Microsoft Pushes Devs With Wider IE8 Beta

An anonymous reader recommends a story about the upcoming beta 2 release of Internet Explorer 8. InternetNews expects that the standards-compliant default mode will push many developers to update their sites. We've previously discussed IE8's standards compliance and other features. Quoting: "Over the years of IE's dominance as the leading browser, designers regularly tweaked their sites to get the best possible accuracy in rendering pages in IE -- most recently, the current commercial release, IE7. Now those pages will need to be changed. Microsoft originally planned for IE8 to default to rendering similarly to IE7, while super standards mode would have been an option. The outcry from critics helped convince Microsoft officials to instead default to super standards. That, unfortunately, will mean work for site administrators."

Comments

Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Anonymous Coward]

Before anyone starts bitching about how much IE sucks and how it's lack of standards is nothing but a burden on anyone, understand that this is a decent move by Microsoft in the right direction.
I know, I know, it's almost too little, too late, but it's better than nothing and as long as this trend continues, at least we might have a decent amount of cross-browser standards in a few years time, as opposed to none if Microsoft simply hadn't bothered.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[jeiler]

Agreed. I will admit that I have remarkably little sympathy for those who have to reconfig their sites to standards, I have to admit that's the wrong attitude on my part. Most users don't care about some arbitrary "standard," even if it was designed for optimum functionality and safety: all they care about is "Does it look good."

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[maxume]

As a user, I often care whether a site is easy to navigate and has a decent structure.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Anonymous Coward]

I have nil sympathy for anyone that has to recode his site; to standards or otherwise.
If they weren't retards their page would work in IE3 as well as in dillo and Opera 9. Is someone with a gun forcing them to include "new tag of the day" to their HTML code?
Trying to cover up poor skills with magic numbers?
Javascript, ActiveX, Java, Flash, Silverlight, CSS, all to write a page that seems to be coming from 1995 with ugly graphics, unreadable text, strident sounds and crap moving around and no content at all.
If your crap doesn't render in w3m and you are not a bank I won't be caught dead while browsing your site.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Unforunately, it's not that simple. Previous versions of IE were broken enough that standards-compliant HTML and CSS would not render properly. So if you wanted the majority of people to be able to actually use your site, you /had/ to be aware of - and often code around - IE stupidity, for all but the simplest of applications.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Anonymous Coward]

And how is that related to the troll post? STOP TROLLING MY TROLL THREADS!
I use w3m-image most of the time and Firefox when there is no other option. I for one don't enjoy the system dying because the javascript routine is trying to run an emulation of the universe to display an ad.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[bigman2003]

But how many designers did NOT code for Firefox/Safari?

I create websites, and test primarily in Internet Explorer. Then I go through with Firefox and Safari to 'fix' anything that didn't work. Then I go back through with IE to make sure it is still okay (rinse, repeat).

I am too lazy to use IE hacks, so I end up with code that is 'current standards' compliant. Admittedly, it may not always look the same in the two browsers, but it is always usable.

I'm not worried about any additional work for the new version of IE. I'm just excited about maybe being able to use minwidth- that would be great.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[hvm2hvm]

Yeah, 'looking good' for me is usually a PITA because that means longer loading, slower rendering, bugs, the use of flash, java or other bullshit. If everything would be text only html and maybe javascript i would be a happier man. Of course images and other media can be there but only if necessary (like flash for youtube, images when actually showing pictures, etc).

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Vectronic]

"...I won't be caught dead while browsing your site."

Obviously not, you could be caught alive browsing their site though, or found dead infront of a computer displaying the site.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[wvmarle]

So true.
Call me a loser, but after setting up my website nicely with CSS defined columns, floats, etc - it didn't work in IE. It just displayed an empty page! While it worked fine in Mozilla, FF and Safari.
I recoded the site using tables for lay-out.
When I did that, it worked nicely in IE as well. And I really had the intention to move with the times.
It's a simple company site, partly static, partly dynamic - but using tables was the easiest way out for me, without having to learn even more new things. I've got better things to do with my time.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sure somewhere I clicked a button allowing MS to rape my system through a " recommended update" but this has got to stop. How exactly is it Microsoft's fault that you don't pay attention to what you're clicking on?

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Red Flayer]

Most users don't care about some arbitrary "standard," even if it was designed for optimum functionality and safety: all they care about is "Does it look good."

I'm unsure of who you mean by "users" -- do you mean web developers, or end-viewers?

If you mean developers, then adhering to standards and "looking good" are the same thing -- since more and more end-viewers use browsers other than IE. Developers should care about adhering to standards because not doing so may alienate some of their (or their employers') potential customers.

If you meant end-viewer, they aren't really germane to the discussion, since what we're discussing is in the blackbox to them. All they will understand is that some sites seem "broken"... not understanding that it's because they are using a non-compliant browser. Again this goes back to the developers, since it is their duty to make sure their website looks good (or even is viewable) by the most number of people.

Please note I'm generalizing here, I'm sure there are exceptions.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Urthwhyte]

Funny, I've never had anything remotely similar happen in over 13 years of using Windows, I believe that the PEBKAC virus may have been the root cause of the error.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Snover]

Uh. min-width is in IE7. I'm surprised you don't know that if you're testing "primary in Internet Explorer".

Not to be high and mighty, but you really really really should develop against a standards-compliant browser *first*, which means any one of Konqueror, Safari, Opera, or Firefox, and then hack IE once you're all done using conditional comments. Since all the browser vendors other than Microsoft do a good job of adhering to standards at this point, by testing against one of those browsers you can pretty well guarantee you will be functioning in the rest of them. It makes much more sense than to test on the outlier (IE) and then try to fiddle with it until it works in everything else.

I'm quite confident that none of my sites will need to be updated for IE8 as long as Microsoft are doing their jobs, because the sites are written to conform to standards and only use conditional comments with special CSS for browsers <= IE7. That means that when IE8 rolls around, it will get served the same standards-compliant code as everything else and (for once) will not break on it.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[jmusits]

Browser specific stylesheets.

If people were using these instead of horrible CSS hacks to make their pages work within IE then we wouldn't be having this conversation. Unfortunately too many people are still using CSS hacks to make their pages render properly.

By using browser specific stylesheets, assuming that IE8 is actually standards compliant like FF, then IE6 and IE7 can continue to load their stylesheets to fix their problems and IE8 will only load the non-specific stylesheet as FF does and then all will be good.

Since you place the browser specific stylesheet after the generic one the styles in defined in the browser specific stylesheets override the ones in the generic stylesheet, while the ones only defined in the generic one cascade down. This is the beauty of Cascading Style Sheets.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Nicolay77]

Most users don't care about some arbitrary "standard," Users of other browsers like Firefox, Opera and Safari care if a website doesn't work in their browsers. Making a website conforming to standards will probably make those sites work equally well in all those browsers.

And I believe those alternative browsers have about 30%-40% of total users now, and growing.

And Firefox adoption alone will force those webmasters to use standards, now that Firefox 3 is finally a fine browser (and the other browsers are making nice progress too, but firefox leads in users) it will make Internet Explorer have less than 50% of all users in 2008 or the first half of 2009.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Nicolay77]

This seems to be a Layer 8 kind of error.

I'm not sure if a more complex OS is the answer here.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[jeiler]

If you meant end-viewer, they aren't really germane to the discussion, since what we're discussing is in the blackbox to them.

It's only "blackbox" if the results cannot be differentiated from another browser/platform. The very fact that a page looks different on some browsers than on others violates the blackbox concept.

Again this goes back to the developers, since it is their duty to make sure their website looks good (or even is viewable) by the most number of people.

"The most of the people" is people who use IE--they still have a 74% marketshare. (Cite)

You really can't separate web developers from end users--web developers not only have to eat their own dogfood (test it on their preferred setup), but everybody else's (test it on non-preferred setups). As it stands, by your own arguments, that means web developers should be writing to IE's peculiarities rather than to standard.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Miseph]

Unless, and this is a distinct possibility for many web sites, IE is only a compatibility outlier while everything else is a use outlier.

If 90% of your users are using one browser, then it kind of makes sense to test in it first, no matter how much of a dog it is.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[jeiler]

No way in hell I'm going to call you a loser--you were writing to the market.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Jugalator]

I know, I know, it's almost too little, too late IMO, it's maybe "too little" given that they still won't support Acid 3 in the final IE 8 release, but I wouldn't call it too late. It's never too late to me to improve standards support like this. It's very late though, yes, definitely.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[cp.tar]

Yes, it is a very good move.

The question is, how much good will it do them?

My estimate is that the mere fact that they were willing to change their usual policy to that extent shows how much weaker their market position has become.
Most new sites, as far as I've noticed, are coded to standards. Most of the others are no longer "Best viewed under IE 6.0" either. Firefox holds about 25% of the global browser marketshare, and over 40% in certain European countries.
Microsoft did not switch to standards because of the goodness of their software-making hearts. They did it because there is no longer any other game in town.

Of course, that does not mean they will not try to subvert standards at some later date, when they have stopped bleeding users and maybe even regained some markertshare. But for now, standards are of utmost importance -- without them, they know they will continue bleeding users to other browsers.

It has to mean something when you have the OS monopoly, when you've used it to gain browser monopoly, and now you're still losing.
I welcome Microsoft's new strategy because it will not help only Microsoft, but also all the others. Unless, of course, people fail to update their sites and Microsoft remains the only browser capable of rendering them. But they are in a minority.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[milsoRgen]

I had IE8 in use for some time. I installed it for no particular reason and didn't really notice any particular difference (not that I was truly looking for any truth be told, it was just shiny and new). It ran reasonably fast, memory consumption wasn't wildly different from previous incarnations, pages displayed roughly the same as with any modern browser. No crashes... So yeah, not much to talk about from an end use experience. Although it should be noted FF is my primary browser so my actual use was limited to sites that were broken under anything but IE or when a program needed it's rendering engine.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Jugalator]

I have to admit that's the wrong attitude on my part. According to me -- not really. If the end users only care about is "does it look good" (something I agree with you about), then this would be the right move, because inter-browser standards compliance is a requirement for that to happen for more than a specific target group. Especially now that Firefox has consumed around 15-20% of the market according to a number of analyst firms; that's nothing to sneeze at.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[livewire98801]

I ditched Windows for similar reasons. Besides "Genuine Advantage", I've had pathces with bugs in them destroy other parts of my system and revert back to using MS apps that I'd previously disabled. I'm now Windows-free, and have never looked back since.

Microsoft must have the worst QA program in history. I'm just glad I don't have to maintain their servers anymore.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Anonymous Coward]

Dang, I didn't realize FF 3 had shipped already. Take a week's vacation and come back and FF 3 is already a fine browser.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Snover]

I strongly disagree. Unless you want to end up having to do like this article suggests and make a bunch of changes every time a new browser comes out (and maybe you do -- I bet it's good for business), it makes much more sense to test against something that you know adheres to defined standards and then doing minor fixups for IE at the end.

If you're writing and testing against IE, and you write a line of CSS that doesn't do what you expect and change it to make it work, but the reason it wasn't working isn't because you wrote it wrong but because IE calculates some dimensions incorrectly (read: hasLayout), then when you get around to testing it in everything else (and by "everything else" I mean "Firefox", since this is what the IE-first crowd seems to think means "everything else") it's broken. Now compound this issue 20 times, because there are 20 distinct things in the CSS that cause IE to fuck up. Maybe there are also some combinations of things that trigger a bug. So now, instead of writing hacks to work around IE's brokenness, you are writing hacks and sending different code conditionally to "work around" the browsers that are rendering it properly. Suddenly, when IE8 comes around and fixes the bugs you're relying on in IE, you've got a broken Web site again. It's just a bad idea, and getting things working across all the other browsers, frankly, takes a mere fraction of the time it does to get things touched up properly for IE.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[epsy]

as long as they support most of acid2 and AddEventListener(), i'm happy the lack of AddEventListener() made simple things quite complicated because you had each time to check if you were on IE or not, then use IE's way if needed

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[capnkr]

Based on what I've seen in my logs the past few years, the 90% figure for IE share in browsers is no longer accurate at all, and in fact hasn't been for some time. Firefox broke those numbers a couple years ago, and continues to gain share. Currently I'd put Firefox use at about 30-35% of what I'm seeing being used by "regular folks", or non-techs.

Because I felt that it was the Right Thing to do, I've always coded for standards compliant browsers first, and hacked it to work for IE later. So with this announcement by MS, it's interesting and ironically funny to me that it a move by MS (albeit after many years of loud public complaining by web devs) is going to for once make me work *less* than those who code for IE only. :)

I never thought I'd say this (and reserve the right to take back this statement until I've seen that IE8 *really* does have compliance to W3 standards when it's released), but, well, here it is: Good job, MS IE Team!

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this really the first post? Microsoft did the right thing, and I think everyone on /. knows that. Couldn't you at least wait for one negative comment, or is this a preemptive strike?

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[zlogic]

Actually, pre-IE7 versions had a broken HTTP implementation. Not only do they fail to render pages properly, but they can't even ask the server nicely to get them :-) Apache even has a special mode in its HTTP Digest authentication module that enters an IE-quirks mode (tm) when the browser-agent is IE6 or less.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Anonymous Coward]

How much of the refactoring of IE for standards compliance really has more to do with a new/signifcantly changed rendering/layout engine?

How many instances of fixing ones site will ultimately really be due to a change in interpretation of rendering behavior rather than correction of an instance lacking adherence to spec?

For anyone who has actually bothered to try beta 1 its really quite bad and broken in a lot of ways and it would be pointless for anyone to take the ie8 b1 mode output with anything but a grain of salt.

In any spec as vast as the multitude of html and css publications there will always be corner cases that go undefined and there will always be differences rendering between browsers even if they all were to magically comply 100% with published specs.

Its ususally not that difficult to find a way to write style sheets or html that work with both versions without having to resort to checking browser versions. As a practical matter anyone bashing IEs abysmal adherence to spec must also bash the firefox -moz-* extensions and its own shortcommings in this department.

In the history of the WWW there has never been an excuse for a new browser version to break backwards compatibility with old sites on a large scale. I have a hard time believing the final product after enough bugs are shaken out of it will be any different.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[hackstraw]

I know, I know, it's almost too little, too late, but it's better than nothing and as long as this trend continues, at least we might have a decent amount of cross-browser standards in a few years time, as opposed to none if Microsoft simply hadn't bothered.

Kinda like the guy coming to his senses and complying now that a gun is at his head.

Face it, as much as MS has tried to "own" the web, open standards and competition (mostly from open source projects), has figuratively put the gun to their head.

I sure don't miss the day when webistes told me I needed to be running a certain version of windows with a certain version of IE with a certain window dimension.

Next step towards standards is more "media rich" content. W3C is working on this standard, and hopefully this will clear up the muddied waters with WMV, Flash, QuickTime, Java, SilverLIght, et al.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[jonaskoelker]

Especially now that Firefox has consumed around 15-20% of the market according to a number of analyst firms; that's nothing to sneeze at. Consider this tidbit: the danish IT- and telecomunnications comittee ("It- og telestyrelsen") considers 25% a strong market presence, subject to regulation. I know, browsers != copper wires, but it puts the figure into some kind of perspective.

I don't suggest regulating firefox, it is the small competitor; this in fact a rather sad statement about the market for browsers, but good on firefox :)

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[jonaskoelker]

Here's an idea:

Write a standards-adherent CSS, and check that it works in firefox, konqueror, safari, elinks and $BROWSER. Then, write a completely different CSS stylesheet for IE. Make apache return one or the other, depending on the user-agent string. Any reasons why this would be infeasible?

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[truthsearch]

IE7 is still not HTTP 1.1 compliant. Just last week I found (again) that a tab after "Content-Type:" in a response header causes the line to be ignored. So XML from a server, for example, is not interpreted as XML. I checked the RFC and any linear white space, including tabs, is supposed to be allowed.

The same HTTP header is interpreted correctly in Firefox and Safari, of course.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[thetoadwarrior]

Design for stanards and then use IE conditional tags to cater to IE users. Then all you'd have to do is remove the IE specific files and conditional comments.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[aliquis]

To put it short form my perspective: Hurray for Microsoft!

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[hedwards]

Flash tends to be a real pain. Especially for ads, it loads slowly, crashes often and frequently keeps me from viewing the page because flash has started eating up all my resources.

With the speed of my connection, most sites should pop up almost instantly. Or have the common decency to be long in loading due to the content I am looking for.

(And while we are at it, can web browsers not employ things like that broken ff quick search? I get that it can be useful, but why can't it be turned off in a reasonable fashion. These things do run amok sometimes) Having to put searchkeys.disable.all and hope it works is definitely not an acceptable work around for a poorly designed feature breaking randomly.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[quacking duck]

That's the exact rationalization I have to fight my supervisor on every now and again. He has this irrational hate on for Firefox (my primary dev browser), and has said that if it were up to him he'd force me to only develop on IE, even though I test on IE7 and IE6 afterwards to ensure they don't screw up on perfectly valid code.

I finally not-so-subtly threatened to go somewhere else if this ever happened. It's a small organization, so while I'm not irreplaceable, it definitely wouldn't be worth losing me over such a small issue, since web dev is the least complex of my responsibilities.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Kjella]

As a user, I often care whether a site is easy to navigate and has a decent structure. Which has very little to do with compliance, you can design a spec-compliant clusterfuck and a non-compliant userfriendly site because browsers liberally interpret a bit, some tags normal users never see and so on.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[maxume]

It has at least as much to do with standards compliance as the "Does it look good" in the post I replied to (and accessibility is probably more important than shiny to most standards folks)

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[ptlis]

The user-agent string is not a reliable indicator of which user-agent is being used (as counter-intuitive as this seems), a much better methodology (that several other people have already mentioned) is to use IE conditional comments to serve additional stylesheets to specific versions of Internet Explorer after the main stylesheet to override only the specific rules required to get that version of internet explorer to display the content as expected.

This has several advantages:

• the ability to have different rules to handle bugs in specific versions of IE.
• if future versions are released then they'll ignore the stylesheets targeted at older versions (so if IE8 is as good as it's been made out to be your documents should render correctly without any additional work)...
• and if there are still some some small bugs then IE8 can itself get a stylesheet designed to fix just these.
• unlike methods that rely on the UA string, it is guaranteed only to be applied by the browser you specify (because browsers other than IE see the conditional comments as just plain old HTML comments (relying on the UA string would mean that UAs pretending to be IE would not be incorrectly served the IE hack filled stylesheet)

This is the methodology I prefer to follow with the sites that I develop, and after the experiences I had testing compatibility and fixing various layout problems that remained in IE7 I can say that it definitely pays off. Personally I'm hoping that IE8 will be close enough that I can finally dump IE conditional comments entirely once the older versions have disappeared and relegate it to the pile of no-longer relevant skills alongside the ability to generate pixel perfect layouts using tables & invisible spacer gifs and the ability to consistently beat almost anyone at Perfect Dark multiplayer.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[colmore]

This is why I quit webdev.

Developers were right to code to IE -- it's where the customers are. And they might have been right to ignore other browsers (at least at the time) if they only had so much time and had a deadline etc.

The Web seems to run in place. While the experience of using it does change gradually. There's some brand frikkin new technology showing up every six months that you're expected to learn.

I'm going to grad school and I think I'm going to wind up programming microcontrollers. Fun technical challenges, stationary target. Probably as close as you can get to being a 70s mainframe dev.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[riceboy50]

One needn't rely on the UA. IE has the ability to load version-specific stylesheets merely from coding a conditional comment in the markup.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[BenoitRen]

That's all fine and dandy if you Server-Side Includes for your link tags or use PHP to generate your pages. But if you don't, it means changing all the HTML pages you have every time to insert/change/remove those IE conditional HTML comments. In light of that, CSS hacks make more sense.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[jack455]

I don't think someone dual-booting ubuntu accidentally manually changed his default browser and possibly that browser's home page (it wasn't explicitly stated that igoog was the default homepage for ie). As a MS sysadmin I have seen this behavior or something similar I think. At any rate it's never happened to me in Linux.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[binary paladin]

Loser.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[tehBoris]

What? Is it 1998 or something? There are these things called 'Cascading Style Sheets' which allow you to apply a style to an (X)HTML document.

They actually save bandwith, because everything is written only once (instead of putting font tags everywhere in the HTML, like in the Old Days) and you can use a single file (and thus, download) for all the documents in a domain.

If 'good looking' sites are slow for you, it is probably because of poor browser choice. It should both render fast and reliably on your hardware AND let you set a style to be used on all web pages, if their 'bullshit' degrades your browsing experience.

Now, of course, there are asshats who make their entire websites in Flash. I personally think they should all die in a well, but that's just me :)

(BTW, Firefox has this nifty extension called Flashblock, it blocks Flash! don't know about Java, I never see that any more)

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[mwolfe38]

IE conditional comments are a pain in the ass to maintain. And writing them is ugly as hell. You've got to understand what ie treats as a comment and what it doesnt, and which version that is targeting since the format changes.
I suppose if you do it on a regular basis it is simple, but they really don't need to be used except in very rare situations.
What we do is the same or similar as already mentioned. Define all your styles in base stylesheets.. Don't hack anything in them at all. Try and get IE working perfectly with just these but if thats not possible, use the same name stylesheet as your normal one with -ie.css concatenated (so base.css becomes base-ie.css), and then if you are using something like jsp and you can include a special tag, write a stylsheet tag that will inspect the user agent string and if it included ie6 then import the IE stysleet (along with the regular one). In that stylsheet just overwrite/add styles to fix the problems.
We only use this to give IE 6 a different stylesheet, IE 7 gets the same thing as all other browsers.. If we have to we'll include a conditional comment in the header to target IE7 but so far I think we've only had to do that once in the past year where I've been employed. And as for IE 5 or less compliance, if you are still using that trash, your experience should be as painful as possible.
Oh.. and to think you can't rely on the user agent string is a bit silly in this case. If the user has IE 6 they surely haven't changed his or her user agent string because they obviously know nothing about web browsers. If they are using firefox or opera and claiming to be IE 6, then you've got a slight problem, except that they probably know how to switch it back and get the site working correctly.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Anonymous Coward]

As much as I agree with that method (it's what I do), there's one huge problem with it - IE8's super-standards mode has a completely different set of correctly implemented CSS than do Firefox, Opera and Safari, and a completely different set of correctly implemented CSS than IE 7 does.

In other words, it's quite possible to write a fully standards-compliant site that works in all other major browsers, with no IE 6 / IE 7 hacks, and it still won't work properly in IE 8. Simple things, like fonts being all wrong, or in some cases actually getting some basic CSS wrong that even IE 6 got right.

Granted, that was only from IE 8 Beta 1, and the layout engine wasn't finished. We'll have to see if they've picked their game up a bit for Beta 2.

For a new site, I don't see it being a problem. Just make sure you stick to the common subset of Firefox, Opera, Safari, and IE 8, then hack for IE 7 and IE 6, just like before. It's just existing pages that don't take IE 8 into account that could cause problems. Might need to do some hacking for IE 8 in that case.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[bishiraver]

Yeah, if they didn't know what the hell they were doing. For a long time (since IE5 I think) you have been able to use conditional comments to include special IE override stylesheets. This completely takes care of a) making sure your site doesn't dump to quirks mode because you're using IE css parsing error hacks and b) making sure your site looks right in all the major browsers. Not only can you say "IE, parse this code but everyone else ignore it because it looks just like a regular html comment," you can say "IE 6? yeah, you parse this. IE7? Ignore it and parse this instead."

It's a little bit of extra work but it saves so much in headaches that it's not even funny. Oh, yeah, and it's certain to make your site futuresafe. Why the heck don't more people use them? I don't know. Maybe it's an awareness issue; maybe it' s a laziness issue.

It's still "coding around the issue," but it's the safest way to do so. And typically that file will be less than 1kb anyway.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[BasharTeg]

First of all, most statistics I've seen for Firefox browser usage are about as over-inflated as some peoples' Mac statistics or Linux-desktop statistics. Most Firefox fans like to pull their statistics from w3c or other standards sites, or from Slashdot and other pro-OSS or related sites. Obviously these numbers are ridiculously skewed because the people visiting these sites are going to be more aware of standards issues. If you look at stats from marketing and advertising sources, which tend to have a wider perspective of the net, you see that Firefox typically comes in around 18% of the browser market share. No disrespect to Firefox, because it's amazing they've acquired as much market share as they have in the Windows/IE dominated world, but overstating the statistics just comes off as desperate to validate your perspective.

Safari is insignificant, even with their bullshit bundling tactics. You can use these same marketing and advertising statistics to knock down the hugely overstated "Apple revolution" we're in the middle of, with their grand ~7% market share.

Oh, and back to desperate to validate your perspective, with IE holding 73% of the market share, and Firefox holding 18% of the market share, and Safari holding 6% of the market share, to make a statement like "and now you're still losing" is just ridiculous. Holding 73% of the browser market share isn't "losing", it's just "winning less". And if you look at the Firefox versus IE numbers, Firefox's growth against IE has started to simmer down. They had a big boom towards the end of 2007, but the installing Firefox trend seems to have burned itself out and FF growth has gone back to the slower trickle that it was before the boom started. If you look at the number objectively, that's the reality of the situation.

*** BTW if anyone who works for or is associated with Firefox is reading this, can we get some protected mode under Vista please? It's about what benefits the user, not what beef you have with Microsoft/Vista. I know you'd feel sick at the idea of a Firefox exploit that works on every platform but Vista, but deal with it, get over it, and do what's right for the consumer. As a front-line internet program that people are supposed to trust, the fact that you guys don't take full advantage of DEP, ASLR, and Protected Mode doesn't exactly impress. I'd expect you to take advantage of the same features on Linux and OSX too, if they offered them. Quit picking sides in the OS war and go that extra mile to support your users. ***

Just like the fantasy land the Apple fanbois are living in with their 7.8% market share, versus Windows having a 91% market share. All the witty commercials on earth can't change the fact that you hold less than ***10%*** of the PC market, despite having an arguably superior product and a fairly heavy marketing campaign. But at least Apple has some consumer appeal. Firefox? Most people don't give a damn about installing "another" browser. Their computer has IE, so they use IE. End of story.

Disclaimer: I'm shopping for MacBook Pros and I have no beef with Firefox, just with people who look at the situation through a magic lens that makes the world look like they want it to look.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[BorgDrone]

I know, I know, it's almost too little, too late, but it's better than nothing and as long as this trend continues They better have IE8 up to at least the same level of standards support as Gecko/WebKit. If they don't all they have done is create yet another 'special case' browser we have to support.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Anonymous Coward]

Well now it won't work for you in IE8 any more...
lol
you will have to learn the whole shebang now.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[gronofer]

Agreed. I will admit that I have remarkably little sympathy for those who have to reconfig their sites to standards, If only it was true that anyone would be forced to reconfig to standards. I think what Microsoft is actually suggesting is that they can simply add a meta tag and carry on as before.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Anonymous Coward]

I totally agree. Thank you MS for actually listening.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Keeper Of Keys]

write a completely different CSS stylesheet for IE. Or none :-P

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[hvm2hvm]

The html code is usually a very small part compared to all the crap the browser needs to download for displaying ads and unnecessary images on the page.

I'm not saying CSS is bad, it's great, all the sites should use them but it's not enough for me. I'm using Firefox with flashblock and adblock so I don't have much problems.

What I wanted to say is that it shouldn't be necessary to opt-out the surplus of data. And like you said there are some sites that require tons of javascript to work, or that are made entirely of a big flash horror, etc.

People should tell those second hand webdesigners that they usually don't care about 'design' or that they'd rather have a less fancy but more functional page than a bloated eye-candy flash/javascript page.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[walshy007]

Funnyily enough I agree with all of your post except the ***

For starters "DEP" known to the rest of the world as the NX bit, has been supported in linux kernels since 2004, now this should not require any code changes at all to utilize. The kernel handles memory protection, and when the binary is loaded I'd imagine everything in .data and .bss should be protected, aswell as every malloc.

now, on to ASLR, since linux 2.6.12 it's on by default, and also, requires no special code, it just works, as it should (and hopefully does) do on vista.

now onto vista 'protected mode', essentially this reduces the privilege level, awesome, now windows isn't running it's browser as root essentially, but every decent windows person should have a restricted personal account themselves in which they do things regardless, making it moot, and nobody sane in linux does everything as root.

as said, I agree with the rest of your post, but the *** part makes you sound like you listen to too much microsoft advertising, the people who code firefox are smart, don't bash them without looking into things.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Red Flayer]

It's only "blackbox" if the results cannot be differentiated from another browser/platform.

No, that is not what blackbox means. Blackbox is when the user sees only input and output. (Input: www.somewebsite.com; output: rendered page). A large portion of users are not even aware of alternatives to IE.

As it stands, by your own arguments, that means web developers should be writing to IE's peculiarities rather than to standard.

No, it means that web developers should be writing to both, which is the current situation. And yet if IE 8 is released with a standards-compliant setup, why bother?

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

I think it's mostly a matter of awareness. Not to say that a bit of due diligence wouldn't have uncovered it...

Another big problem is corporate intranets. When people are creating for a captive audience, standard are often never considered.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[BenoitRen]

This is the first time I hear of this. Where can I find more information about IE's flawed HTTP implementation?

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[zlogic]

Here's the example I've mentioned: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_auth_digest.html
The interesting part is under the "Working with MS Internet Explorer" header.
I've seen the source code for that module and it's a bug that uses the wrong URI when generating a response. Not completely broken (and only a few servers use digest authentication), but since it's dealing with MD5 hashes the thing wouldn't work at all if Apache didn't introduce the hack.

just one question

[Tastecicles]

which set of standards? Microsofts?

Let's Bash Microsoft!

[h4rm0ny]

So basically, Microsoft, listened to their customers, went with the better default mode (and it is better that they do this), and the Slashdot article ends with "But it makes more work for administrators - boo!"

*sigh

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Macthorpe]

I would have summarised like this:

- IE7 not standards compliant
- Slashdot posts article complaining
- IE8 standards compliant but not by default
- Slashdot posts article complaining
- IE8 standards compliant by default
- Slashdot... posts article complaining

I can only echo your sighing...

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[EvilMonkeySlayer]

I think the complaint isn't so much that they're implementing a proper standards mode, more the fact that it has taken so long for them to do this.

People kept getting peeved off expecting Microsoft to start implementing some proper standard support (something which was expected of them in IE7) and then getting annoyed when they do a half hearted attempt at it.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[FooAtWFU]

That's only because Slashdot has both Complainers and Non-Complainers on any given topic, and the Complainers are the ones who enjoy posting most. So they do.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[espiesp]

Whaaaaaaa!!!

You said it! Job security sure does suck, doesn't it?

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

I can only echo your sighing... Get a room guys!

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[cyfer2000]

1. X1.0 (X=mozilla, firefox, opera, office, openoffice.org, macbook, macbook air, X300...) is not whatever.
2. Slashdot posts article complaining
3. X1.5 is better
4. Slashdot posts article complaining
5. X2.0 is even better
6. Slashdot... posts article complaining

You must be new here.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[mounthood]

Let me fix that for you:

[Microsoft screws Web development community]
- IE7 not standards compliant
- Slashdot posts article complaining

[Microsoft planning to continue screwing Web development community]
- IE8 standards compliant but not by default
- Slashdot posts article complaining

[Microsoft screws developers who trusted them]
- IE8 standards compliant by default
- Slashdot... posts article complaining Maybe after Microsoft stops screwing up, and the damage is repaired, developers will stop complaining. I won't be holding my breath.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[pete-classic]

I'm not defending the summary, but it is worth remembering that Microsoft actively undermined web standards for the last decade or so. It is laudable that they are finally getting on board with the program, but the reason these sites need to be re-worked is that Microsoft intentionally archived and maintained browser dominance with their own "take" on how web standards should work.

I don't see any reason they shouldn't shoulder the blame for the cleanup costs.

-Peter

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[FishWithAHammer]

Wow, Microsoft just can't win with retards like you. I don't assume good faith with Microsoft, but I give them credit for trying to unfuck themselves.

Fucking morons...

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot the last step - an army of slashbots chanting "we're all different." In unison. Ironic, ain't it?

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[poetmatt]

I agree.

Especially since people were kicking and screaming over the fact that Microtard needed to be standards compliant from when IE8 dev began...I remember the posts where people were like "you need to be standards compliant" and MS was like "well, you have the option, thats good enough".

Something is way wrong (which is obvious with MS) if it takes a huge company months to decide to listen to their customers/employees/etc.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

That only means there's always something to complain about.

Darn universal truths.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[bigstrat2003]

...and it is better that they do this... No it isn't. This is going to make half the Web break in IE8. The smart thing to do was what they did originally: default to legacy IE mode, and allow site developers to put a meta tag in to force standards mode. Then, some number of years down the road, when the majority of people were running sites that were standards-compliant (with or without the special meta tag), IE could've defaulted to standards mode. It's called phasing out old stuff, which is something you have to do when the old behavior is so widespread.

Microsoft caved in to the complaints of people who don't give a damn about breaking functionality for the majority of users, and they're a bunch of retards for doing so.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Znork]

The summary is much improved if you shorten it a bit:

"Over the years of IE's dominance as the leading browser, designers regularly tweaked their sites to get the best possible accuracy in rendering pages in IE" ... "That, unfortunately, will mean work for site administrators."

*shrug* I guess the whole 'standards' thing is something every generation has to learn on its own. Those of us who've been in the industry for 20 years know that proprietary means you do it again, and again, and again...

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[bunratty]

IE 8 is still not going to support standards well. It will simply do as well as it can by default. Previously, IE 8 would render pages as badly as IE 7 by default. Now it will render them as well as IE 8 can by default. IE 8 is still going to be far behind Firefox 3.0, Safari 3.1, and Opera 9.5 in standards support.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Slashdot Suxxors]

Maybe after Microsoft stops screwing up, and the damage is repaired, developers will stop complaining. I won't be holding my breath.

What damage? More work for administrators? Maybe if the administrators focused on coding compliant webpages instead of catering to the retards that still use IE6 it wouldn't be as drastic as some people are trying to make it out to be.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[ConceptJunkie]

Well the complaining comes from people who code for IE, who always pay the price for every stupid thing Microsoft has ever done. Maybe MS is doing the right thing finally, but customers will once again have to pay the price to correct all the bad things they did to get it to work with the broken prior versions of IE. Incompetence is not the biggest problem with Microsoft. Their utter contempt for customers is.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[bunratty]

Why doesn't half the web break with all the other browsers when they are updated? I don't remember Firefox users complaining that Firefox 2 broke half the web. I don't remember Safari users complaining that Safari 3 broke half the web. I don't remember Opera users complaining that Opera 9 broke half the web. Why would IE users complain that IE 8 breaks half the web? You don't mean Microsoft has been doing something wrong for the past several years to bring this about, do you?

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[dal20402]

retards that still use IE6

Not everyone who uses IE6 does so by choice. The admins at my last workplace refuse to upgrade, install an alternate browser, or allow users to install an alternate browser.

From a user perspective, the best thing about Microsoft's decision in IE8 is that it will force IT admins to phase out IE6 as sites increasingly stop working with IE6.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Tacvek]

That is true, but many of the more nasty CSS bugs, which are a source of many (but definitely not all) of the IE specific workarounds should probably be fixed, since apparently IE 8 does pass Acid 2.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[bigstrat2003]

And? What's your point? So, Microsoft should've been doing better in the past. That is entirely immaterial now. What matters is, moving forward while breaking as little as possible... which is NOT what Microsoft is doing.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Blakey Rat]

This is all idiocy anyway.

IE has now fallen under the same spell that the rest of the web standards community has fallen under, namely, the illusion that old web sites will be upgraded for newer browser. Here's a hint, W3C, Mozilla, and now Microsoft: They won't.

Large commercial websites (for example, this one: http://www.jcpenney.com/jcp/default.aspx ) are coded using the 1998 method of lots of tables and hardly any CSS. And that's a page that's:
1) Been updated every single day for the last 5 years at least
2) Could have massive, massive bandwidth and render-time savings if they switched the layout.

And that's one site. And that's just one site that's actually maintained. There are thousands of others, still written using the same methods. Many of those are entirely orphaned or unmaintained. Many of those contain critical information that you can't get on any other sites.

Any web standard that isn't written with this in mind (for example, XHTML) will fail. It'll just be one more standard for browsers to support until the end of time, until browsers are so bloated it takes twenty minutes to render Yahoo.com.

People on this site who hate Microsoft actually should be applauding this decision, since users upgrading to IE8 will simply think IE8 is fundamentally broken. Of course, the tears'll start flowing when Firefox, Safari, Opera, and all the browsers Slashdotters like have the same problem. My personal guess is that Microsoft isn't going to let this happen, and they'll make super-strict mode off by default.

IMHO, the HTML 5 spec is a move in the right direction. We all agree that web standards suck, but whatever we do, we need to ensure backwards compatibility.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[h4rm0ny]

And similarly I'm not forgetting what Microsoft have done, I'm just condemning the summary. ;)

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Omnedon]

The smart thing to do was what they did originally: default to legacy IE mode, and allow site developers to put a meta tag in to force standards mode.
No, the smart thing to do would have been to NOT fork off their own version of M$slHTML. And "allowing" site developers to put in a meta tag to indicate that the site is standards compliant, is NOT, in and of itself, standards compliant. Doing it that way merely shifts the burden from devs with legacy IE compliant pages to devs with standards compliant pages. There is no way to escape having some group of web devs or another getting an extra ton of work dropped on them.

M$slHTML = Microsoft (somewhat like) HTML

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[bigstrat2003]

It's not true standards compliance, but it's what we call an "intermediary step". The idea is that the meta tag gets put in sites which are in active development, where one tag isn't going to make any difference in the workload anyway. Sites which are already broken will stay broken, sites which are already working will stay working, but it improves the situation for NEW sites, without any real amount of work.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[bunratty]

Other browsers weren't doing as well in the past, either. Yet somehow they've managed to keep up to the new standards. Why can Microsoft simply support the new standards? Why not stop making excuses and finally just support the standards as well as the other browsers already? If they screwed up in the past, they should admit so and make up for their screwup. They shouldn't force us to live year after year with the mistakes of the past. Why can't MS fix them once and for all and be done with it? My point is that's why we're bashing Microsoft, not because we take perverse pleasure in saying rotten things about them.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[daliman]

Still your voice of reason and common sense, you're killing a good argument before it gets going!

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[thue]

The web developers will have 6 months to insert

<eta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />

on their pages. Nothing else is needed to ensure their pages will continue working in the new IE. If they can't be bothered to do that then I don't care if their pages break...

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Metasquares]

Not to mention that the mere release of IE8 should be enough to attenuate IE6 support, since many web developers code for the latest n browser versions. For me, n=2, and I for one look forward to abandoning IE6 when IE8 is released.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Just Some Guy]

It's called phasing out old stuff, which is something you have to do when the old behavior is so widespread.

Webmasters have been phasing in standards for most of the last of the decade. The ones that haven't? Screw 'em. Seriously. Anyone so incompetent and misinformed that this is a surprise needs the cluebat application which they are about to receive.

The only ones I feel sorry for are the people who've had to maintain essentially two sites: the defective one for IE, and the good one for everyone else. At least this beta beta will give them time to update their browser checks so that they can serve the appropriate site to IE8.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

And that, folks, is why the people who aren't complaining keep quiet ;)

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[bigpicture]

The steering wheels in cars are circular in shape. That is an automotive industry standard. They make millions of cars with this functionality standard. In the past there were attempts to make these steering wheels various non-circular shapes, that were stylish and "look good" sexy. But in the end there seems to be consensus on a circular shape standard. Why? Because in comparison to all other considered design options, and for general public usage application, this standard works best. Why? Because the user mostly doesn't notice it when operating a vehicle, which is the way all standards should be, and should be applied.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Pjerky]

Wow, so what your saying is make IE work like usually so that the majority of developers who cater to IE bugs and workarounds have no motivation at all to change their code to standards compliant code. Instead that change wouldn't come until another 5 to 8 years down the road when they are forced to do it. That is a horrible way to approach the problem.

The thing you need to remember is that their is still a majority of IE users that use IE6. In another few years that will shift to IE7, during which all the sudden, huh, developers will ease into moving to standards compliance in preparation for a large-scale adoption of IE8 and BAM, there is your phasing out time. Wow, its amazing how consumer adoption patterns takes care of that for us isn't it?

If we did it your way we would still have to wait another 6 to 8 years before those IE-hugging developers start getting off their rears to adopt standards. Thus keeping us stuck in a dark age of frustration and incompatibility that much longer.

So your a retard for not thinking this stuff through... and you have lost your speaking privileges!

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[t0y]

The site is in quirks mode. It'll still work.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

And though you might not be a retard, your IT admins surely are. The statement stands.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Blakey Rat]

The change in IE8 is that there is no "quirks mode." It always renders in "super-standards" mode, and then has a button on the toolbar to switch to IE7-style quirks mode rendering. The user has to specifically recognize that the page renders wrong, and tell the browser to render it the old way. That's exactly the issue here, and why IE8 breaks damn near every page on the web.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Quiet_Desperation]

Be fair, though. It took a *LOT* of complaining to drag MS kicking and screaming into standards compliance. We can hardly let our guard drop now.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[jalefkowit]

If moving to IE8 is going to "break" your site, it's already "broken" for anybody who views it in any browser other than IE. That's about 20% of the browsing population (and more every day).

If I was a corporation and my web development team had been shipping a site that flat didn't work for 1/5 of my customers, I'd have fired them long before this.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[spitzak]

That is a quote from the article, not a Slashdot addition.

And I certainly did not read it as "bash Microsoft". I read it as "bash those people who forced Microsoft to default to standards because they made all you web developers have to do more work".

Microsoft is clearly, finally, doing the right thing. And I think that sentence is from somebody mad that their beloved Microsoft is being forced to do the right thing and is making up reasons why this is bad.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[robotbebop]

It'll be more work in the short term, but it'll save hundreds of hours of fixing sites for IE6, so I'm happy. The day I never hear "it's broke in IE6" will be the happiest fucking day of my life.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[SirLurksAlot]

Why can Microsoft simply support the new standards?

Because it's not that simple. You have to remember, they have a whole business model built around keeping a large customer base which they've been building for almost 20 years happy. There are companies out there that have built their entire infrastructure on MS products, namely IE, and for MS to "simply support the new standards" means breaking (lots) of old functionality. That translates into actual dollar amounts when it comes time to fix all the old web applications out there that rely on the borked functionality that $_IE_VERSION <= 7 provided. In other words, this is going to cost a lot of companies a lot of money. To make it even worse for MS once IE supports the standards it means that lots of corporate sites will render correctly in a variety of browsers, giving people even less reason to use IE. This is a lose/lose situation for MS.

Why can't MS fix them once and for all and be done with it?

The response you've given makes perfect sense from a consumer point of view. "WTF mate, how hard can it be!?" exclaims the user who doesn't have to pay for or worry about implementing the changes. Now, having said that I have zero pity for all those businesses who were duped into vendor lock-in and are going to be in a world of pain if they don't get their sites up to spec, and I have zero pity for MS. They have well and truly made their own bed and they can certainly sleep in it.

If they screwed up in the past, they should admit so and make up for their screwup.

They are. That's why IE is going to support the standards by default. I'm not sure what you're looking for here, although I suspect a good many people want a blood sacrifice and sworn oaths to never put web developers in this position again.

My point is that's why we're bashing Microsoft, not because we take perverse pleasure in saying rotten things about them.

Oh come on, of course we take perverse pleasure in saying rotten things about them ;-)

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

that's only an eta, mind you

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is going to cause even more problems when designing web pages. Now, IE has even more modes to target.

I've been testing my sites in IE8 and have noticed a number of issues with beta 1 that do not exist in Firefox 3 RC1, Safari 3.1, or Opera 9.5b2.

"Standards" support in IE8 is not all it seems to be. Microsoft has a long way to go with IE8. I just hope beta 2 fixes a lot of the rendering issues that beta 1 introduced.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[rrohbeck]

You can simplify that:
- Microsoft does/announces anything
- Slashdot posts article complaining

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

My site runs exactly the same in all major browsers, IE, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. There are no rendering issues on any of the browsers I support.

When IE8 beta 1 came out I downloaded it to test my site, and things were broken in IE8 that no other browser had issues with.

IE8 is gong to break sites, regardless of standards conformance. I've sent a bug report to Microsoft for my site in hopes that they'll fix some bugs. I'm hoping that beta 2 will have rendering improvements.

All other browsers have now reach the point where they can compete to make the most efficient rendering engine that can conform to even more standards (the race to pass Acid 3 is a great example of this.) I'm hoping Microsoft will attempt to get to this level with IE8 by its final release.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Hal_Porter]

Why though? Why not default to assuming sites haven't been updated. That way all the old sites work.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[t0y]

I doubt it. The page runs in quirks mode in firefox, IE6 and IE7. The triggers for this mode are already well-defined and adopted by all major browsers. They won't need any effort to keep them working.

The difference that IE8 will bring is that it'll keep the standards mode as default just like firefox does, instead of creating another set of triggers for real standards mode like they were planning to do. Their warnings about having pages breaking all over the place comes from the fact that they know pages written specifically for IE6/IE7 "standards mode" will stop working once they start implementing them properly.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

Quick, which was more standards-compliant? IE 6 or its rival NS 6?

If you picked the former, you're right. The problem with Microsoft is not that it isn't standards-compliant, but that it failed to sufficiently innovate following the end of the first browser wars. IE 7 was a step in the right direction, albeit one that left it in an awkward position. IE 8, though, should be standards-compliant, at least as much so as FF 2. IIRC, hasLayout is being ripped out in IE 8 which should fix many of the more aggravating problems.

Also, at least in the last two or three years, MS has not been actively undermining standards in the CSS realm. Some IE developers are regular posters on the public CSS mailing list, and it's not to complain about some standard or another. Granted, they haven't communicated in large numbers on the WHATWG lists, but I'm sure they're more interested in getting current impls up to scratch instead of designing the future of the HTML specification.

I have also heard anecdotes that standards-compatibility was put on the back-burner for some time to fix more glaring issues (like security holes).

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, it's almost as if there were multiple people posting on Slashdot, all with different opinions! WTF.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[bytta]

Not everyone who uses IE6 does so by choice. The admins at my last workplace refuse to upgrade, install an alternate browser, or allow users to install an alternate browser.

Ever heard of portable apps?
Opera and FireFox don't require an install.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[bytta]

Why though? Why not default to assuming sites haven't been updated. That way all the old sites work. That way, there's no reason to stop coding like a retarded monkey.
Forcing users to do things "the right way" will make most of them at least try.

Remember the "C:\Program Files" and "C:\Documents and Settings" folders? In order to use them, programmers had to use long filenames, so support for long filenames was soon implemented in most programs.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Squozen]

- Microsoft exists
- Slashdot complains

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Hal_Porter]

Read this

http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html
The web standards camp seems kind of Trotskyist. You'd think they're the left wing, but if you happened to make a website that claims to conform to web standards but doesn't, the idealists turn into Joe Arpaio, America's Toughest Sheriff. "YOU MADE A MISTAKE AND YOUR WEBSITE SHOULD BREAK. I don't care if 80% of your websites stop working. I'll put you all in jail, where you will wear pink pajamas and eat 15 cent sandwiches and work on a chain gang. And I don't care if the whole county is in jail. The law is the law."

On the other hand, we have the pragmatic, touchy feely, warm and fuzzy engineering types. "Can't we just default to IE7 mode? One line of code ... Zip! Solved!"

Secretly? Here's what I think is going to happen. The IE8 team going to tell everyone that IE8 will use web standards by default, and run a nice long beta during which they beg people to test their pages with IE8 and get them to work. And when they get closer to shipping, and only 32% of the web pages in the world render properly, they'll say, "look guys, we're really sorry, we really wanted IE8 standards mode to be the default, but we can't ship a browser that doesn't work," and they'll revert to the pragmatic decision. Or maybe they won't, because the pragmatists at Microsoft have been out of power for a long time. In which case, IE is going to lose a lot of market share, which would please the idealists to no end, and probably won't decrease Dean Hachamovitch's big year-end bonus by one cent.

And long filenames is different. Win16 applications were still presented with the aliases (C:\PROGAM~1 and C:\DOCUME~1). In fact they still are. Win32 ones weren't. But you needed to recompile (and do a lot of other stuff) to go from Win16 to Win32 anway, the fact that MAX_PATH changed wasn't really noticable.

And older Win32 applications worked on NT which always had long filenames.

They didn't push long filenames onto old applications, because that would have been stupid. Win16 applications could use a special API to get at LFNs, but they had to opt into it, just like web pages should opt into to a standards mode which will break pages that are designed for IE6.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[IntlHarvester]

My guess is that the IE7 crowd will quickly upgrade, while the IE6 people will bitterly hold out for as long as possible.

At least for B2B stuff, I don't expect IE6 usage to drop off the cliff any time soon.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Paiev]

//If client is using Netscape Navigator 3.0 or higher, set the popup window as the focus.

From their site. It's not that surprising that they're still using tables for layouts, they probably fired their dev team about ten years ago.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

The admins at my last workplace refuse to upgrade, install an alternate browser, or allow users to install an alternate browser.

Ever heard of portable apps?

Ever heard of getting fired for running unauthorized software?
The workplace policy is *not* to allow alternate browsers. You're encouraging people to break this policy by using portable apps. So you think it's worth them risking their job in order to run their favourite browser? Asshat.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[poot_rootbeer]

Bloody repeats. Wasn't it only a year or two ago that we went through the following cycle?:

- IE6 not standards compliant
- Slashdot posts article complaining
- IE7 standards compliant but not by default
- Slashdot posts article complaining
- IE7 standards compliant by default
- Slashdot... posts article complaining

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[somethinghollow]

It's hard to feel sorry for any site admin who doesn't do this. If they are using header includes or a template engine or even DreamWeaver templates, it's easy to add. If they aren't and they are running Apache, all they have to do is add a line to their .htaccess files to add the HTTP header. If they don't have either, many text editors support replacing across multiple documents, so replacing <head> with head and the meta tag will make quick work of that.

Unfortunately, it's the users that suffer, not the site administrator. I think The Web Standards Project should start an initiative to get major sites (e.g. banks) that don't have the meta tag that have broken sites to add it for free for the sites. I'd say Microsoft should do it, but WaSP seems to be a bit more agile.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Blakey Rat]

That's my exact point. But... thanks for repeating it.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[TheSunborn]

But he is wrong on 2 counts.

1: The reason that IE6 is so bad at standard complience is not that the ie team made a bad implementation, but that they choose not to implement html and css1+2.1 as specified in the standard. The reason most likely beeing a combination of backward compability, and the thought that their way were better then the standard way. (like guessing, that if the user specifiy a box that is not high enough to contain its content, the box should increase in size, even thoug the standard clearly say that it should overflow. This is not an implementation bug, but a design choice that the ie team made.)

2: All the other browsers have managed to implement html+css in a way that give consistent output and my guess is that if ie8 implements html+css as well as firefox 1.5, then it too will be able to display 99.99% of the web, similary to all the other browsers. The only page I currently know, that only works in internet explorer(And which don't use active X),
is running in quirk mode anyway, so it will keep 'working' in ie8.

One problem that IE8 might encounter, is that some webpages might delivery html/css with workarounds for bugs in ie6 and ie7, but that problem is easy to work around. Microsoft just need to change their browser agent string to something that will not trigger theese.

So here is a challange, nobody have yet solved:
Find 3 webpages that works now in ie6 and ie7, but will give problems if ie8 start in standard complience mode, With an user agent string so different from the existing one that it will not trigger special download.

To qualify a webpage must:
a: Work in ie6 and ie7.

b: Not work in any other browser. And the reason must be due to difference in behavier in html/css handling. Sites that require active-x or special ie plugins will not qualify, as theese will also work in ie8.

c: Have a header, that causes it to be in "standards complience mode" because the quirks mode in ie8 will most like be like the one in ie 6 and 7.

There might be a few pages out there that qualify, I just havent been able to find them, and neither have the ie8 team, but something between 15 and 20% of the internet users now use an non ie browser, and our internet is not broken, and neither will it be, just because ie8 choose to handle the html4 standard, PROVIDED That they make a complete and proper implementation.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Hal_Porter]

So here is a challange, nobody have yet solved:
Find 3 webpages that works now in ie6 and ie7, but will give problems if ie8 start in standard complience mode He has a picture of Google Maps all fubar in IE8. Gmail is broken too, according to this

http://spanring.eu/blog/2008/03/06/no-google-maps-for-ie-8-beta-1/

One problem that IE8 might encounter, is that some webpages might delivery html/css with workarounds for bugs in ie6 and ie7, but that problem is easy to work around. Microsoft just need to change their browser agent string to something that will not trigger theese. The problem is that people detected IE6/7 and served up their rather non standard dialect of HTML. That doesn't work anymore in IE8.

b: Not work in any other browser. And the reason must be due to difference in behavier in html/css handling. Sites that require active-x or special ie plugins will not qualify, as theese will also work in ie8.

c: Have a header, that causes it to be in "standards complience mode" because the quirks mode in ie8 will most like be like the one in ie 6 and 7. b: I don't see why this applies. If the user had IE7 and pages work and they upgrade to IE8 and they stop then from their point of view IE8 is broken.

c: No, that's not what the article says. It says that IE8 will be in standards compliant mode by default, which means all the sites that serve non standard HTML to IE break. Google maps worked in Firefox because it uses CSS and it works in IE6/7 because it uses the Microsfot html extensions they invented as an alternative to CSS. Now you can argue about the wisdom of jumping the gun by inventing their own version of CSS and then ignoring the standard, but changing to support (by default) only standard CSS now and not their proprietary extensions is suicide for IE8. People will try it, find a bunch of sites don't work and stop using it. They won't give a shit if those sites are using the wrong sort of html and they won't wait for them to be fixed. They'll stop using IE8 and go back to IE7, or switch to Firefox or Opera.

Lazy dumbasses

[Daimanta]

"that, unfortunately, will mean work for site administrators."

Well, if you don't code to standards, that's what you get. I don't feel sorry for them.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[pezpunk]

just to play devil's advocate here, you're suggesting a designer should code to standards, and let the page be broken for 80% of his visitors? i don't think many designers would keep that job very long.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[BotnetZombie]

Yep. Dance with the devil and you burn, even if it's warm at first. Film at 11.
Only sad thing is that it wont be the long gone pointy-haired bosses that get bitten, but instead the poor on-the-floor webdevs.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[Anonymous Coward]

just to play devil's advocate here, you're suggesting a designer should code to standards, and let the page be broken for 80% of his visitors? i don't think many designers would keep that job very long.

That's what led to the current situation. Somewhere in an idealized parallel universe, web developers had stuck to standards and users were directed to send bug reports to the browser vendor.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[dmsuperman]

I have to agree with you there. I code my site to look good in a normal browser (like firefox), then go back in with either CSS or Server Side HTML Change hacks, to make it render properly in IE 6+. Since I've coded this way, all I'll have to do is tell everything that IE8 users will see the same page as Firefox users, meaning I won't have to do anything more than add another case in my switch/case determining which hacks should be included into the page from my PHP. I just wish more developers should realize this is how it should be done from the beginning.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[Quantumstate]

You can code to standards and make the page work in IE. It just takes a lot of effort. I have created a css based website design which works in every browser I have tested (safari, IE5,6,7, Firefox, Opera, Konqueror) with exactly the same code for each browser. The borders came out to be a few pixels different and it took quite a bit of effort but it can be done.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[LordKazan]

i've coded to standards for eons and my pages have never been broken for IE users

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[Junior J. Junior III]

No, I don't suppose so. However, if ALL designers did the right thing -- coded to standards -- Microsoft's feet would be held to the fire and they would be forced to develop a standards-compliant browser. Coding IE workarounds just fuels the problem, punishes Microsoft's bad behavior, and gives that 80% of the market 0 incentive to migrate to a better browser.

Instead, web developers find themselves in a hopeless situation, much like trying to be the only honest official in a thoroughly corrupt government. If we value standards, then we have to enforce them, just as if we value the rule of law, we have to enforce the laws.

If the standards or laws are broken, then fix them, I say. But IE's deviations from standards is nothing like reform or even civil disobedience, it's like an attempt to usurp and conquer.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is, it's not difficult to make 2 versions of a page: One that complies with standards, and one that works with the screwy, broken IE4/5/6/7 engine. In fact, this is how MOST properly-coded sites work.

The sites that need to be redesigned are the sites that were made by clueless designers that just coded to IE6 and ignored everything else. Fuck them. They should be out of a job anyway.

The only "unfortunate" aspect of this is that there are a lot of small sites that probably paid some idiot web-designer a lot of money to make a site that is going to need to be re-designed, and equally great expense. Oh well.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[Slashdot Suxxors]

But you shouldn't have to use _any_ hacks to get a standards complaint webpage to display properly.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[Anonymous Coward]

you're suggesting a designer should code to standards, and let the page be broken for 80% of his visitors?

While I strongly disagree with you, I do agree with "dmsuperman". But I don't know why dmsuperman says he would agree with you, because your statements are contradictory.

The proper way for coding (X)HTML/CSS is this here (and it has been this for years):

1. Write the code according to standards.
2. Make sure the thing looks (and works) right in almost standards-compliant browsers (Firefox, Opera, Konqueror etc.). Do some hacks to help with their (few) bugs.
3. The last step is to introduce hacks to make the thing work right in IE (different versions). For older versions, a CSS-free layout is sufficient, newer versions can get as much pseudo-CSS as you like.
4. Don't forget to do your hacks forward-compatible, i. e., to target IE7, don't use:

   if gt IE6

   (that would most likely break in IE8). Use

   if lt IE8

The last point traditionally has been the one where those who did it wrongly did it wrongly. A super-compliant site written in 2005 still works fine in IE8 and needs little or no modification for newer browser.

This is why I opted against the standards-as-an-option-proposal from Microsoft. My sites are written for modern browsers and (this is the hack) browsers older than IE8; if IE8 would use IE7's rendering engine instead of its own, my sites would become broken.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[bigman2003]

Your plan is fairly good, but not perfect.

What if you died tomorrow...who would add the extra code to make this work?

A better method would be to deliver the standards version by default, unless you made specific conditions. So you could have an IE 5 version, IE 6 version, IE 7 version, etc.

Then, when IE 8 came out, you could do nothing...and it would deliver the 'proper' version.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[The End Of Days]

Web designers did stick to a standard, just not the one you like. Whether you want to admit it or not, IE defined the de facto majority standard of the web. The "real" standard was in competition and didn't gain any traction for quite a few years.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[wvmarle]

You're so lucky, or using ancient html only. See my comment before: I coded to standards, CSS and all, W3C said it's all correct, and IE: displays an empty page. Not even broken. Switching back to a tables based layout made the page work in IE as well.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[J0nne]

No, it's a skill. Most of IE's bugs are well-documented with workarounds and everything. It's really possible to write css-based layouts and have them work in IE, we do it all the time.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[hacker]

Whether you want to admit it or not, IE defined the de facto majority standard of the web. The "real" standard was in competition and didn't gain any traction for quite a few years.

You spelled "usage" wrong there.

Standards are defined by standards bodies, like the W3C in the case of web standards. Microsoft's ignorance of those ratified and accepted standards for several years does not change the fact that standards existed before they decided to ignore them and try to create their own.

Microsoft by no means "created" that standard by force-feeding the masses a sub-optimal browser within their core OS itself.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of IE's bugs are well-documented with workarounds and everything. It's really possible to write css-based layouts and have them work in IE, we do it all the time.

I do completely agree. "Switching back to a tables based layout" because IE "displays an empty page" just shows this old trial-and-error-approach which is quite worthless in dealing with standards.

You code according to standards. You see some misbehavior in some browser. You research its reasons (and really, the single most encountered weird bug with IE 6 and 5 was centered around that "having layout" property, so that really was easy to fix). You resolve the issue. What next?

... profit! ;)

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[Nicolay77]

This is a case where the only thing I can say to both you and the GP is:

Show us the code.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[Nicolay77]

See this.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[The End Of Days]

You're making a very important academic point that falls apart as soon as it touches the real world. There's no value in being a purist.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[daliman]

I don't put any hacks in on the PHP side, it seems to be 95% CSS and 5% Javascript hacks.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[pizzach]

just to play devil's advocate here, you're suggesting a designer should code to standards, and let the page be broken for 80% of his visitors? i don't think many designers would keep that job very long. The sad part is that the designers and managers probably weren't thinking that both are not great choices. When you're coding for a non-standard, if that said programs starts losing popularity you're F*d over.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[QuoteMstr]

"The PHP side"? This is a huge pet peeve of mine. PHP is not the only server-side web option, and talking about it as if it were only perpetuates that mediocre language's popularity. There's a whole world out there! Why limit yourself to clanky, rusty old PHP?

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[QuoteMstr]

And how much did you have to sacrifice to achieve that feat? Any why did you bother? You're only going to live to be about 72. Did you really want to waste all that time tweaking when you could have simply coded a standard version, and conditionally included some IE workarounds?

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[hacker]

There's no value in being a purist.

Other than my code, which adheres to standards, continues to work in 13 different browsers (visual, audio and text-only), as well as MSIE 6, 7 and 8 with the same exact same codebase (no tricky MSIE-only hacks, different stylesheets or otherwise).. so I never have to touch the code again, because it remains future-compatible.

Yes, you're right. Being a purist, touching the code once and having to do a LOT less work, really has no value.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[Anonymous Coward]

Standards are defined by standards bodies, like the W3C in the case of web standards. What part of "de facto" did you not understand?

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[seriesrover]

Sure you shouldn't *have* to, but the reality is that this is a good approach between creating a compliant standard webpage and creating branches for the different browser idiosyncacies.

In an ideal world IE, FF, Opera, Safari etc. would all render every webpage identically. Thats not being realistic.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[Anonymous Coward]

His reply was to someone who also uses PHP, so it's adequate here. FWIW, I use PHP myself. For what I do, it works fine, so I don't see a need to change. I do recognise how neat Perl and Ruby are, though.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[gzunk]

Maybe you should look up "de facto standard" and "de jure standard".

De jure standards are indeed created by standards bodies, however de facto standards emerge from whatever people actually use. So the GP poster is correct in using the words "de facto standard" because that's what most people used.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[Anonymous Coward]

Web designers did stick to a standard, just not the one you like.

pfft!

Whether you want to admit it or not, IE defined the de facto majority standard of the web.

Almost everyone was running Netscape back in the mid '90s, IE didn't see widespread usage until version 4.

The "real" standard was in competition and didn't gain any traction for quite a few years.

Most "web designers" were amateurs who didn't know HTML, plenty of those of us who did were doing HTML 4 in 1998 and XHTML 1.0 shortly thereafter. There was no competition between w3c standards and the IE non-standard, that wasn't even the war being waged.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[Anonymous Coward]

In the real world standards are defined by those who first implement and deploy a standard to the largest avaliable customer base. Those who follow a flawed or incompatible standard on principal to the detrement of compatibility with real deployed implementations loose market share and in short order go out of business.

Ususally at some point a bis document will be released to correct the parity between the origional spec and the real world.

The optimal way out of "this" whatever "this" really is includes contributions from Microsoft *and* existing spec revisions to reflect current realities. Without both web sites and millions of their users will for the first time on such a scale in the history of the web suffer unecessarily. Millions who don't give a crap about technology -- they just rightfully want crap to work and to get their jobs done.

Concidering the complexity involved and a surprisingly good measure of agreement between browsers out of necessity it is my opinion that while useful to keep them in line the MS bashing on this topic is mostly unwarranted regergetation of party line. Most adherents when pressed I doubt would even be able to name even a single significant diversion from spec off the top of their heads without googling for an answer.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[LordKazan]

because CSS2 and DOM2, ajax, etc are ancient

yup

it has nothing to do with research (googling :P) and testing on IE and firefox..

nothing at all

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[dissy]

just to play devil's advocate here, you're suggesting a designer should code to standards, and let the page be broken for 80% of his visitors? i don't think many designers would keep that job very long. It's really not the developers fault here.
To view a *web page*, one needs to use a *web browser*
There is simply no getting around that fact.

To FTP one needs an FTP client, to email one needs an email client, etc etc

IE6 is NOT a web browser, its a custom microsoft XML parser at best.

So if 80% of the people out there don't have a web browser at all (because only IE6 is installed), then how is that the web developers fault?
Clearly the blame can only rest between the end user that wont install a web browser, and/or microsoft for not including a web browser with their OS until Windows XP came around a decade after the web was made.

Before IE (and really before MS added TCPIP support in their OS) everyone had to go out and get a web browser to install to use the web.
MS had a good idea, they wanted to remove that step, and thus include a web browser in the OS, back in 95.
Sadly, they never did this until XP came around, before that you didnt get a web browser but IE, so its the same problem.
Then they went around and did their evil, convincing people that IE was a real web browser, and that the world was broken instead of them. So I have no pity for them at all. Only the end users that dont want to mess with installing software get screwed in the whole deal.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[StormReaver]

"...i don't think many designers would keep that job very long."

If the vast majority of designers would have coded to standards to begin with, the 80 percent of users with broken browsers would have picked a different one; or maybe Microsoft would have fixed theirs so it worked.

With that said, I don't believe for a second that Microsoft won't try its best to produce some half-assed monstrosity that still doesn't work right, but that convinces a lot of gullible people to not leave IE just yet. After all, they promise that this time they'll get it right; and Microsoft would never try something deceptive.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[daliman]

Possibly, because that's what the parent I was replying to was talking about?

What's your preference? ASP.NET? Ruby? Perl?

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[ya really]

just to play devil's advocate here, you're suggesting a designer should code to standards, and let the page be broken for 80% of his visitors? i don't think many designers would keep that job very long.

Although he didn't directly say it, I assume he implies you code your site to standards and then use conditionals for IE and have it point to a different style sheet for IE browsers as already mentioned by others. It would be silly otherwise as you said to not code for it. Though a majority of people use IE, this is just another instance where the majority is wrong or mostly just too lazy/ignorant to switch to a different browser

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[The End Of Days]

And what standard did Netscape follow?

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[dmsuperman]

That's not what's being debated in my post, I'm saying that as web developers, it's your job to make sure it gets to as many users as possible. We don't have a say in Microsoft's bad practices (usually), so the next best thing is to make sure that at least the users of it's browser (and many of them aren't necessarily users by choice, either that they just can't use another browser or don't know) can view our websites. If you feel that you can omit the entire Internet Explorer group, then you're a fool.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[dmsuperman]

I find it much better to hack the code before you even output it to the browser. It's much more likely to be done accurately, and it also ensures validated code. And don't mention user agent, because anybody that's changing their user agents knows the website's going to render differently.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[Anonymous Coward]

Good! I agree with you!

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[Anonymous Coward]

You do one out of 3 things:

a)Only use code that even IE implements according to the standard.
b)Serve different style sheets depending on the browser's user agent string
c)Use conditional statements that only IE care about

It is a shame you have to do it, but until the majority of people use standards compliant browsers those are the only somewhat sane choices you have.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately it's not that easy. For example, one bank I'm developing for refuses to use anything but IE6. We HAVE TO develop for IE6 or else we lose a huge customer. We try to use as many standards as we can as long as it is ready for the customer in the way they want it. If we could tell the customer they have to bend around our wishes, life would be so much easier.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[Tokerat]

...there reason they're called "STANDARDS" is because they're the STANDARD. You can't just make up your own way and expect everyone to follow you, then we'd have NO STANDARDS and the web, for example, would have many ways of doing things and would end up being a horribly broken mess, causing headaches for both designers and users alike, and as a result we'd see people arguing furiously over what constitutes a standard.

Like now.

Get it?

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[daliman]

Each to their own, I suppose. In my current job I only have to support IE6, but I pointed out that at some point in time they'd be using either IE7 or Firefox or something else, so the apps I write are tested in IE7, IE6 and FF.

I've yet to come across any specific problems that needed to be handled differently on the server side. Are you talking about emitting different CSS or Javascript from your server side code? Or entirely different markup?

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[dmsuperman]

Just omitting portions of CSS and JavaScript, the same way most hacks work, only without ever sending it to the browser if the hack would normally just be hidden anyway.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[pezpunk]

i would LOVE to be in the room when you explain to your boss that his new x-hundred-thousand dollar web site doesn't work in Internet Explorer because "IE is not a web browser".

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[dissy]

i would LOVE to be in the room when you explain to your boss that his new x-hundred-thousand dollar web site doesn't work in Internet Explorer because "IE is not a web browser". What does my boss asking me to make an IE website have anything in anyway to do with the fact IE 6 is not a web browser?

If your boss says to make an IE6 page, you do so.
If your boss says to make a standards compliant xhtml website, and realizes the fact 80% (or whatever percentage is IE6) won't be able to view it, you do so.

Neither of those actions changes the fact IE6 is not a web browser

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[Quantumstate]

It took maybe an extra 20% of the time, and the benefit will be that it won't break every time microsoft decide to change IE's rendering engine.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[Walter Carver]

Nope. Let me introduce you to Conditional Comments: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537512.aspx

I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[apathy maybe]

When I develop pages, I like to do so in XHTML, simply because it is nicer to develop in for me (someone who initially learnt nasty 3.whatever back in 2000).

So, because I use PHP, I go and tell everyone that the page I'm serving up is application/xhtml+xml. Whoops, MSIE doesn't understand that... *roles eyes*. So I have to chuck in a bit of code to check for MSIE, and then add a disclaimer at the bottom, "If your user agent has MSIE in it, then this page was served as text/html. Maybe you should stop using MSIE if you are, or change your user agent if you aren't."

Not to mention having to chuck in IE specific CSS (the /only/ thing I like about IE is the fact that it has that comment stuff
which allows a separate style sheet that no other browser sees).

Meh, I'll continue not developing for MSIE, unless I have to, and because I'm using standards compliant code, the site should still be perfectly viewable, even without CSS. If only other people decided not to develop for MSIE, maybe more people would get a better browser...

Actually maybe MSIE 8 will actually mean that I don't have to care that IE even exists? (Sorta how I don't care that Opera exists, because I know that it is relatively standards compliant.)

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[Anonymous Coward]

(the /only/ thing I like about IE is the fact that it has that comment stuff
which allows a separate style sheet that no other browser sees). If IE were halfway decent, it wouldn't need to have that feature.

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[Anonymous Coward]

the /only/ thing I like about IE is the fact that it has that comment stuff
which allows a separate style sheet that no other browser sees

Exactly. This has been Microsoft's recommendation for dealing with IE not having been standards compliant for years. You either choose to write one line of invalid comment code to direct IE to a separate stylesheet, or you could write a lot of bad CSS rules and stick them in with the good CSS. The former's the easy one, though, because it can be based around particular versions of IE in a direct and obvious fashion, rather than relying on janky selector hacks. Unless IE8 mistakenly interprets "lte IE7", all the sites I've worked on over the past five years should be just fine.

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[FishWithAHammer]

add a disclaimer at the bottom, "If your user agent has MSIE in it, then this page was served as text/html. Maybe you should stop using MSIE if you are, or change your user agent if you aren't." Or...you can make it work for them and stop bitching.

Nobody really cares what work you have to do in order to make a site work for them. Your whining doesn't serve the purpose you want it to.

Sad, but true.

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[Anonymous Coward]

*roles eyes* Hesitant grate watts peach oft where kin dew ferrous?

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah because that's totally relevant to his post! Dickwad.

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[The End Of Days]

How is this flamebait? Does someone here really think that users care about the technology implementing the web? Foolish foolish nerds.

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[l0b0]

XHTML in IE, using PHP? Here are the two things you need:

if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT']) and stristr($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT'], 'application/xhtml+xml')) {
define('MIME_TYPE', 'application/xhtml+xml');
} else {
define('MIME_TYPE', 'text/html');
}

and an XHTML-to-HTML XSLT file.

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[pizzach]

application/xhtml+xml? I thought pages had to be served as application/xml?

I jumped back to xhtml 1.0 personally because it lets my pages be served as the old sand by text/xhtml. When IE hopefully adds compatibility, I'll be making the jump to xhtml 1.1 too.

xhtml is kind of nice because of how it errors immediately when there is an error in the code. Another words you can't accidently output total crap in the same way you can't compile C with incorrect syntax. Yes you can still write stuff that doesn't work correctly but displays. Still, at least there is a good baseline.

But I don't think I get the feature when I send out my pages as text/xhtml :-(

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[FishWithAHammer]

Well put.

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[Angostura]

Meh, I'll continue not developing for MSIE, unless I have to...

The salient part is unless I have to. You are basically setting out the same position as all other Web developers.

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[QuoteMstr]

XHTML should be served as text/html anyway. You don't lose anything in your workflow -- validating editors will still work, XSLT will still work, and so on -- but your users get incremental rendering and a better-tested parser.

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[apathy maybe]

Nah, screw MSIE users. I develop personal websites, and unless someone specifically asks me to make it look pretty in IE, I won't. I'll code to standards, and I'll code to make it look nice in Firefox.

I'll also make the point that it may or maynot look nice in IE, but I don't care.

If they really want it to look nice in IE, I make it so. And it costs them.

They know that, I know that.

But, because I code to standards, it "works" in IE (except for the bit where IE doesn't understand XHTML).

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[fluffy99]

So, because I use PHP, I go and tell everyone that the page I'm serving up is application/xhtml+xml. I'm not sure I understand this. Isn't PHP a server-side scripting that's transparent to the client? So text/html would seem appropriate unless you really do have client-side scripting.

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[MeNeXT]

When i fix it they don't like the bill....

Install FF and the problem goes away. They never go back to IE.

Sad but, Not true... When you are the user and the site doesn't work and you can't install IE they WILL change the site or lose you as a client. This reminds me of a site developer who didn't know that the owner used Mac at home. Lost a large contract because it didn't work. The developer looked like an idiot. The problem was also replicated on cell phones. MS can't maintain the standard incompatibility that it is creating. IE has no standards and keeping track of IE is beyond any one developers wishes.

For once MS is doing the right thing and it's not because it want's to, it's because it has to not to loses any more market share.

There are more devices today that don't run MS desktop as there are that do. If it doesn't run MS desktop then the chances that it runs "IE# standard" are slim.

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[FishWithAHammer]

Um, yes, and how does that have anything to do with what I said? I told him to stop bitching that people were still using IE because nobody is going to pay attention to his little "you should upgrade!111" disclaimer.

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[jack455]

getting the page as text/html is slower but doesn't break anything. If opera users have ie as their user agent there's not much you can do to give them xml (which loads faster) without breaking the site for ie users. hence the message. There's no doubt that having opera claiming to be ie deflates opera's usage statistics and inflates ie's.

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[FishWithAHammer]

How's text/html slower?

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[BenoitRen]

Maybe you should use HTML 4.01 Strict instead. There's not much point in using XHTML. http://www.spartanicus.utvinternet.ie/no-xhtml.htm

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[jack455]

I'm sorry I don't know the technical reasons. xml parsers are faster than html parsers. I imagine it's due to supporting fewer tags. There are difficulties serving the pages as application/xhtml+xml that don't exist for text/html though.

From my perspective I'd like to support this as much as I can because I look forward to a day when the web is mostly xml documents with css layouts. I can dream.

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[ya really]

"If your user agent has MSIE in it, then this page was served as text/html. Maybe you should stop using MSIE if you are, or change your user agent if you aren't."

If they're using IE, do you think they would even know what a user agent is?

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[ya really]

Sorry, I misread what you wrote

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[Bogtha]

So, because I use PHP, I go and tell everyone that the page I'm serving up is application/xhtml+xml. Whoops, MSIE doesn't understand that... *roles eyes*. So I have to chuck in a bit of code to check for MSIE, and then add a disclaimer at the bottom, "If your user agent has MSIE in it, then this page was served as text/html. Maybe you should stop using MSIE if you are, or change your user agent if you aren't."

Checking the User-Agent header is an unreliable hack. The header you should be checking is Accept.

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[BenoitRen]

No, it shouldn't. It should be sent as application/xhtml+xml. Sending an XHTML page as text/html means the page will be treated as invalid HTML, losing any 'benefits' your page would have had by using XHTML in the first place.

Sending XHTML as text/html is plain stupid.

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[QuoteMstr]

I disagree. You're being a purist, ignoring real problems, and not considering benefits remaining even after serving XHTML as text/html. XHTML isn't just useful for the client: it's useful for the server. Serving XHTML as HTML might strip the client-side benefits, but it leaves the server-side ones intact, and I'd argue that being able to use XML processing tools and editors in development is a bigger boon that the client parsing the page with a real XML parser.

The fact is, today, browsers don't support XHTML served as application/xhtml+xml as well as they do text/html. Only the latest beta of Firefox supports incremental rendering of XHTML, for example. And as much as we would rather these go away, people still like to use loathsome constructs like document.write, namespace-unaware Javascript DOM methods, ALL CAPS CSS selectors, and inline script elements with constructs that look like XML comments.

On the other hand, browsers universally and correctly understand XHTML documents served as HTML, as long as they're serialized with XHTML compatibility guidelines in mind. As long as these documents have the correct doctype, browsers still render them in full standards mode. There is no downside to serving XHTML as HTML.

Yes, even with compatibility guidelines in mind for serialization, XHTML violates some aspects of the HTML standard. But browsers universally understand these deviations from the standard, so practically speaking, there is no problem.

So our two options are using HTML 4 and serving it as HTML 4, or using XHTML 1.0 and serving it as HTML 4. At least the latter gives us the ability to work with an XML toolchain on the server side, and when the web evolves to the point where we can start serving XML as XML, it's easier to do that than to munge those crufty old HTML documents.

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[BenoitRen]

Indeed it can be a boon to the developer, but it's not an argument for serving XHTML to the client. Use XHTML for your development so you can use those XML parsers, and serve actual, compliant HTML to the client. You know how easy it is.

And I wouldn't say I'm ignoring benefits after serving it, as there are none. There are benefits before, for the developer.

As I mentioned in my previous post, there are downsides to serving XHTML as text/html. No mixed namespace support, for one thing, which is one of the big things XHTML has going for it.

Just because I'm telling people to stop abusing XHTML doesn't mean that I don't know what the real problems are.

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[QuoteMstr]

There's no mixed namespace support after munging XHTML into HTML 4 either.

If you have an XHTML workflow, there are three options.

1. Serve XHTML as application/xhtml+xml
2. Serve XHTML as text/html
3. Munge the XHTML into HTML 4 and serve that as text/html

Option 1 is the best choice, but it's a non-starter today. All browsers today will operate correctly with option 2. Option 3 introduces needless complexity and introduces barriers to later switching to option 1. Option 2 is simply the best we can do today.

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[BenoitRen]

There's no mixed namespace support after munging XHTML into HTML 4 either.

Of course not. But since you decided to serve XHTML as HTML, it is implied you already lost that support and don't need it.

Option 3 introduces needless complexity and introduces barriers to later switching to option 1.

Needless complexity? Barriers? Please. You keep the XHTML version locally, and serve HTML to clients. Since you were already serving XHTML as HTML, there are no hurdles to converting XHTML to HTML.

Serving XHTML as HTML is in itself already a barrier, and the most important one.

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[Bogtha]

No, that's buggy. Firstly, when you vary your response depending on a request header, you need to transmit a Vary header. Secondly, an XSLT that transforms from XHTML to HTML doesn't cover all the bases - there are differences in CSS and the DOM to account for. Thirdly, you completely ignore weights. That code would serve XHTML to a user-agent that supports XHTML but prefers HTML. It would also serve XHTML to a user-agent that is saying under no circumstances should you transmit XHTML to it.

Unless you have a specific need for XHTML, just don't bother with content negotiation. It screws up caching and if you don't understand all the issues, you can very easily introduce bugs.

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[Anonymous Coward]

Another words you can't accidently output total crap

The idiom is "in other words", not "another words". You are expressing the same idea, but in other words.

"it's better than nothing"

[TW Atwater]

That pretty well sums up the entire Microsoft experience.

Re:"it's better than nothing"

[Brian Gordon]

I agree and don't feel the least bit sorry for these web designers that design for Microsoft "standards". Just design for actual standards and leave idiot IE users high and dry.. maybe when MS starts realizing that half the internet looks like crap on their browser then they'll do something about it. Honestly, I don't even know where web designers came up with this idea that it's OK to spend extra time tweaking it for users of a bizarrely non-compliant browser. Or where Microsoft decided it would be a good idea to randomly make a browser that renders differently from other ones.

Re:"it's better than nothing"

[Kjella]

That pretty well sums up the entire Microsoft experience. For those trying to mix Microsoft and non-Microsoft software, or that haven't paid the latest upgrade fees. Once you go a little past e-mail and word and into corporate software though like Sharepoint and Microsoft CRM, I'd say it's the norm rather than the exception. Try going with IBM or CA or SAP or IFS and you'll find they all tend to work much better with their own products than trying to piece together a best of breed. Make no mistake, Microsoft is out to make you an all Microsoft shop which can be fairly pleasant but expensive. The other option is to find alternative software for all of it, they rise and fall together. Some are quite good and the rest dragged along, so despite the best efforts by many there hasn't been that much falling...

Re:"it's better than nothing"

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Oh, I'm quite sure some Microsoft software is actually worse than nothing. Much of the on-line help in recent versions of some products is just an annoying distraction when you accidentally hit F1 and it takes several seconds to appear, for example, and it's usually faster to use a search engine to find useful answers on the web anyway if you actually wanted some help.

But most of the time, I agree: Microsoft's software is useful, and substantially better than nothing.

Re:"it's better than nothing"

[Anonymous Coward]

Just design for actual standards and leave idiot IE users high and dry..

From the actual transcript from Brian's Performance Review:

Boss: Well Brian, I see that since you took over the web site that complaints about our website have gone up 80 fold and we've lost more than half our customers. What do you make of this?
Brian: They're all idiots.

Re:"it's better than nothing"

[memojuez]

You're absolutely right. American Businesses are more worried about reaching the most people, if non IE users, like myself, can't render their page correctly, I am insignificant consequence to mass marketing to them.

It's a shame that it took a European company like Opera Software to force European Regulators to stop the Microsoft's take over of the Web.

Re:"it's better than nothing"

[MonoApe]

lol.

P.S. The article is ancient news. MS backed down from their original plan to make IE8 default rendering of 'IE7 aka broken' after a shit storm from the web dev community. It got nasty. Zeldman, in particular, came out of it badly bruised as he bizarrely supported MS's original idiotic plan. It's now going to default to 'the best we can do' - which should mean ACID2 is passed. Like I said, this all happened months ago.

Re:"it's better than nothing"

[try_anything]

Microsoft is out to make you an all Microsoft shop which can be fairly pleasant but expensive. Microsoft has educated an entire generation of developers and consultants who do nothing but push Microsoft technologies in mixed shops, where they are unwanted, technically and socially isolated, and not very useful.

But once you've installed an expensive Microsoft product that is a failure because most people hate it and only a few people use it, there's a cure: just replace a little bit more of your working infrastructure with Microsoft products, and suddenly the unused Microsoft products will become vital, useful parts of your business instead of embarrassing mistakes.

So the whole project tanked in the end? Well, you can't blame the Microsoft technologies. They're all "Best of Breed" products with all the right buzzwords and bullet points. Just think of how efficient and unstoppable you would be if you had just managed to convince your employees to use it. I guess you weren't ready to be a Best of Breed business.

This is the eternally recurring story of Microsoft developers, consultants, and "process experts" who just push Microsoft instead of actually doing their jobs.

Doing their jobs, by the way, means studying the businesses they work for, finding out what features would be beneficial and which would actually be used, and figuring out how the available technologies will fit into current practices and current infrastructure. Oh, and figuring out how software can help you simplify process. More often than not, behemoth kitchen sink software does not allow you to create a customized, lightweight process for a unique business.

Most Microsoft consultants who read that last sentence will say, "Ah, here's where it becomes obvious that this guy is on drugs/inexperienced/trolling." Because their Microsoft marketing brochures -- sorry, "educational publications for developers" -- tell them that the only way to create a customized, lightweight solution is to buy the BIGGEST and most featureful product available. You wouldn't want to adopt (or, gasp, develop!) a product and find out it's missing that one vital feature that's necessary to make it lightweight.

So, instead of doing their job, they compare products on a bullet-point basis, using Microsoft "educational" materials to guide them, and work towards a vision of the future in which the more processes and supporting software features people use, the more efficient they are. It's no accident that project plans for adopting Microsoft technologies usually involve adopting tons of practices and processes at the same time -- it helps justify the expense and complexity of the software, and it helps construct a utopian fantasy in which the business will run in perfect synchrony because of the awesome power of process, in defiance of human nature and in defiance of the finite number of hours in the day.

Re:"it's better than nothing"

[donweel]

I'ts been a while since I have used Microsoft products but it used to be that Front Page created non standard web pages. Don't know if that is still true.

Re:"it's better than nothing"

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think it's any different with any other companies consultants, you really are green.

Re:"it's better than nothing"

[try_anything]

There are plenty of other consulting religions that are able to spin such an idealistic view of what other businesses are achieving that the customer is too ashamed to say, "Hey, none of this works for me. You were supposed to build something that works for my business and my employees, not something that works for the idealized business you want us to be."

However, there aren't many other consulting religions in which most of the consultants themselves are devout believers who retain their faith no matter what kind of destruction they cause. Even Rails and J2EE developers eventually come to realize that those technologies only are good in certain contexts. Microsoft guys just blame the customer for not reaching far enough for the helping hand Microsoft offered them.

Re:"it's better than nothing"

[dantezco]

Try going with IBM or CA or SAP or IFS and you'll find they all tend to work much better with their own products than trying to piece together a best of breed.

The difference being that none of those provide a "best results with our software" operating system.

Re:"it's better than nothing"

[Sledgy]

We are also paid to make sites work on IE (and every other browser), I wouldn't get much work if I told a client sorry it doesn't work, tell your client to get a better browser.

That said I build using Firefox (thanks to the brilliant development plugins available) and that covers most other browsers and then using the conditional includes support IE. All this really makes for developers that know what they are doing, is less work in the add support for IE stage.

Unfortunately most projects specify IE6 as a minimum spec as a large group of internet users still use it.

Re:"it's better than nothing"

[TofuMatt]

I don't even know where web designers came up with this idea that it's OK to spend extra time tweaking it for users of a bizarrely non-compliant browser.

For the longest time, there wasn't a reasonable spec to measure against, and even when there was, no browser supported it. Both Netscape and IE were non-compliant browsers, and the notion of designing for them was that everyone could see your content. IE is a huge part of the market and can't be ignored; in much the same way we design for people who are forced to use text browsers or screen-readers, we design for people using IE, because we want our content to be viewable by everyone.

Does IE suck? You bet. Do I hate having to design for it? Sure. Do I think its users deserve to be punished when they often don't even know what a "browser" is? No. Either get a little "Best viewed in Netscape Navigator 4" button for your site or understand that if you want people to get your content, you have to design for IE.

Re:"it's better than nothing"

[Anonymous Coward]

/agree

Anyone that pushes one vendor panacea has some screwed up priorities.

As an IT worker your mantra needs to be "Simplest, most reliable, most cost effective way to fill the requirements and suit my user's needs".

Users want "just works", reliability, cost effectiveness and the a la carte feature set they need. They could care less who wrote the software. Unfortunately Microsoft has a long way to go in the "just works", a la carte, and cost effectiveness departments.

You either make your entire shop Microsoft and pay for a bunch of crap you don't need, or you have interoperability issues. This is what steers us away from their products whenever possible.

-AC

Re:"it's better than nothing"

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if you are talking consultants in partner companies then it's really simple: It's the competence you got and the features you got, which you can't change. Trying to make a multibillion dollar company do what you need for your customer is a pipe dream. Don't get me wrong, most products have good parts but to implement the system as a whole you sometimes have to implement parts which aren't just poor, but solutions that are plain old unsuitable. Been there, done that and was fuck all we could do about it once the real customer demands came on the table. They'd long since settled on the product and there was no way that part could be replaced by an external application. If we had the code we probably would have coded around it but without it all you can do is throw up your hands and say this is how it WORKS. I've been definately less than a believer but when you have no alternatives you sell the customer what you have to offer. Sad but true.

Re:"it's better than nothing"

[allcar]

Sorry, but you have to live in the real world. Many websites are run for commercial reasons. They cannot deliberately provide a poor experience for most of their customers, just in order to wage a standards war.
Like most developers, my company develops against Firefox and then spends time ensuring that it works acceptably on IE.
In spite of this move from MS (which I welcome), the problem will not go away for some years. We will have to consider IE6 and IE7 for a long time, yet as they will continue to have a significant market share, long after IE8 makes it's debut.

Re:"it's better than nothing"

[goltzc]

The problem is, it's not just consultants. I work for a manufacturing company, and our CIO has bought into this mentality that a monolithic architecture is going to make our IT infrastructure perfect and unbreakable. Of course, every MS product we roll out has issues and she gets to skirt by because we havn't fully implemented all of the surrounding MS technology to take full advantage of what we have.

The business requirements are no longer a concern to her. When the business asks for problem to be solved by IT, she either brings in a new MS product or tells them they have to use some crappy piece of MS software we already purchased (SharePoint I'm looking at you).

It really is disgusting.

Unfortunately???

[VMaN]

This is anything BUT unfortunate.. Once agreed upon standards are the norm everyone will benefit, and it'll save a ton of work in the long run.

yay for MS on this call

Re:Unfortunately???

[Anonymous Coward]

The summary contained pros and cons. The word "unfortunately" was in the cons section. Microsoft chose to go forward, and that might be extremely positive, but that doesn't give you the right to fuck up a description of the cons.

Re:Unfortunately???

[Spudds]

Although I obviously agree that this is a Good Thing(tm), I do wish to point out that Microsoft isn't doing this out of the kindness of their own hearts. They didn't choose to do this, they were berated en mass into doing it by the web development community.

So, instead of saying "yay Microsoft", we should be saying (sigh of relief) FINALLY!

Not that bad

[PhrostyMcByte]

If you write your site for Firefox, chances are you can just tell it to use that code for IE8. Assuming, of course, that IE8 comes through with their promises of compliance.

A little pain now for a lot less cumulative pain later. I'll take that!

Re:Not that bad

[Anonymous Coward]

A little pain now for a lot less cumulative pain later. I'll take that! Standards-compliance: It's like a condom for web developers!

(Sorry; I had to. You can now proceed to mod me down to death.)

Re:Not that bad

[supernova_hq]

You mean like they promised for IE7??? *rolls eyes*

Re:Not that bad

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you mean: a little extra pain now to finally end 10 years of suffering

"Unfortunately"?

[Anonymous Coward]

"That, unfortunately, will mean work for site administrators."

Boo-freaking-hoo, those IE bastards won't stick to standards compliance, the way the web should be.

Boo-freaking-hoo, those IE bastards are going to make standards compliance a default, now we have so much work to do.

Standards and deployment

[Midnight Thunder]

I am working for a large Canadian company and we are still using IE6. For whatever reason they are holding off on general deployment of IE7. Some of our imports customers also still have IE6 as the target platform. Given this, once IE8 is deployed I can still imagine another year before everyone is using it.

As to standards compliance, I will be interested to see where they are with CSS2, CSS3 and SVG support.

Pity the poor administrators

[sfritsche]

"That, unfortunately, will mean work for site administrators."

The only "unfortunate" thing about the need to retool web sites is that it could have been avoided by coding to the standards in the first place.

Idiots

[ScepticOne]

"I used non-standard code on my site and it stopped working. It must be someone else's fault!"

Morons.

IE standards compliant that is ..

[rs232]

That is of course standards-compliant to the current version of Internet Explorer and not a Browser by any other name .. :)

"Microsoft is .. letting Web site developers signal to IE how standards-compliant it ought to be with their pages"

How about writing web pages to a generic standard, something like W3C

Why is work for site admins

[iminplaya]

considered "unfortunate"? I would consider it an opportunity for those seeking a job. Isn't that a good thing?

hogwash, this is not a lot of work

[circletimessquare]

if you have the page render in firefox as appearance a

and you have the page render in ie as appearance b

then its a rather simple top level switch to say "all ie8 requests get rendered as appearance a"

you're not talking about a lot of work here folks

Re:hogwash, this is not a lot of work

[Richard_at_work]

Why is Firefox assumed to be the reference implementation which must be matched?

Re:hogwash, this is not a lot of work

[jimicus]

Why is Firefox assumed to be the reference implementation which must be matched? Same reason as IE was considered the reference implementation that must be matched 7 years ago.

Re:hogwash, this is not a lot of work

[Richard_at_work]

Because Firefox deviates badly from the W3C specification?

Re:hogwash, this is not a lot of work

[Nicolay77]

I use Opera for that purpose.

Re:hogwash, this is not a lot of work

[jimicus]

Because Firefox deviates badly from the W3C specification? Not quite what I meant.

Despite the original point of HTML being "content is important, layout is decided by the user (or, more accurately, their software)", it's not really worked out that way - hence why CSS came to be.

7 years ago, IE was the reference implementation not because it was any good but because it was what most people were likely to be using. So web designers could very well find themselves designing for IE (because that's what most of the customers would be using) then tweaking to make it look much the same in Netscape (because no matter how much we say "Layout is not the business of the web designer", that never really cut much ice with the designer or their boss)

Re:hogwash, this is not a lot of work

[c0ol]

Because firefox has the best tools for web developers and therefore web developers use it to develop on.

Do they plan to fix the select bug

[DarkOx]

The most irritating thing with IE for me these days is the select or "dropbox" bug. Watch give IE a select with not options and it will crash hard, just closes out on the user. This means that when your developing a dynamic form and there is any possibility of no selctions you have to write code for to custom handle the endcase. Which means you also have to consider they layout and appearace of your form when that control is absent, or do something tacky like make "nothing" an option.

On the back side its not such a big deal basic input validation your doing anyway right? when you handle the get or post result from the form you have to not just check for null and deal with that appropriately but also check for the lack of value entirely and interprert that as you would null.

Re:Do they plan to fix the select bug

[gazbo]

WTF? It certainly doesn't do that on my IE 7 installation. Also, your "custom code" complaint doesn't hold much water as the W3C specs state that a select element must contain at least one option element.

Re:Do they plan to fix the select bug

[nuzak]

I don't think crashing is exactly acceptable behavior when a standard isn't met.

I've never seen actual crashes like the GP mentioned, but IE7 would have fixed the bug he mentioned. IE actually uses its own widget set, the same as Firefox does, but until IE7, combo boxes were the exception: it actually took a different rendering path to render the win32 native peers they were implemented with. This is what made them slow and have problems with z-order, and why they tended to stick around longer when the page content changed. IE7 finally got around to implementing an IE combo box widget, and this fixed a whole class of bugs related to them.

Re:Do they plan to fix the select bug

[IBBoard]

Surely giving users a select box with no options is a bad idea anyway, since it will confuse them as to "what am I supposed to select if there's nothing here"? I'd have expected any reasonably coded site where that was a possibility to give a "no options available" option in the box and then disable the box, or remove the section completely.

On a more on-topic note: Finally, Webmasters won't be able to design sites with quite such terrible HTML just because that's what IE does! Okay, so the sites might still be ugly as hell, but at least the source won't be so awful with so much broken stuff in other browsers.

Re:Do they plan to fix the select bug

[Anonymous Coward]

If you write HTML as poorly as you do English, it's no wonder your pages have problems.

Re:Do they plan to fix the select bug

[J0nne]

Still, I don't get why the OP bitches about it crashing on empty select boxes. If your select box is going to be empty, don't display it. How hard is that to do?

Sure, IE shouldn't crash when it encounters one of those, but what's an user supposed to do with an empty select box?

Re:Do they plan to fix the select bug

[gazbo]

Indeed it's not acceptable to crash on bad input; my comment about W3C standards was in reference to his whinging about having to write special code around IE, when actually he should be writing that code anyway to be standards compliant (and for usability). Also, if indeed it was fixed in IE 7 (that is to say it was broken in IE 6) then I guess that answers his question of "Do they plan to fix the select bug?".

I'm quite aware of the...quirky nature of the select widget in IE. Back in the day I had to work around the z-index problems by drawing an iframe "undercoat" underneath any element that might get drawn over a select box in a DHTML heavy app. Frankly ridiculous.

Not really more work.

[strredwolf]

It's more like "Oh, it's standards compliant? Okay, we'll just lump IE 8 next to Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, and Safari."

demo of how MS sets a standard ..

[rs232]

"at least we might have a decent amount of cross-browser standards in a few years time, as opposed to none if Microsoft simply hadn't bothered"

Well , they could have bothered while they were about cloning Netscape and making running any other browser a jolting experience and preventing Netscale from sabotaging their protocol extensions. Or in english, making web pages not render correctly in other peoples browsers .. :)

Microsoft is losing their competitive advantage

[FranTaylor]

One of their big stated reasons for buying into their infrastructure is that they offer a stable platform for developers so they don't have to keep doing more work every time Microsoft upgrades.

This reason is rapidly falling by the boards. First it was Visual Basic, which has changed so many times that there is no hope of old code running. Then it was the Windows API, where many things that developers did, originally with Microsoft's blessing, now cause security warning dialog boxes in Vista. Now it's their interpretation of HTML, which they convinced many web developers to follow instead of the standard.

Every time a developer codes to a Microsoft "standard", they had better be prepared to make extensive modifications at the drop of a hat.

Hopefully Microsoft's customers are catching on to this trend.

Re:Microsoft is losing their competitive advantage

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice argument. It's a shame that it's completely wrong.

MS did change various semantics of the code with Visual Basic. However, the compiled code still works, and the compilers still work. The Visual Basic 6.0 runtime was shipped with Vista, and will continue to be supported for many years. This is like complaining that c/C++ has evolved so c code written in the 70s doesn't necessarily compile perfectly with a compiler of today. After 6.0 the language did change drastically, but for the better. But Visual Basic 6.0 projects still compile fine in the Visual Basic 6.0 IDE and still execute fine, even if the IDE and executable are both run on Vista.

As for the Win32 API, well, you seem to have no idea what they are or what they do. They are still the heart and core of Windows programming. Calling them works fine, and always has, as long as you stuck with the documented methods of calling them. If you called them improperly then your application can break as undocumented side effects are never guaranteed to follow forward. If you violated standard and documented security practices then your applications will break. However, any Win32 application written in the last 15 years that follows the documentation will work just fine on Vista. An MFC project written in 1992 will compile in Visual C++ 2008 and execute fine in Vista.

As for HTML, remember that IE (as well as Netscape) were evolving quickly during a time when the standards didn't exist and were also evolving. As a result many differentiating behaviors were introduced and kept around because nobody wanted to break existing pages. These standards are highly subjective and open to interprettation. There is not a single browser in existance which implements the standards completely. There are no reference renderers, period. Even the W3C reference browser, Amaya, is horribly behind in compliance, moreso than pretty much any other browser. You can look at ACID tests but they intentionally target very narrow and specific cases. For IE8 MS had to submit hundreds of test cases to W3C to clarify the meaning of the standard. A standard that wasn't complete shit wouldn't require that kind of constant clarification, and would have a reference renderer.

look over here! Standards!

[bigbadbuccidaddy]

microsoft made this decision in a desperate attempt to hide the fact that ie8 can't properly render any content, standards-compliant or not. They are just trying to push the work off on web developers. Ie8 won't be any more standards compliant than ie7, it probably still won't support XHTML, svg, or even completely support PNG.

re

[rs232]

go away astroturfer ..

unfortunately?

[nguy]

That, unfortunately, will mean work for site administrators."

I don't see anything "unfortunate" about it. It's about time people fixed their sites.

Re:unfortunately?

[Vectronic]

Indeed.

"Unfortunetly, due to new Government regulations, drug developers will have to be more stringent about the drugs they release, so as to minimize the chance of killing their users"

Plus, this also creates more job opportunities (especially for people familliar with 'standards'), aswell as return coding, "we need to update our website for IE8 and/or to be more standards complient"

If any website coders (who are currently using non-standard coding practices) that are going "shit fuck damnit crap" it's there fault for not doing their job properly. They could have simply said "well, we could do that, but its not standards complient, and could create problems in the future" - "oh, hmm well maybe there is another way"... its really their own laziness.

And anyone who really enjoys coding websites, will probably like this, a new challenge, "lets see if I can make this site 100% complient"...

this doesn't matter since there's "quirks mode"

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as a page can be rendered in "quirks mode" by adding a header (or leaving doctype out entirely) this is not an issue, at all.

Joel on Software: Idealists vs Pragmatists

[redink1]

Joel on Software published an excellent article about web standards a few months ago, and it brings up a lot of great, great points. The article is a bit on the long side (and gets side-tracked with an odd analogy), but it is well worth reading. A couple excerpts:

So you have to "test" in your own head, purely as a thought experiment, against a bunch of standards documents which you probably never read and couldn't completely understand even if you did.

Those documents are super confusing. The specs are full of statements like "If a sibling block box (that does not float and is not absolutely positioned) follows the run-in box, the run-in box becomes the first inline box of the block box. A run-in cannot run in to a block that already starts with a run-in or that itself is a run-in." Whenever I read things like that, I wonder how anyone correctly conforms to the spec.

The precise problem here is that you're pretending that there's one standard, but since nobody has a way to test against the standard, it's not a real standard: it's a platonic ideal and a set of misinterpretations, and therefore the standard is not serving the desired goal of reducing the test matrix in a MANY-MANY market.

Re:Joel on Software: Idealists vs Pragmatists

[bunratty]

Joel does have a point, but programming portable C is certainly much harder than writing portable web applications. Yet programmers manage to write C code that can work when compiled by many different compilers on many different operating systems. If standards did not assist in writing portable code, we would instead have found another solution to the problem such as having a reference implementation. Yet standards for complicated computer languages continue to be developed. The only problem is when vendors do not adhere to the standard, such as with SQL. This is also a problem when one vendor has a majority of the market and holds back on supporting standards well, as Microsoft has done with IE.

Re:Joel on Software: Idealists vs Pragmatists

[cnettel]

Any non-trivial project of portable C code has autoconf or a bunch of defines and ifdefs, or some conditionally compiled modules (or any combination of these), to actually achieve that portability. It's the equivalent of user-agent hacks.

Re:Joel on Software: Idealists vs Pragmatists

[bunratty]

And what would portable C look like if we didn't even have a standard that compilers tried to follow? At least having standards makes it possible to write portable code. Standards are not a fool's errand as Joel tries to make them out to be. They are not a panacea, but following standards is much easier than simply testing in all browsers and hoping for the best.

Re:Joel on Software: Idealists vs Pragmatists

[jack455]

He claims that websites require hacks for more than one popular browser. If firefox opera or safari need hacks to render they are rare enough that I've never come across them. Back in the day Netscape needed some hackery. The only reason I even validate now is to catch typos (and I occasionally do something wrong that I understand when it gets caught). Do I completely understand the specs? No. But I understand what I use.
I thought it was an interesting article, with some good insights, but I think there were some pretty alarming statements that need some evidence to back up the claims.
It's also very useful as an example of why argument by analogy is wrong.

Wine

[Anonymous Coward]

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=11329

Its rated Platinum, so should not be much effort.

"super standards mode" ???

[HyperQuantum]

They call this "super standards mode"? Shouldn't this be the "display-like-other-decent-browsers-do" mode?

Yeah I know, IE is nothing like other browsers. It has always done things differently and uses special names for regular things. *Sigh*

Re:"super standards mode" ???

[bunratty]

Calling it "display-like-other-decent-browsers-do" mode would also give IE more credit than it's due. It's just regular old standards mode, which does not mean the page will be rendered according to standards. It just means it will not be intentionally rendered incorrectly, in quirks mode. IE 8 will still not be anywhere near as standards compliant as the other browsers that come out at around the same time. Yes, IE 8 does fix many bugs and adds support for many standards compared to IE 7. But in the past three years, all the other browsers have had bugs fixed and have added support for more standards, too. When will IE catch up instead of continuing to lag behind? I guess we should just be happy that they're not just standing still. Moving forward is better than nothing, after all.

Re:Well poisoning imminent...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cue the slashbots screaming and crying about a million irrelevant details in a failed attempt to make out Microsoft to be evil.

Finally!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

As a web developer I am happy to see that MS finally understands what 'Standards' and 'Compliance' means. Unfortunately, they will never admit to the fact that they caused this problem in the first place by ignoring the standards in the first place.

AH Ku-DOS, MS guys!

[alexborges]

Finally. A step in the right direction, Microsoft. I congratulate thee and hope youll pay for what youve done to web standards.

Lets level: you created this hell, you are now crawling your way out of it. You have enough money to survive it and that is GOOD(tm).

Lets hope that youll continue to do this kind of thing for every standard youve steped on.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft! MODDER UP PARENT

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the truth. M$ intentionally chose to not follow the standards, in order to strengthen it's lock-in strange hold.

It was a shrewd business decision that has netted them shitloads of money. And today half of the internet works properly only on M$ windoze + IE 6.

One funny thing is this has never been brought to the monopoly abuse discussion at large AFAIK.

WTF: Super Standards?

[Anonymous Coward]

What (t.f.) are 'super standards'? Are these somehow better than regular standards?

Sarcasm. Cute

[symbolset]

Their problem is that they haven't supported these standards based browsers up to now. Their sites have been IE only. Now they have to code to standards, which is work. Boo Hoo.

Sooner is Better

[Robert Hopson]

There are those who feel that maintaining the old rendering mode would be preferable - allow developers to add the meta tag forcing standards mode. "Don't break the web."

The problem is that unless 100% of new pages include that tag, the amount of broken stuff out there keeps increasing.

Assuming the goal is write-once, standards-based content (please tell me that's the goal), you can break it now, or break it years from now when the amount of content has grown.

Do it now, rip the bandaid off. Force future user agents to use the One True Markup so we don't end up in this situation again.

qwerks mode anyone?

[pizzach]

No it isn't. This is going to make half the Web break in IE8. The smart thing to do was what they did originally: default to legacy IE mode, and allow site developers to put a meta tag in to force standards mode. Then, some number of years down the road, when the majority of people were running sites that were standards-compliant (with or without the special meta tag), IE could've defaulted to standards mode. It's called phasing out old stuff, which is something you have to do when the old behavior is so widespread. What are you talking about?

• Half of the web doesn't even specify a doctype. Those pages would be rendered in qwerks mode anyway, meaning they would display fine.
• The zealots that are using strict html4 are most likely already aware of any display problems already.
• The xhtml using folks basically already said "Screw Microsoft! I don't care if you can view this page anyway!" to begin with.

Damn drama queen.

More work? If you are crap at your job, sure.

[lattyware]

"That, unfortunately, will mean work for site administrators."
Only if they are incompetent and haven't been designing to standards. Otherwise, just the only work they need to do is opening the bottle to celebrate not having to spend ages getting their correct code working.
For once, something I think M$ are doing right. Not going to make me run Windows, but it might stop me wanting to kill anyone running IE.

Not News?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know that this article is new, but the fact that IE8 is rendering in strict mode by default is not news. This decision was made over 6 months ago, and the first public beta of IE8 was released in March. While there were bugs in the implementation, as to be expected as MS still had hundreds of test cases submitted and pending reply from W3C, it was strict standards by default and rendered the reference ACID2 page without issue.

So what exactly is the news? That MS is releasing a second beta soon?

no. PLEASE NO !

[unity100]

just had to make a site compatible with ie6, ie7 and firefox. please, NOT another browser version that soon. as a developer this is not appeasing me at all, its irritating me.

Re:no. PLEASE NO !

[CrunchyPCB]

/>

Aaaa! The pain!! My fingers... hurt!

Re:no. PLEASE NO !

[bunratty]

I just can't understand why a company with the resources Microsoft has can't just have IE catch up to and even easily surpass all the other browsers. Why can't they just bite the bullet and release IE 8 next year with better standards compliance than any other browser? They could simply decide to fully implement every web standard, such as XHTML, CSS 2.1, DOM 2, SVG, JPEG 2000. Then nobody could complain to them about lagging behind every other browser. Nobody could complain to them about releasing a new browser every couple of years that fixes some bugs but not others. They could simply release a fixed browser and do only security updates for five years while the other browser companies take their turn playing catch up. They would be nearly completely absolved of all past wrongdoing.

Re:no. PLEASE NO !

[unity100]

it doesnt end with that.

Re:no. PLEASE NO !

[unity100]

they are told to hurry in order to implement the schemes to control the internet : http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/05/microsofts-masters-whose-rules-does-your-media-cen

Re:no. PLEASE NO !

[Yvan256]

You should be making websites that work fine in Firefox, Opera and Safari and then add IE conditional comments to patch things up for IE6 and IE7.

If you don't use crappy CSS hacks and go with IE conditional comments, it's actually pretty easy.

Re:no. PLEASE NO !

[Anonymous Coward]

"Oh noes! I can't do my job properly! Enormous company, please change your release schedule to cater to my laziness!"

Re:no. PLEASE NO !

[bunratty]

I guess they're also too busy developing Silverlight, yet another proprietary, incompatible web format. MS, this is not what web developers are asking for!

Re:no. PLEASE NO !

[unity100]

oh its straightforward allright .... unless you count in the time spent on making them compliant, instead of other things, even though it is just a menial task.

Re:no. PLEASE NO !

[gnud]

Well, writing compliant html/css might take some time if you without thinking write "cursor: hand;" in your css. On the other hand, if you're used to the standards, you know that it's "cursor: pointer;".

Forgive the kind of random example, but you didn't give any example of what takes long to write while adhering to standards.

Sometimes, there's these crazy

[deesine]

people, we call them bosses, and they make these crazy demands like, I don't care why, I just want it to work!".

Oh, I forgot to mention, these bosses sign our paychecks.

More work

[SirLurksAlot]

That, unfortunately, will mean work for site administrators.

I wouldn't call that a bad thing, I would call that job security.

This is good news

[smelroy]

It is good to see a little progress from MS on a standards compliant browser out of the box. The work required for admins will be well worth it.

Breaking the internet

[v(*_*)vvvv]

1. Users will just think IE8 broke their favorite web site, or their own web site. They will blame IE8 before going to help pages or trying to figure out what happened.

2. Most of the internet is an archive. They are no longer updated. This will break all of those pages.

3. IE *is* a standard. They are breaking their own standard.

Solution? If webmasters are suppose to update their site for IE8, then have them do that, but have them declare it in their code. Like, say, in the document declaration? Why not use the standard to solve your standard problems. That way IE8 will render like IE8 for those pages that updated for IE8. No need to mess with IE7 web pages whatsoever because they will not be updated period.

But I don't care because I use Firefox.

Re:Breaking the internet

[jack455]

1. Users will just think IE8 broke their favorite web site, or their own web site. They will blame IE8 before going to help pages or trying to figure out what happened...

--at first, but it will eventually only be true of old and crappy sites. the people upgrading to ie8 will be more technical at first. even when it's true it won't be that important. as a ff user how often are sites broken for you? I went from Netscape to Opera and remember when it was a problem, not so much now.

2. Most of the internet is an archive. They are no longer updated. This will break all of those pages...

--yup, the way they were broken for me when I had IE as my user agent in opera. MS shouldn't claim to be ie, problem solved :-)

3. IE *is* a standard. They are breaking their own standard...

--which ie? 3? a standard that wasn't consistent even within itself, if you call that a standard ...Solution? If webmasters are suppose to update their site for IE8, then have them do that, but have them declare it in their code...

--that wouldn't force anyone's hand. Let's be honest, this pressure on MS came about because they largely were the cause of all this. They need to fix it, or stop making a browser.

If the brower is lying

[Anonymous Coward]

so what if it renders incorrectly.

And surely if IE uses a different engine, why can't it be calling itself something different?

It's not like MS don't have access to the source code or anything

That's a band-aid on a bullet wound

[v.dog]

That might be fine for intranet sites where all your staff are forced to use IE, but for internet sites where the demand for standards-compliant browsers is only going to grow, that hasn't really fixed anything. Also, eventually IE 9 or 10 will drop support for 6 and 7, and you'll have to fix your pages anyway.

Proper tools

[DrYak]

it means changing all the HTML pages you have every time to insert/change/remove those IE conditional HTML comments. In light of that, CSS hacks make more sense. That or maybe, you know, using proper tools to edit the website you're working on, which can automate this kind of repetitive tasks.

Javascript?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about all those JavaScript links that don't work in Firefox... is this because of IE only sites using ie only JavaScript? or is Firefox broken

I rarely say this, but...

[Yvan256]

Microsoft originally planned for IE8 to default to rendering similarly to IE7, while super standards mode would have been an option. The outcry from critics helped convince Microsoft officials to instead default to super standards.

Thank you, Microsoft. You finally made a right choice (as long as IE8 is as good as you're saying).

About time.

[Anonymous Coward]

If MS can screw up an entire program by embracing and extending the standard, they will immediately do so.

How stupid is MS all these years not to be standards complaint by default?

How bad of a programmer do you have to be to not write your browser to be standards compliant?

MS is one of the worst programming companies ever in the history of computing. All they are in it for is the cash. Nothing else matters to them.

I'm not an MS basher

[sentientbrendan]

and I generally think that anyone who refers to microsoft has M$ is an idiot. However, it is true that the IE team is still moving glacially slowly on the standards track.

CSS support has gotten better, and that's nice... but what about things like the event model, and support for HTML 5?

The truth is, that Microsoft still has a lot of incentive to *not* push for implementations of features that would make browsers better standards based application platforms. I think Microsoft is essentially still fearful that given how their competitors rule the web market, a more powerful browser will only make it easier for companies like google and yahoo to compete with with traditional desktop microsoft products.

I don't take the idea that things like google docs can, in their current form, compete with desktop microsoft products, even on the low end. However, it is at least *conceptually* possible that a strong enough browser would eventually become a decent platform for traditional applications. Certainly, it already is for mail.

I think that anyone considering the strategy at microsoft has to be deeply ambivalent about IE. IE has to be good enough so that people don't switch over to another browser, but if it offers too much platform, it also gives a place for competitors to wedge their products into the windows market, and perhaps create added value over traditional desktop apps (like how gmail can search much more effectively than a desktop email client).

That's why you see Microsoft investing in silverlight as a web platform that microsoft can control, even though it seems like a doomed endeavor from the start, considering that flash has already dominated this space.

All of that said, I genuinely do not blame the people working at Microsoft for dragging their heals on IE standards compliance, and here's why you shouldn't either. No one develops software that they know for a fact will hurt their bottom line, and if they do, they are idiots. Every company out there, even google and apple, for all the goodwill that people have for them, will defend their bottom line tooth and nail if it comes under attack.

That's why it's the software *business* and not the software *charity*.

You might say the solution is open source, and to *some* extent that is true. However, that's a bigger discussion than I want to get into.

to ie

[krischik]

yup, the way they were broken for me when I had IE as my user agent in opera. MS shouldn't claim to be ie, problem solved :-) What about the "best viewed in IE pages" which only show you a "download IE now" page when you use anything but IE?

Well ansering my own question: In have the agent set-up on my opera tool bar for quick switching :-) .

Martin

Old School Still Works You Know...

[Anonymous Coward]

I built sites back in 2000 with table layouts and font tags. I have not had to rebuild them yet. And these are web applications that are used by thousands of people every day.

They kept telling me that font tags are wrong, that table layouts are wrong and slow. But all my customers are happy and my applications will run on 3.0 browsers and I won't have to change my code until they remove font tag support from modern browsers. Which I doubt will ever happen soon.

So you folks keep trying to wedge your CSS into what browser developers throw at you, I'll spend my time doing more productive things.

Welcome Work

[egandalf]

"That, unfortunately, will mean work for site administrators."

Not so. I, for one, would welcome this work. Imagine, functional CSS for all!

My usual mantra applies

[stewbacca]

I work at a software company. I'm often heard saying, "why don't we fix the shit we've got now before we worry about version2beta"?

I think the same thing applies here.

Now, I realize the value in staying on top of the industry and always looking forward, but, as in the case with my company, when you constantly divert talent and resources to the "next great thing" before the current shitty thing even works well, you'll never have a good product. You'll have a product, which appeases the board, I suppose, but you'll have a shoddy product. Continue that for many years (cough, Microsoft, cough) and your user base will finally tire and move on to other stuff.