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IE7 Compatibility a Developer Nightmare
yavori writes "Internet Explorer 7 has kicked in at last on all MS Windows OS running PCs because of the fact M$ decided to force it's users to migrate through update. In fact this has started a IE7 Web Developers Nightmare. The article actually explains that most of the small company B2C sites may just fall from grace because of IE7 incompatibility. One of the coolest thing IE7 is unable to do is actually processing form data when clicked on an INPUT field of TYPE IMG... which is pretty uncool for those using entire payment processes with such INPUT fields."
I'm gonna grant the author a free pass on the writing since it's obvious English is not his first language. But the rest of the article seems to be vague hand-wavy FUD and anecdotal complaints. To take two of the more cohesive statements:
The truth is that standards were not the first priority of IE7 (they are an evil mega-corporation after all), but they did do an awful lot of work on them. Just take a look at the list of CSS improvements over at the IEBlog. They acknowledge that there's a lot more work to do, but it's clear from this that they've solved a lot of headaches for CSS developers.
I'm assuming the author means forms won't submit with an <input type="image"> tag. Without even testing it, I can't believe for one second this is true. This is a major backbone of HTML going back to at least HTML 2, and used in millions of websites. If this were broken it would have been fixed during beta. Microsoft may not care that much about web standards but they do care about backwards compatibility, and a lot of their decision making process has centered around not breaking things that worked in IE6.
It's likely IE7 is going to be a headache for web developers, but this article doesn't do anything to support that argument. As a web developer IE7 hasn't really taken any of my time. So far it's been more reliable than IE6, and I look forward to the day when IE7 is the standard and IE6 is an afterthought for picky clients.
Pretty unprofessional to use the "M$" moniker in a submission. But whatever. Also it probably should not say that people were forced since they have to agree to the install and don't need to do it at all. But whatever. Typical biased press you get here from some of the folks. Many folks can be more balanced but lately we hear from a lot of "slashtards".
Okay, firstly, I'd be bloody amazed if the pages in question validate. The guy goesn't give any link to the site, though, so I can't tell.
Secondly... if you're using lots of client side Javascript to make a site work, you're asking for trouble. Google can do this, because they have massive dev and QA teams. If you don't have the manpower to do enough testing (for example, in the beta period) and fix problems, maybe you should make your site simpler.
Every single web application I work on, worked perfectly in IE 7. Even, yes, the ones that use Javascript. This is achieved by:
Exactly. From what I've heard from my friends and family in the web business (including my sister, whose work recently won awards for degrading nicely), the main thing IE7 does is increases compatibility and conformance. From the sound of it (without reading the article, of course), this story is a bitchfest that probably stems from the IE workarounds that were poorly done falling apart under IE7, or something similar. In other words, it's partly the fault of the developers who are bitching and partly the fault of previous versions of IE, but probably not IE7's fault in any meaningful way.
Without Microsoft / IBM, we would have had Apple, Acorn, Commodore and many others competing for the desktop market. All of these got GUIs as standard before any Microsoft platform. In addition, I suspect that the lack of a single strong player would have encouraged the widespread adoption of open standards much earlier; how else would you with your Mac be able to work with your customer and his Amiga?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Erm, I think you need to recap your history of the personal computer.
When IBM finally decided to sell PCs, Apple had a damn good run at first-mover advantage. IBM wanted to keep Apple from getting the same kind of lock with the Apple ][ that it now has with the iPod, so they decided to rush a disposable launch-vehicle product into the market, then evolve what it considered a 'good' product once its place in the channel was secure. They gave the job of designing the new product to an engineer who had the good sense to run a production capacity baseline, and realized that it would take something like 18 months to open a factory that did nothing but ship empty boxes. Any product design, supplier contracts, and production setup would have to be added to that time.
Instead, he proposed a radical solution: build the initial product from off-the-shelf parts, using third-party assembly houses for the actual production. That would put the new product in the market fast enough for IBM to build a place in the channel, and would buy them time to work on setting up production for an all-IBM product. Trouble was, that model would be vulnerable to copying, so IBM needed something to keep its proprietary lock on the product.
The result was the BIOS chip. That was IBM property pure and simple, and no computer could run (or at least be compatible with IBM's machines) without one.
The plan was approved, and IBM established contracts with a whole slew of outside vendors to supply parts of the initial system, including a tiny little place in Washington called Microsoft.
Then some bastard from a company called Compaq reverse-engineered IBM's BIOS chip and developed a brutally legal clean-room copy.
That opened the floodgates of commodity PCs. Not anything IBM or Microsoft did by choice. In fact, since the OS was the only thing that made an IBM computer distinct in the market, IBM suddenly found itself needing Microsoft more than Microsoft needed IBM.
And that's how a tiny little company with a crap product came to inherit one of the largest and best organized sales channels in the world, and bootstrapped itself into one of the largest companies of all time.