhere to it. On the other hand, web pages which do assert adherence to a W3C document specification, e.g.
, clearly don't intend to use IE6-specific features - if they do, they should be penalised by getting incorrect rendering.
Why, given the depth of developer talent at Microsoft, wasn't IE7 given the smarts to apply appropriate rendering to pages asserting a valid W3C doctype, and fall back to the non-compliant rendering consistent with IE6's non-standard rendering practices for pages that don't state a doctype?
Also, to whom should I send my invoices for the approximately 50% extra development time, per design, required to get perfectly functional W3C standards compliant sites (that render flawlessly in modern standards compliant browsers) to work in IE6 and now IE7? The cost that Microsoft's callous attitude towards open standards compliance has imposed on the diligent web developers for the past 6 or so years is unacceptable.