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Microsoft Finally Joins HTML 5 Standard Efforts
bonch writes "On Friday, Microsoft posted to a mailing list that IE developers are reviewing the HTML 5 standard for future versions of Internet Explorer. They've given some feedback on the current editor's draft, saying that they 'have more questions than answers' and criticizing many of HTML 5's new tags, like <header>, <footer> and <aside>, calling them 'arbitrary' or unnecessary. It remains to be seen whether Microsoft waited too long to try to influence basic parts of the spec that most of their competitors have already adopted."
Well, if they implement parts of it, drop other parts, add a few bits of their own and call the result "HTML 5.2", then I hope that the standards group sue them for misrepresentation.
Eric Baird
While everyone should keep an eye on Microsoft (*was always) this is generally a good thing for the Internet as a whole. We as consumers, and we as web-developers, alike will be a lot happier if all the major players can create a consistent experience.
If Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, and Apple are all on board before the spec' is even in the final stages we have a fairly good shot of similar behavour no matter the platform or browser.
A lot of Microsoft's "notes" on the HTML 5 spec are either - "This isn't detailed enough to implement concistently" or "Do we need this?" Both of which are fair questions to ask and something that others will want to answer before HTML 5 goes live.
Factor in most browsing stats are from slackers on their work PCs, not home machines.
http://gs.statcounter.com/
Usage patterns vary a lot among countries, but the general trend is: IE usage drops on weekends, Fx usage climbs on weekends.
This is something Opera could actually push quite much via other countries. Opera has 40-60% marketshare in CIS countries, better than both FF and IE. They push the support for HTML5 and its new tags there and CIS websites adopt it (cyrillic language differences make it so that most people use local websites instead of US ones). IE and FF also has to start supporting the same to get marketshare there, and bam: you have the support elsewhere too. And they can also start supporting it on Wii, Mobile Phones and other accessories they make web browsers too. People usually underestimate the power of Opera because of their smaller marketshare (in US home PC's).
Chrome does not install in /programs, so it can be installed in machines at work with ease; kind of a big FU from google to MS and IT departments. I wish the installers for all other browsers followed suit.
Firefox, Opera, Safari will show a standards compliant page in its all glory with complete functionality. If they don't, file a bug report. I can guarantee you it will be the second important issue to fix after a critical security flaw.
Opera 10 passes the very aggressive Acid 3 test, what are you talking about? Do you know how many millions of lines, manpower wasted just to make sites designed for their junk browser appear fine on those browsers?
About the MS puppets... Slashdot user for a long time here, we know who is who and all their tricks.
The amount of code that can be removed from a web app if you give the condition (!msie) is incredible. This is why more libraries do a check at initialization to determine if they're dealing with IE or "anything else", and then dynamically load the code for that environment.
I've started implementing a third condition to that: Is the browser non-IE && FF3+ || webkit (some chrome/safari feature sniffing) || Opera (again, some feature sniffing to see if it's from the past ~year). In these cases, the amount of code that's needed to be brought in, and the amount of bureaucracy that needs to be handled at runtime drops like a stone. The latest batch of browsers are amazingly fast and compliant.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
That's because it is part of Denmark. Unfortunately our government loves everything Microsoft. When Bill Gates was here he got the same reception as a President does. He also met with our government heads.
With properly designed CSS and Javascript, you can always have a fallback that basically equates to "how you would've done it in HTML 4", that'll work just fine in IE.
In my new sites, IE users get a functional app, but not a pretty, or even necessarily ajaxy one.
It's extra work, but you end up supporting all sorts of crippled browsers, from lynx, to cell phones, to IE.
I do not know why Opera is so popular in Russia (and CIS / ex-USSR / Eastern Europe), but let me make a guess.
Computers came to Eastern Europe much later than in the West, and PCs later still. When they did appear, they triggered the same effect that was previously seen in the West, however - the birth and spread of the "hacker" culture among those susceptible to it. People tinkered with machines, found interesting hacks and ways around limitations, and so on.
The difference was that all this happened on PCs. There were no PDPs or similar machines (they were there earlier, but not in sufficient quantities, and never as accessible as in Western universities). Thus, the first generation raised on DOS, and the second saw the migration to Windows.
This resulted in an unusually high concentration of DOS/Win power users in those countries. And when Internet, and later the browser wars, came, that situation still persisted - most computer users in Russia were still mostly in the "power user" category by Western standards. Because of that, animosity towards IE was a very early phenomenon, and predated the appearance of today's common alternatives such as Mozilla or Firefox (some people have stubbornly stuck to NN, but it was clearly inferior). So, at that time, Opera was the only reasonable alternative. It actually worked, it was fast, and it had lots of nifty features that IE wouldn't see for years to come (such as MDI, which was a precursor to tab browsing).
One minor thing there was that Opera isn't free. But in Russia in particular, the software culture had long been centered around using pirated software, often distributed from friend to friend. In fact, you could get odd looks by using licensed software at home ("Where does this guy get so much money to waste it on stuff that everyone else gets for free?"), and many people didn't even understand the concept of licensed commercial software and pirating - as far as they were concerned, if you could copy it, then surely it is okay to do so. And so, the price of Opera simply never entered into equation.