What I meant to get across was that PHP 5.2 is the current stable branch and that there are some hosts out there that are still strictly only PHP4... despite some of the security issues.
True, but it still contradicts the point you made that it's "so available". Maybe it's how I'm reading it, but I took that to mean that every cheap web host in the world is going to have PHP somewhere -- but that's not much of a strength if you're counting all the PHP4 hosts in that statistic.
it allows a lot of control and fine-tuning in the event that I need it (yes, I know ASM is better, but also a steeper learning curve.)
Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Write your program in something reasonably fast (like Python), and add C and ASM as needed.
Of course, this does mean you need to know C or ASM -- or that someone on your team does. I'd argue you need to know them more for understanding than for any practical purpose.
You can't be serious. You just can't be. Any coder who file_get_content's a 2GB file on a box with 512MB of RAM, and is surprised at the outcome, should NOT be a coder.
Or maybe they need to learn to be a coder.
If you have "an inexperienced programmer [who] might not know any better", you don't have a programmer - you have a toaster operator who thinks they can program because they've figured out how to use an "if" block.
You were born less than a toaster operator. You were born a smelly infant who couldn't do much other than shit, piss, and gurgle.
Now, neither babies nor people who slurp multi-gig files should be paid professionals, but neither diapers nor crashing the server in your basement should mean there's no future for you, ever. We've all got some "rm -rf/" in our past.
If I gave you 2 billion dollars to support legislation for me, would you do it?
Depends on the legislation.
Also, if you gave me 2 billion dollars to do something I was going to do anyway, I'd take it. Or if you gave me 2 billion dollars in the hopes that I'd do something for you, but without getting me to actually agree to it, that's your fault. And that's what you get for trying to bribe me.
Or would you listen to "the voters,"
I'd listen, yes. Just as I'd listen to you.
And then I'd vote for what I thought was the right thing to vote for. As in, I'd follow my conscience. You know, basic ethics.
If the voters don't like it, they don't vote for me, and that's fine. But if they voted me in, they must have agreed with me on something.
Add the lack of knowledge of the consequences of said legislation that almost all politicians suffer from at least at some point in their careers, if not all the time,
Which is precisely why I'd listen to everyone I can. In particular, I'd ask the experts -- on both sides of the debate.
The voters won't remember you for taking a stand against lobbyists but for accepting that money in the first place, even if you never acted on it. The relationship between bribes and biased legislation is just too great in their minds.
Honestly, you don't think advertising is particularly great in their minds?
Think about it: would you re-elect someone who publicly announced that he or she would no longer act upon bribes, or would you suspect that this is just a ploy to get more votes with good-old-fashioned political deception?
You're assuming that it was, originally, a bribe.
Yes, I'd accept the money. But I absolutely would not promise anything.
PHP.INI means there are thousands of variations of the language.
I don't see that as a problem. Or at least, the problem there is that those variations are in PHP.INI, which isn't exactly accessible to the application developer.
Take Ruby -- as I've been re-learning Ruby for work, I've also had to learn Rake and Capistrano, both of which can be seen as mini-languages built on top of Ruby. This is a feature, not a bug -- plus, no one is forcing me to use Rake, even in a so-called Rake script.
When a website is not standards-compliant, it still works.
If Microsoft creates an atmosphere where web developers can be sure that their website will work on all future versions of IE, no matter how broken it is with respect to the standards... what are competitors supposed to do?
It's hard to figure out exactly where the assumption creeps in. He goes from seemingly-solid fact, to seemingly-solid fact, to this:
Giving up control of content and giving it away free are not rational ideas in a market economy, yet everyone's cheering.
Wait -- is he actually assuming that DRM-free equals free as in beer?
I hope he never diets. Sugar-free and fat-free products might confuse him.
I love how intelligent people think subscription-based music services are the way to go. All you can eat for $15 a month. Talk about devaluing your product. People can download enough songs to fill 100 albums and pay under $20. How does anyone make money this way?
Well, let's see. First, they're DRM-laden.
Second, did he honestly think that anyone was going to pay for those 100 albums? If there wasn't a rental service, they'd pirate. If there wasn't easy piracy, then they'd just buy less.
Making $N is always a good idea, where N>0, and the alternative is making $0.
And the rentals absolutely should cost less. He seems to be on the brink of understanding this:
Worse yet, if you sign up for a subscription, you're saying that it's okay for the music service to wipe out your music collection if you cancel.
Yeah. So they cost less, because they provide less worth. If you buy a physical album, you're paying more, but you can guarantee that you have access to it, forever, on any medium you care to translate it to.
Imagine walking into your living room as all your books disappear because you changed libraries, or your DVD collection disappears because you switched from Blockbuster to Netflix.
Let's see -- books in my living room, I bought. If I have a bunch of books in my living room that came from a library, well, either I stole them, or I paid enough late fees to buy them several times over. And if they're not actually in my living room, but in the library, then I absolutely expect to lose access to my old library's books when I join a new library.
DVD collection -- same deal. Is this guy stealing DVDs from Blockbuster or Netflix?
In summary, we have a new, Dvorak-level troll on our hands, only so far as I can tell, he's not intentionally trolling, but he actually is that stupid. Didn't the old PC Mag editor-in-chief quit because of Vista? Well, this is what they replaced him with...
On Windows, I enjoy the bliss of not knowing until I try it whether a particular drag-n-drop is going to result in moving the file, copying the file, creating a shortcut, or just make something up. Same with OS X, and with every other system that tries to helpfully guess for me.
On KDE, if I forget to hold down shift (move) or ctrl (copy), I get a context menu, instead of some completely unpredictable behavior. It mentions the keyboard shortcuts, so that if I'm intelligent, that menu will never bother me again, and I'll know exactly what I'm doing.
While PHP5 is a *lot* better than PHP4 (and probably Perl if one took the time to compare) - it's not really comparable to truly robust OOP languages such as Java, Smalltalk and C++.
How is it better than Perl?
I'll admit Perl's OOP is weird. It's weird syntactically, it's weird conceptually, it feels bolted on, etc.
But scratch the surface a bit -- it's also every bit as powerful as Java or C++. Moreso, I'd say, especially if you like "duck typing" (to steal a Ruby term).
PHP has for much of its history been criticized for not offering the full capabilities of object-oriented programming (OOP).
Nope. PHP has been criticized for:
starting out as insecure by default
lacking the basic capabilities of most other languages -- not just OOP, but things like anonymous subroutines
being designed around the need to embed code in a template (not a good idea -- separate content from logic from presentation!)
having essentially nothing compelling to offer once other languages got said templating ability -- but sensibly as an add-on, not as a core feature of the language (all PHP files, even library code, must be sandwiched between <?php and ?>)
I could go on. Not all of these are really legitimate complaints, or a reason not to use the language; indeed, it has evolved. Due to the amount of code that exists in PHP, and the amount of cheap hosting which runs some form of PHP, I can no longer accuse people of being stupid for choosing PHP, although I might call them insane for liking it if they've given anything else half a chance.
But I wouldn't put a lack of basic OOP particularly high on the list, especially with how dysfunctional the OOP was when it was finally added.
Disclaimer: As much as I enjoy flamewars, and although I realize this will feed one, that's not why I'm posting. I'm just posting to clarify -- if you thought all PHP needed was OOP, you're dead wrong. If you're trying to improve PHP, look beyond OOP. (Look especially to the mysql_add_slashes_no_really_i_mean_it_this_time() functions, and compare them to Perl's support for prepared queries.)
PHP is so available and that is its real strength. It's biggest problem is those lazy folks who are still running 4.2.x or some branch that is or is to be discontinued very soon here.
You kind of contradicted yourself there. That, or PHP is much more pervasive than I give it credit for, such that even the 5.2.x branch is more widely deployed than everything else... but I kind of doubt that.
I love the rapid-ness of PHP though. At present I even use PHP-GTK2 to prototype all of my idea's while I learn new languages. That is, I'll make a rough draft in PHP-GTK and then try to do the same in C/C++... which is much more painstaking for someone who has used web development for so long. But I am slowly un-learning my habits to depend on magic to handle memory for me, etc.
You know, there's quite a lot besides PHP and C/C++. Not all of it makes you handle your own memory -- but you absolutely should have that experience of having to do that, so that you understand what's going on behind the scenes (why not to slurp the whole file, etc).
The goal was to find a method that was more explicit than the DOCTYPE switch, and could be implemented in any browser, not just IE.
And they came up with browser detection 2.0.
I do apologize for not actually looking this up ahead of time. In my later posts in this thread, I do try to clarify that while the use of meta to do random things is not standard, this also means that any actual use of meta is, by definition, not part of the standard. Which is fine when it's actual, supplementary information. It's disgusting when it's suddenly actually required, and again, only for one browser.
How about some examples of "real work" that can't be done in OS X's shell?
Running a Rails server on Amazon EC2.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that OS X has an inferior commandline when it comes to real work. It may be in some ways -- DTrace being what spawned this discussion -- but what I meant was simply that no matter what OS I have as a client, I'm going to have to ssh somewhere to do real work, and in the case of EC2, it's going to be Linux, because Amazon says so.
By some defintions it's always been broken, since it doesn't comply with the spec. But users seeing a broken page on a broken browser that looks right doesn't care.
The only reason we are having this conversation is the 800-pound-gorilla in the room -- IE is a fucking monopoly.
Were IE not a fucking monopoly, what would happen is, users would see the broken page in a compliant browser. You seem to agree...
And for the users on a compliant browser it will always be broken regardless of tagging.
But you see, if there was sufficient marketshare for compliant browsers, or if most browsers were mostly compliant, no one would be stupid enough to release a webpage which doesn't work with them. Just as today, people can be called stupid for releasing a page that doesn't work in IE.
Imagine a scenario where there are five browsers, all equally popular. If a page works in four out of those five browsers, do users blame the page, or the browser? If this happens consistently, for a lot of pages, and it's always the same one, don't you think that one browser would be rushing to patch the problem?
And do you honestly think that anyone would have a page that only works in one of the five? That would be like (pardon the analogy) releasing a Ford-only radio, which would actually explode if you put it in a Chevy.
But, you see, IE is a fucking monopoly, so this actually does happen -- people actually do make IE-only sites, targeted towards a specific version of IE. Meanwhile, I try to make standards-compliant sites that render well in Firefox, Konqueror, Safari, and even Lynx, and I try to be in a situation where I don't have to care if IE is broken -- partly because it is more future-proof, in that if IE ever gets it right, that page will render properly in IE, also.
Yes they do but Google's Summer of code isn't a great example. It is a recruitment tool and does buy them a lot of good publicity.
It also doesn't directly benefit them, in that it's still entirely possible for someone to complete their SoC project, get paid, and go on to work at Microsoft. Nothing about SoC limits it to more than open source.
The company I work for does donate to a charity that helps disabled children. We don't publicize it because the owner thinks of this as an act of charity.
That is a better example, but precisely because you don't publicize it, it's not a really solid example -- I can't verify that you're even telling the truth, and assuming you are, there are still details missing. (I'm not asking you to fill these in, for obvious reasons...)
What you can not expect them to do is to provide donations that are actually counter to their interests!
Phillip-Morris does.
But perhaps, if there's a charity which you see as a good thing, that you would very much like to participate in, but is counter to the interests of your company... perhaps that says something about the interests of your company?
You start thinking about efficient code not by how many lines it takes to write it, but my how much memory is will consume, how many objects it is creating, how many context switches it will have to perform, etc.
Which can still be done with the help of a debugger (provided you can step in deep enough), but I do see your point.
Its main market is for an easy to use home computer and as a creative platform for video editing, graphic design and professional audio.
And software development. Or where did you think the developers of those video editors work and test their code?
If you want a command line you're fully in control of, use Linux or a BSD Unix.
No disagreement there, but it doesn't hurt to remind people that OS X is not that. People often leave Linux for OS X, claiming that it's basically an easier-to-use Linux than Linux, you still have all your stuff, etc. And you can always ssh to a Linux server to do real work.
It's a commercial OS and Apple will do what they like so long as its legal.
What do you want, for Microsoft to change the rendering engine out from under people?
Yes. To anyone this affects: Your website was broken in the first place. It is partly MS' fault that it was broken, but mostly yours, for not trying it out with other browsers.
Thousands of websites to stop working in that browser (the one that most people use) until the developers can fix the site?
Yes. Let them add hacks like <use-fucked-up-block-model>. Don't make the standards compliant people have to add <dont-fuck-up-my-box-model/>.
(Yes, I realize it's an HTTP header. You think that makes it better? I mean, yeah, great -- now "save as" on webpages will break them, unless they're using <http-equiv>. And yes, it's got a browser version number in there!)
It's a bad situation, and it's Microsoft's fault to begin with, but what solution would you propose that wouldn't inconvenience a lot of end users (both developers and their customers, alike)?
I wouldn't. I'd much rather have a little short-term inconvenience, if it means that in the long term, we can forget about all this. Maybe even forgive.
But no, we got the opposite -- something that works in the short term, but will come back to haunt us in the long term. I'm really not looking forward to the <no-really-I-mean-it-standards-compliant-this-time> tag with IE9 in another few years. Nor am I looking forward to IE15 unintentionally introducing a bug in the IE6 compatibility, breaking some decade-old site out of the blue -- I'd much rather it be broken now, when there's a greater chance someone's actually paying attention enough to fix it.
I happen to like them. In any case, on the off-chance that Microsoft is reading this, consider "stupidfucksjustdontgetit" to be feedback. It should be obvious why.
Do you want to add a single tag that all other browsers will ignore, or do you want to spend all your time hacking workarounds?
How about option 3: Code to the standards, and ignore specific browsers. Obviously, you want to test it in other browsers to expose flaws in your own code/assumptions, but if a browser doesn't work due to actually being non-standard, I want that to be Not My Problem.
I've spent enough of my life hacking workarounds around Microsoft crap. How about they work around the standard for a change?
I ask because Microsoft is not about to drop compatibility with billions of pages that unfortunately rely on IE6-specific shortcomings and rendering quirks.
They already did, to some extent, with IE7.
Keep in mind, these billions of pages were already broken. They should not have been compatible with anything. Microsoft dropping compatibility for them would actually be a healthy thing, compared with, say, some of the things they broke with Vista.
I'd like to see the face of a CIO when his architect tells him that the corporate-wide upgrade to IE8 broke half the apps on the intranet because, you know,
Because, you know, he was a moron who didn't test those apps on IE8 before rolling it out. Didn't know about WSUS, you know. Can I have his job when he's fired for incompetence?
Again: Same thing happened with IE7. Same kind of complaints, same intranets keeping everyone on IE6 for awhile.
The only reason you mention this is the same reason it's not a problem: On intranets, apps tend to be more tied to a single browser, because you can mandate that browser. Because the alternative was even worse -- mandating the install of some custom client-side app, maybe some Visual Basic + Access crap. This same freedom that lets intranet sites be lazy with respect to the standards also allows them to delay IE8 as long as they want -- or, yeah, use Firefox.
Firefox is not bugfree -- it leaks like a sieve (or "fragments"), chewing up half your RAM. Konqueror is not bugfree -- it crashes maybe every day or two for me. I'm sure Safari and Opera each have their own bugs.
But I can relatively easily make a website -- even a web app -- which works the same way in Firefox, Konqueror, Safari, Opera, and so on. This is the first 90% of the project. The other 90% is making it work on IE.
it's unrealistic to expect every webpage around the world to get checked and fixed every time they fix a bug, and it's equally unrealistic to expect every page to follow the standard if there's a good chance it can be made to look right in IE.
Why is it unrealistic to ask people to follow the standard, and to let IE be buggy? Why should we be working around Microsoft's bugs for them?
Honestly, they should have simply made a compatibility tag from the start which basicly means "render like IE4/5/6/7/8/latest, DON'T apply any later bugfixes because we've worked around them".
Perhaps, but has it occurred to you that this is exactly what DOCTYPEs are for? So that when XHTML 6.0 comes out, browsers will still be able to deal with XHTML 5?
First, if you're a webmaster who only designed for IE6, shame on you. If you designed for other browsers, which were mostly standards compliant, you should be able to just swap in one of those for IE8, with minimal tweaking. (Or maybe IE8 isn't that compliant, hmm?)
But more importantly, they are adding a non-standard tag to indicate standards-compliance, which is just fucked up. How about you use a non-standard tag to indicate non-standards-compliance -- to indicate that you want the old way of doing things? How about you just drop your DOCTYPE?
If you don't maintain your website enough to even be able to do that, I don't see how that's Microsoft's fault. And it really pisses me off that Microsoft has the audacity to demand that the rest of the world code specifically for IE. You had to do that before, anyway, but this is the first time they've publicly admitted it. Can we have our antitrust suit back, please?
Slashdot Mirror
True, but it still contradicts the point you made that it's "so available". Maybe it's how I'm reading it, but I took that to mean that every cheap web host in the world is going to have PHP somewhere -- but that's not much of a strength if you're counting all the PHP4 hosts in that statistic.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Write your program in something reasonably fast (like Python), and add C and ASM as needed.
Of course, this does mean you need to know C or ASM -- or that someone on your team does. I'd argue you need to know them more for understanding than for any practical purpose.
Or maybe they need to learn to be a coder.
You were born less than a toaster operator. You were born a smelly infant who couldn't do much other than shit, piss, and gurgle.
Now, neither babies nor people who slurp multi-gig files should be paid professionals, but neither diapers nor crashing the server in your basement should mean there's no future for you, ever. We've all got some "rm -rf /" in our past.
Depends on the legislation.
Also, if you gave me 2 billion dollars to do something I was going to do anyway, I'd take it. Or if you gave me 2 billion dollars in the hopes that I'd do something for you, but without getting me to actually agree to it, that's your fault. And that's what you get for trying to bribe me.
I'd listen, yes. Just as I'd listen to you.
And then I'd vote for what I thought was the right thing to vote for. As in, I'd follow my conscience. You know, basic ethics.
If the voters don't like it, they don't vote for me, and that's fine. But if they voted me in, they must have agreed with me on something.
Which is precisely why I'd listen to everyone I can. In particular, I'd ask the experts -- on both sides of the debate.
Honestly, you don't think advertising is particularly great in their minds?
You're assuming that it was, originally, a bribe.
Yes, I'd accept the money. But I absolutely would not promise anything.
I don't see that as a problem. Or at least, the problem there is that those variations are in PHP.INI, which isn't exactly accessible to the application developer.
Take Ruby -- as I've been re-learning Ruby for work, I've also had to learn Rake and Capistrano, both of which can be seen as mini-languages built on top of Ruby. This is a feature, not a bug -- plus, no one is forcing me to use Rake, even in a so-called Rake script.
If Microsoft creates an atmosphere where web developers can be sure that their website will work on all future versions of IE, no matter how broken it is with respect to the standards... what are competitors supposed to do?
XKCD says it better than I could.
"Better a hundred guilty men go free than one innocent man be falsely convicted."
It needs to be well over 99% before it's even worth talking about. It's innocent until proven guilty, not innocent until 75% likely.
It's hard to figure out exactly where the assumption creeps in. He goes from seemingly-solid fact, to seemingly-solid fact, to this:
Wait -- is he actually assuming that DRM-free equals free as in beer?
I hope he never diets. Sugar-free and fat-free products might confuse him.
Well, let's see. First, they're DRM-laden.
Second, did he honestly think that anyone was going to pay for those 100 albums? If there wasn't a rental service, they'd pirate. If there wasn't easy piracy, then they'd just buy less.
Making $N is always a good idea, where N>0, and the alternative is making $0.
And the rentals absolutely should cost less. He seems to be on the brink of understanding this:
Yeah. So they cost less, because they provide less worth. If you buy a physical album, you're paying more, but you can guarantee that you have access to it, forever, on any medium you care to translate it to.
Let's see -- books in my living room, I bought. If I have a bunch of books in my living room that came from a library, well, either I stole them, or I paid enough late fees to buy them several times over. And if they're not actually in my living room, but in the library, then I absolutely expect to lose access to my old library's books when I join a new library.
DVD collection -- same deal. Is this guy stealing DVDs from Blockbuster or Netflix?
In summary, we have a new, Dvorak-level troll on our hands, only so far as I can tell, he's not intentionally trolling, but he actually is that stupid. Didn't the old PC Mag editor-in-chief quit because of Vista? Well, this is what they replaced him with...
Hold shift+drag to move, ctrl+drag to copy.
On Windows, I enjoy the bliss of not knowing until I try it whether a particular drag-n-drop is going to result in moving the file, copying the file, creating a shortcut, or just make something up. Same with OS X, and with every other system that tries to helpfully guess for me.
On KDE, if I forget to hold down shift (move) or ctrl (copy), I get a context menu, instead of some completely unpredictable behavior. It mentions the keyboard shortcuts, so that if I'm intelligent, that menu will never bother me again, and I'll know exactly what I'm doing.
How is it better than Perl?
I'll admit Perl's OOP is weird. It's weird syntactically, it's weird conceptually, it feels bolted on, etc.
But scratch the surface a bit -- it's also every bit as powerful as Java or C++. Moreso, I'd say, especially if you like "duck typing" (to steal a Ruby term).
Nope. PHP has been criticized for:
I could go on. Not all of these are really legitimate complaints, or a reason not to use the language; indeed, it has evolved. Due to the amount of code that exists in PHP, and the amount of cheap hosting which runs some form of PHP, I can no longer accuse people of being stupid for choosing PHP, although I might call them insane for liking it if they've given anything else half a chance.
But I wouldn't put a lack of basic OOP particularly high on the list, especially with how dysfunctional the OOP was when it was finally added.
Disclaimer: As much as I enjoy flamewars, and although I realize this will feed one, that's not why I'm posting. I'm just posting to clarify -- if you thought all PHP needed was OOP, you're dead wrong. If you're trying to improve PHP, look beyond OOP. (Look especially to the mysql_add_slashes_no_really_i_mean_it_this_time() functions, and compare them to Perl's support for prepared queries.)
You kind of contradicted yourself there. That, or PHP is much more pervasive than I give it credit for, such that even the 5.2.x branch is more widely deployed than everything else... but I kind of doubt that.
You know, there's quite a lot besides PHP and C/C++. Not all of it makes you handle your own memory -- but you absolutely should have that experience of having to do that, so that you understand what's going on behind the scenes (why not to slurp the whole file, etc).
And they came up with browser detection 2.0.
I do apologize for not actually looking this up ahead of time. In my later posts in this thread, I do try to clarify that while the use of meta to do random things is not standard, this also means that any actual use of meta is, by definition, not part of the standard. Which is fine when it's actual, supplementary information. It's disgusting when it's suddenly actually required, and again, only for one browser.
Running a Rails server on Amazon EC2.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that OS X has an inferior commandline when it comes to real work. It may be in some ways -- DTrace being what spawned this discussion -- but what I meant was simply that no matter what OS I have as a client, I'm going to have to ssh somewhere to do real work, and in the case of EC2, it's going to be Linux, because Amazon says so.
The only reason we are having this conversation is the 800-pound-gorilla in the room -- IE is a fucking monopoly.
Were IE not a fucking monopoly, what would happen is, users would see the broken page in a compliant browser. You seem to agree...
But you see, if there was sufficient marketshare for compliant browsers, or if most browsers were mostly compliant, no one would be stupid enough to release a webpage which doesn't work with them. Just as today, people can be called stupid for releasing a page that doesn't work in IE.
Imagine a scenario where there are five browsers, all equally popular. If a page works in four out of those five browsers, do users blame the page, or the browser? If this happens consistently, for a lot of pages, and it's always the same one, don't you think that one browser would be rushing to patch the problem?
And do you honestly think that anyone would have a page that only works in one of the five? That would be like (pardon the analogy) releasing a Ford-only radio, which would actually explode if you put it in a Chevy.
But, you see, IE is a fucking monopoly, so this actually does happen -- people actually do make IE-only sites, targeted towards a specific version of IE. Meanwhile, I try to make standards-compliant sites that render well in Firefox, Konqueror, Safari, and even Lynx, and I try to be in a situation where I don't have to care if IE is broken -- partly because it is more future-proof, in that if IE ever gets it right, that page will render properly in IE, also.
I don't. It's what they would tend to lobby for.
In some ways, they'd be no better than the MPAA. In other ways, well, I like violence in my videogames!
It also doesn't directly benefit them, in that it's still entirely possible for someone to complete their SoC project, get paid, and go on to work at Microsoft. Nothing about SoC limits it to more than open source.
That is a better example, but precisely because you don't publicize it, it's not a really solid example -- I can't verify that you're even telling the truth, and assuming you are, there are still details missing. (I'm not asking you to fill these in, for obvious reasons...)
Phillip-Morris does.
But perhaps, if there's a charity which you see as a good thing, that you would very much like to participate in, but is counter to the interests of your company... perhaps that says something about the interests of your company?
Which can still be done with the help of a debugger (provided you can step in deep enough), but I do see your point.
You obviously didn't look very hard.
And software development. Or where did you think the developers of those video editors work and test their code?
No disagreement there, but it doesn't hurt to remind people that OS X is not that. People often leave Linux for OS X, claiming that it's basically an easier-to-use Linux than Linux, you still have all your stuff, etc. And you can always ssh to a Linux server to do real work.
Why is this OK?
Yes. To anyone this affects: Your website was broken in the first place. It is partly MS' fault that it was broken, but mostly yours, for not trying it out with other browsers.
Yes. Let them add hacks like <use-fucked-up-block-model>. Don't make the standards compliant people have to add <dont-fuck-up-my-box-model/>.
(Yes, I realize it's an HTTP header. You think that makes it better? I mean, yeah, great -- now "save as" on webpages will break them, unless they're using <http-equiv>. And yes, it's got a browser version number in there!)
I wouldn't. I'd much rather have a little short-term inconvenience, if it means that in the long term, we can forget about all this. Maybe even forgive.
But no, we got the opposite -- something that works in the short term, but will come back to haunt us in the long term. I'm really not looking forward to the <no-really-I-mean-it-standards-compliant-this-time> tag with IE9 in another few years. Nor am I looking forward to IE15 unintentionally introducing a bug in the IE6 compatibility, breaking some decade-old site out of the blue -- I'd much rather it be broken now, when there's a greater chance someone's actually paying attention enough to fix it.
...when they actually do take steps towards improving standards compliance, as they did with IE7. Barely, but they did.
Here, they made it worse. They actually had the balls to add an IE-only tag (or header) in the name of standards compliance.
here. Kill them all you want.
I happen to like them. In any case, on the off-chance that Microsoft is reading this, consider "stupidfucksjustdontgetit" to be feedback. It should be obvious why.
How about option 3: Code to the standards, and ignore specific browsers. Obviously, you want to test it in other browsers to expose flaws in your own code/assumptions, but if a browser doesn't work due to actually being non-standard, I want that to be Not My Problem.
I've spent enough of my life hacking workarounds around Microsoft crap. How about they work around the standard for a change?
They already did, to some extent, with IE7.
Keep in mind, these billions of pages were already broken. They should not have been compatible with anything. Microsoft dropping compatibility for them would actually be a healthy thing, compared with, say, some of the things they broke with Vista.
I'd like to see the face of a CIO when his architect tells him that the corporate-wide upgrade to IE8 broke half the apps on the intranet because, you know,Because, you know, he was a moron who didn't test those apps on IE8 before rolling it out. Didn't know about WSUS, you know. Can I have his job when he's fired for incompetence?
Again: Same thing happened with IE7. Same kind of complaints, same intranets keeping everyone on IE6 for awhile.
The only reason you mention this is the same reason it's not a problem: On intranets, apps tend to be more tied to a single browser, because you can mandate that browser. Because the alternative was even worse -- mandating the install of some custom client-side app, maybe some Visual Basic + Access crap. This same freedom that lets intranet sites be lazy with respect to the standards also allows them to delay IE8 as long as they want -- or, yeah, use Firefox.
And that is not an excuse.
Firefox is not bugfree -- it leaks like a sieve (or "fragments"), chewing up half your RAM. Konqueror is not bugfree -- it crashes maybe every day or two for me. I'm sure Safari and Opera each have their own bugs.
But I can relatively easily make a website -- even a web app -- which works the same way in Firefox, Konqueror, Safari, Opera, and so on. This is the first 90% of the project. The other 90% is making it work on IE.
Why is it unrealistic to ask people to follow the standard, and to let IE be buggy? Why should we be working around Microsoft's bugs for them?
Perhaps, but has it occurred to you that this is exactly what DOCTYPEs are for? So that when XHTML 6.0 comes out, browsers will still be able to deal with XHTML 5?
First, if you're a webmaster who only designed for IE6, shame on you. If you designed for other browsers, which were mostly standards compliant, you should be able to just swap in one of those for IE8, with minimal tweaking. (Or maybe IE8 isn't that compliant, hmm?)
But more importantly, they are adding a non-standard tag to indicate standards-compliance, which is just fucked up. How about you use a non-standard tag to indicate non-standards-compliance -- to indicate that you want the old way of doing things? How about you just drop your DOCTYPE?
If you don't maintain your website enough to even be able to do that, I don't see how that's Microsoft's fault. And it really pisses me off that Microsoft has the audacity to demand that the rest of the world code specifically for IE. You had to do that before, anyway, but this is the first time they've publicly admitted it. Can we have our antitrust suit back, please?