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Users and Web Developers Vent Over IE7
Spinlock_1977 writes "ComputerWorld is running a story about developers frustration with IE 7, and Microsoft's upcoming plans (or lack thereof) for it. From the article, "But the most pointed comment came from someone labeled only as dk. You all continue to underestimate the dramatic spillover effect this poor developer experience has had and will continue to have on your other products and services. Let me drive this point home. I am a front-end programmer and a co-founder of a start-up. I can tell you categorically that my team won't download and play with Silverlight ... won't build a Live widget ... won't consider any Microsoft search or ad products in the future.""
To the web developers reading this: Wouldn't it be nice to be able to write totally standards-compliant markup and code and not have to taint it with all the hacks that are practically a necessity these days? It almost seems like an impossible dream (unless your website design is dead simple).
I'm a web developer by profession, and I must say IE6 and 7 are a frustrating pair of browsers to develop for.
I use the Web Developer toolbar extension for Firefox, which conveniently lets me know if my webpages are following standards and if there are any errors on the page. It's a bit depressing when you've developed a perfectly standards-compliant page, and then are forced to break standards, create Javascript warnings etc just so the page renders properly on the IE browsers.
I don't think Microsoft should leave the browser business, as competition is healthy.. but they have polluted the market with these strange browsers, forcing web developers to have to deal with these issues. It will be a triumphant day for us web developers when we can stick to standards and not have to degrade/hack-up our code in order for the majority of the public to be able to view it as it was intended.
Free electronic music for you!
The last couple sites I built were heavy with more DOM shuffling than I like, and lots of AJAXy goodness.
I developed them in Firefox, tested them with Safari, and didn't give IE a thought.
IE7: All functionality worked fine, with one or two very minor formatting differences. (which I'm not going to do anything about)
IE6: Completely and unusably horked. Fortunately I don't have to care.
Thank goodness for internal only sites.
What's even worse is that MS removed the * hack from IE6 that people were using to 'rebuild' IE6 to be more standards-compliant. Talk about a slap in the face! Yeesh.
I've not checked to see how Dean's IE7 js thing works with the real IE7 - does it still work?
So, I have a compatibility library. Yes, it adds another layer... but that layer *works*, and I don't have to rewrite the code every time I want to know where the scrollbar is or how big a div is. And it's fast enough for anything I've needed to do with it, which has included making calls to it every 100 milliseconds in some instances. And because I have my compatibility library, I can do things in minutes that take other people hours or days or weeks... if they can do them at all.
I've been doing extensive Dynamic HTML work since 1999, so I have to deal frequently with the various browsers' implementations of Javascript and the DOM. And yes, IE sucks. Bad. But you know what? All browsers suck, bad. I have constant problems with Firefox too, and with Safari. Do I have more of them with IE? Yup. If I had a nickel for every time IE made me swear, I could buy Microsoft. But that doesn't make Firefox or Webkit good. They're just less bad.
And, let me point out one case in which IE is the winner, in the hope of embarrassing Firefox (and Webkit?) into doing something useful to me... IE is the only browser with a built in API for replacing the scripting language. You want to replace Javascript with, say, Ruby? IE has the API, you can write a plugin and do it. Firefox doesn't: to write a plugin for it you'd have to extensively muck about in Firefox's internals.
That's because this hypothetical client doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground, if you'll pardon my French. What software the client is using doesn't mean jack squat if you're building a public website. What's important is what the rest of the world is using today, and what they will be using 12 months from today.
Standards compliance is not ideology. It's the practical application of the very principle that the Internet depends on: We have to be able to talk to one another using known protocols. Anything that subverts that principle should be treated as damage and routed around, to coin a phrase.
If a potential client doesn't care about turning 20% or more of their potential customer base away simply because they don't want to support software from more than one manufacturer, then I don't want to work for them, because they're going to be equally stupid about other decisions, too.
If you're talking about an Intranet application, then your point is moot. It has no bearing whatsoever on the the Internet, which is what's being discussed here. If I meet a potential client that wants a Microsoft-centric intranet application, then I'll politely decline the work and send them on to someone who actually likes that kind of thing. There's enough work to go around.
This argument has been rearing its ugly head since the mid-1990s. Do a Google search for 'standards compliant' in comp.infosystems.www.html.authoring and you'll find endless, tedious debate there. Frankly, I find it boring. I made the decision not to work with Microsoft anything on the web back in 1998, and it hasn't hurt a bit. I've never lacked for work, and I find I spend so much less time dealing with bugs and incompatibilities that I can actually focus on polishing and improving things instead of busting a nut against Microsoft's latest crap-du-jour.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.