It's not Internet Explorer that is compatible with most websites, it's most websites that are compatible with Internet Explorer. If it wasn't for the extra work web developers do to compensate for that abortion of a browser, you'd be seeing a hell of a lot of websites that Internet Explorer breaks with.
we insist that each developer employ a validation tool set to validate according to XHTML 1.1.
You can't serve XHTML 1.1 as text/html, which makes your website incompatible with legacy browsers, including all versions of Internet Explorer. Unless you are ignoring the relevant RFCs.
How are other web developers planning on dealing with the issue of testing for multiple browsers?
Same as always - VMWare.
I've never been able to have multiple versions of IE on one computer
There's a hack that mostly works. Extract the files to a directory, put an empty file in there called iexplore.exe.local and that's it. Or that's how I remember it, google for it if that doesn't work.
does anyone know if that will change with IE7?
I asked on the IEBlog but didn't get a positive response.
Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 and Internet Explorer 6 are essentially the same browser as far as support for the W3C specifications goes. There are two CSS bugfixes and added PNG alpha channel support. That is it.
Beta 2 will have HTML and CSS updates, including additional selector support that many web developers count on for distinguishing between Internet Explorer and other browsers.
Basically, it's very doubtful that Beta 1 will break anything, but very likely that Beta 2 will break stuff, especially advanced, CSS-based layouts.
If you've ever actually done CSS development, you learn that IE's "broken" CSS support isn't as "broken" as everyone likes to claim.
That's bullshit. Entire sections of CSS 2 are missing - e.g. tables, most selectors,:hover only works on a elements, generated content...
And, no, IE doesn't support all of CSS2
It doesn't even come remotely near supporting all of CSS 2.
the stuff that it doesn't support isn't exactly die-hard-essential to create a page.
How many articles and hacks and so on have you read about for creating multiple column layouts of various styles? I must have seen a few dozen at least. How many times have you seen somebody complain about how difficult CSS is because they have to use workarounds like that? display: table-cell alone would render most of them obsolete.
So you've figured out how to deal with Internet Explorer's bugs, and have been doing it long enough that it doesn't impact your time as much. Big deal. Other developers won't have as much experience, and the time it takes them to learn, and the time it takes them to hone their workarounds, and the time it takes to implement the workarounds once they are as experienced as you all add up. Maybe you work in a place where all the developers are experts who have every workaround memorised, but if so, then you are very lucky and certainly not the norm.
And I'm going to keep developing applications that work - not by working around IE bugs, but by coding tight, coding smart, and avoiding the CSS2 features that I don't really need.
How can you "code tight and smart" when you have to include redundant, completely unnecessary code because Internet Explorer doesn't implement e.g. attribute selectors or generated content? Or when you have to include twice as many rules to do something, one set for Internet Explorer and one set for every other browser?
Technically, you are both right. It was in the beta release of Internet Explorer for XP Service Pack 2, but Firefox implemented it and released a final version before Microsoft could get the final version of the service pack released.
So Microsoft werethe ones that came up with the idea, but Firefox brought it to market first.
The under the hood stuff that matters to developers, is in my opinion and probably for 99 per cent of the users, irrelevant. Developers have to make it work. I could care less about acid test and css compliance.
So it doesn't matter to you that web developers spend hours fixing stuff that breaks in Internet Explorer instead of adding features to their websites?
Web developers' time is finite. Time spent on Internet Explorer fixes is time that could have been spent on stuff that matters to you.
Re:I liked Internet Explorer 7 the first time...
on
IE7 Bugs and Reviews
·
· Score: 1
You are looking at the reference rendering - a picture of what it should look like. You clicked on the wrong link. Dillo is even further away from rendering the Acid2 test correctly than Internet Explorer is, and that's saying something.
It's easy to talk about control structures like for loops, functions, etc because they have names. It's easy to say things like "it's insane to have all that code in one function".
Software architecture, which is a level more abstract than syntax and control structures, lacked such names for some time. Instead of names, you'd describe a solution or something.
If you haven't named something, you can't talk about it effectively. You can't discuss its pros and cons with people easily. And so on.
"Design patterns" is basically identifying and naming common approaches to solving problems that crop up again and again when contructing software. Once they are identified and named, you can read or write about the tradeoffs such a pattern has, the advantages of one pattern over another, and so on.
They can be solutions to small problems or large problems. Beginning programmers can apply patterns to their smal problems, and as they grow in ability, learn the larger patterns as they need to. It's valuable in this respect, because you will be inheriting the experience of other programmers as you learn these patterns.
I played Mario64 (that's the name I was trying to remember) for a while, it just wasn't a tenth as fun as Marioworld or SMB 1-3. I've played a few other 3D platformers since then, and had exactly the same experience. There's something very different about 2D and 3D platformers that makes one fun and one not fun to me.
I think the distinction between a mod that unlocks otherwise inaccessible content and a mod that adds new content is extremely dubious. The two cases are identical from the user's point of view. It makes no sense to treat them differently in terms of classification.
I think it makes perfect sense. In one case, the content is being sold, in the other case, it is not. The law regulated what can be sold, so it would cover the case where the content is on the disc, but not the case where the content is obtained from another source.
Here's a longer article, also from the SMH.
Thanks, that's a lot clearer than the submitted article.
I agree with your general point that there's a difference between nailing somebody for something they've done and nailing somebody for something they are, but you picked a poor choice with the Satanist example.
The idea of Satanic cults that sacrifice humans is an urban legend - in reality Satanism is a group of relatively benign religions. In fact, you can make the case that it's far less harmful than, say, Christianity - Satanism is generally humanistic rather than belief in the supernatural, and doesn't tell people to stone homosexuals to death or anything like that.
The certification board didn't see it because it's not a part of the game.
Yes, it is. It's a part of the game that is normally inaccessible, but it's still part of the game. When you buy the game, you get it.
And nobody else who doesn't want to see it will see it. So what's the problem?
The problem is that Australia decided years ago that you should be of a certain age to buy certain material. They set up a board to decide what material should be available to what ages. This board's judgement has been circumvented. Whether you and I think it's correct or not, the fact is that people can buy this game when the board hasn't deemed it suitable for them - which might be perfectly okay for the kids, but not okay for their parents. According to Australian law, the people who will see this illegally are not the people who can legally decide whether they should see it or not.
What are they certifying anyway - the game or the CD it comes on?
There is no practical difference as far as I can see. The material is on the CD, the CD, and therefore the material, is being sold.
My understanding is that they have viewed content made accessible by the HotCoffee mod and decided it's not appropriate for a MA15+ certification. They will not review the certification again unless RockStar issue a modified version.
Those are not claims that were made by TFA. Do you have another source?
Well the writeup says "on the cheap", so I'd guess free as in beer. But then again, it's called "Liberated Games", so I'd guess free as in speech. But then again, it says "for the grand price of zero dollars and zero cents", so I'd guess free as in beer. But then again, it says "released for free in one way or another", so I'd guess it's time to start reaching for the paracetamol.
At least we have the Slashdot editors that do their jobs and fix the writeup to clear up any confusion.
Mario/Zelda/Metroid on the the SNES were the pinnacle of Nintendo gaming. It all went downhill with the N64
I agree. The SNES was the last Nintendo hardware I owned. When the N64 came out, I remember being distinctly unimpressed with Mario 3D or whatever it was called. The graphics might have been better (and in fact, I think they were worse; big, blocky 3D is worse than small, pixellated 2D), but platformers as a genre are far more playable in 2D.
From my perspective, it wasn't so much "the only thing Nintendo fans seemed to want were 3D sequels", but "the only thing Nintendo fans were given were 3D sequels". If the N64 had come out with Marioworld 2 that was 2D, then I would have gladly bought it. But that wouldn't have shown off the 3D hardware, would it?
What's the point of "hacking" a site to make it look good in IE?
Because the whole idea behind making a website is to communicate effectively. Letting Internet Explorer screw things up is, in the short-term, very counterproductive. There's no denying that.
However, in the long-term, the amount of effort saved by providing an incentive to switch browsers and forcing Microsoft to fix Internet Explorer, will pay off, since you can divert all the effort you used to hack for Internet Explorer into actual improvements to your websites.
I would LOVE If tomorrow all the major websites said, "Notice - We are now supporting web browsers which support web standards"
I'd love it too. But because it's very harmful in the short-term, no businesses will do it. If one business took the lead, their competitors would sit back and watch their traffic rise as all the Internet Explorer users found alternatives.
Can we start a new movement here on slashdot?
On Slashdot? Surely you jest:).
I think this kind of thing only has a slim chance of taking off at best. It would need a acronym/buzzword too. It's kinda like BrowseHappy on steroids.
Perhaps an IBM or similar company has a new feature that they want, or worse, need, in the Linux kernel, and as such they spend all their time working on that.
The reality might be however that an improved VM is needed but all the Red Hat guys are busy working on some scheduling code that really isn't as crucial.
If an improved VM is needed, then who needs it? Why would there not be anybody to "scratch that itch" if people need it? The presence of large companies contributing scheduling code does not mean that other people can't contribute VM code.
But I propose that we watch what is being worked on and that our priorities are appropriate.
From your post, I suspect what you mean is that you want Redhat's priorities to be appropriate for your needs. Free Software isn't about getting other people to do what you want.
If there's nobody contributing code that satisfies your needs, then perhaps the rest of the world doesn't consider it as necessary as you do, in which case, you have an unusual problem and you know exactly what you can do to fix it - code it yourself or pay somebody else to.
As far as I know, Linus himself still verifies all submissions and deems which baselines they appear in, but I hope that since he's also a professional and getting paid by Corporate if our priorities are straight.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not Internet Explorer that is compatible with most websites, it's most websites that are compatible with Internet Explorer. If it wasn't for the extra work web developers do to compensate for that abortion of a browser, you'd be seeing a hell of a lot of websites that Internet Explorer breaks with.
we insist that each developer employ a validation tool set to validate according to XHTML 1.1.
You can't serve XHTML 1.1 as text/html, which makes your website incompatible with legacy browsers, including all versions of Internet Explorer. Unless you are ignoring the relevant RFCs.
How are other web developers planning on dealing with the issue of testing for multiple browsers?
Same as always - VMWare.
I've never been able to have multiple versions of IE on one computer
There's a hack that mostly works. Extract the files to a directory, put an empty file in there called iexplore.exe.local and that's it. Or that's how I remember it, google for it if that doesn't work.
does anyone know if that will change with IE7?
I asked on the IEBlog but didn't get a positive response.
Does it break anything fundamental?
Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 and Internet Explorer 6 are essentially the same browser as far as support for the W3C specifications goes. There are two CSS bugfixes and added PNG alpha channel support. That is it.
Beta 2 will have HTML and CSS updates, including additional selector support that many web developers count on for distinguishing between Internet Explorer and other browsers.
Basically, it's very doubtful that Beta 1 will break anything, but very likely that Beta 2 will break stuff, especially advanced, CSS-based layouts.
If you've ever actually done CSS development, you learn that IE's "broken" CSS support isn't as "broken" as everyone likes to claim.
That's bullshit. Entire sections of CSS 2 are missing - e.g. tables, most selectors, :hover only works on a elements, generated content...
And, no, IE doesn't support all of CSS2
It doesn't even come remotely near supporting all of CSS 2.
the stuff that it doesn't support isn't exactly die-hard-essential to create a page.
How many articles and hacks and so on have you read about for creating multiple column layouts of various styles? I must have seen a few dozen at least. How many times have you seen somebody complain about how difficult CSS is because they have to use workarounds like that? display: table-cell alone would render most of them obsolete.
So you've figured out how to deal with Internet Explorer's bugs, and have been doing it long enough that it doesn't impact your time as much. Big deal. Other developers won't have as much experience, and the time it takes them to learn, and the time it takes them to hone their workarounds, and the time it takes to implement the workarounds once they are as experienced as you all add up. Maybe you work in a place where all the developers are experts who have every workaround memorised, but if so, then you are very lucky and certainly not the norm.
And I'm going to keep developing applications that work - not by working around IE bugs, but by coding tight, coding smart, and avoiding the CSS2 features that I don't really need.
How can you "code tight and smart" when you have to include redundant, completely unnecessary code because Internet Explorer doesn't implement e.g. attribute selectors or generated content? Or when you have to include twice as many rules to do something, one set for Internet Explorer and one set for every other browser?
No, it's part of the page. If it's merely a launcher, then the address wouldn't change when you switched tabs.
Technically, you are both right. It was in the beta release of Internet Explorer for XP Service Pack 2, but Firefox implemented it and released a final version before Microsoft could get the final version of the service pack released.
So Microsoft werethe ones that came up with the idea, but Firefox brought it to market first.
The under the hood stuff that matters to developers, is in my opinion and probably for 99 per cent of the users, irrelevant. Developers have to make it work. I could care less about acid test and css compliance.
So it doesn't matter to you that web developers spend hours fixing stuff that breaks in Internet Explorer instead of adding features to their websites?
Web developers' time is finite. Time spent on Internet Explorer fixes is time that could have been spent on stuff that matters to you.
Keep in mind who throws around the world "innovation".
According to the KDE developers, something doesn't have to be new to be innovative.
You are looking at the reference rendering - a picture of what it should look like. You clicked on the wrong link. Dillo is even further away from rendering the Acid2 test correctly than Internet Explorer is, and that's saying something.
They had two weeks and a $100 budget.
Real geeks know that versioning starts before 1.0 :)
It's easy to talk about control structures like for loops, functions, etc because they have names. It's easy to say things like "it's insane to have all that code in one function".
Software architecture, which is a level more abstract than syntax and control structures, lacked such names for some time. Instead of names, you'd describe a solution or something.
If you haven't named something, you can't talk about it effectively. You can't discuss its pros and cons with people easily. And so on.
"Design patterns" is basically identifying and naming common approaches to solving problems that crop up again and again when contructing software. Once they are identified and named, you can read or write about the tradeoffs such a pattern has, the advantages of one pattern over another, and so on.
They can be solutions to small problems or large problems. Beginning programmers can apply patterns to their smal problems, and as they grow in ability, learn the larger patterns as they need to. It's valuable in this respect, because you will be inheriting the experience of other programmers as you learn these patterns.
Er, wouldn't that be "as discovered by Peter Norvig"? Why are you giving the credit to Paul Graham?
Now that you have commented on it, I could be technically correct in saying "as mentioned by putko", but the emphasis would be all wrong, wouldn't it?
You mean Bill doesn't insist on being called 'Lord Gates' any more?
I played Mario64 (that's the name I was trying to remember) for a while, it just wasn't a tenth as fun as Marioworld or SMB 1-3. I've played a few other 3D platformers since then, and had exactly the same experience. There's something very different about 2D and 3D platformers that makes one fun and one not fun to me.
I think the distinction between a mod that unlocks otherwise inaccessible content and a mod that adds new content is extremely dubious. The two cases are identical from the user's point of view. It makes no sense to treat them differently in terms of classification.
I think it makes perfect sense. In one case, the content is being sold, in the other case, it is not. The law regulated what can be sold, so it would cover the case where the content is on the disc, but not the case where the content is obtained from another source.
Here's a longer article, also from the SMH.
Thanks, that's a lot clearer than the submitted article.
I agree with your general point that there's a difference between nailing somebody for something they've done and nailing somebody for something they are, but you picked a poor choice with the Satanist example.
The idea of Satanic cults that sacrifice humans is an urban legend - in reality Satanism is a group of relatively benign religions. In fact, you can make the case that it's far less harmful than, say, Christianity - Satanism is generally humanistic rather than belief in the supernatural, and doesn't tell people to stone homosexuals to death or anything like that.
More information in Wikipædia.
Have you been overclocking your eyes again?
The certification board didn't see it because it's not a part of the game.
Yes, it is. It's a part of the game that is normally inaccessible, but it's still part of the game. When you buy the game, you get it.
And nobody else who doesn't want to see it will see it. So what's the problem?
The problem is that Australia decided years ago that you should be of a certain age to buy certain material. They set up a board to decide what material should be available to what ages. This board's judgement has been circumvented. Whether you and I think it's correct or not, the fact is that people can buy this game when the board hasn't deemed it suitable for them - which might be perfectly okay for the kids, but not okay for their parents. According to Australian law, the people who will see this illegally are not the people who can legally decide whether they should see it or not.
What are they certifying anyway - the game or the CD it comes on?
There is no practical difference as far as I can see. The material is on the CD, the CD, and therefore the material, is being sold.
My understanding is that they have viewed content made accessible by the HotCoffee mod and decided it's not appropriate for a MA15+ certification. They will not review the certification again unless RockStar issue a modified version.
Those are not claims that were made by TFA. Do you have another source?
Who's modding this guy up? We'll be inundated with awful puns if you egg him on!
Well the writeup says "on the cheap", so I'd guess free as in beer. But then again, it's called "Liberated Games", so I'd guess free as in speech. But then again, it says "for the grand price of zero dollars and zero cents", so I'd guess free as in beer. But then again, it says "released for free in one way or another", so I'd guess it's time to start reaching for the paracetamol.
At least we have the Slashdot editors that do their jobs and fix the writeup to clear up any confusion.
Mario/Zelda/Metroid on the the SNES were the pinnacle of Nintendo gaming. It all went downhill with the N64
I agree. The SNES was the last Nintendo hardware I owned. When the N64 came out, I remember being distinctly unimpressed with Mario 3D or whatever it was called. The graphics might have been better (and in fact, I think they were worse; big, blocky 3D is worse than small, pixellated 2D), but platformers as a genre are far more playable in 2D.
From my perspective, it wasn't so much "the only thing Nintendo fans seemed to want were 3D sequels", but "the only thing Nintendo fans were given were 3D sequels". If the N64 had come out with Marioworld 2 that was 2D, then I would have gladly bought it. But that wouldn't have shown off the 3D hardware, would it?
What's the point of "hacking" a site to make it look good in IE?
Because the whole idea behind making a website is to communicate effectively. Letting Internet Explorer screw things up is, in the short-term, very counterproductive. There's no denying that.
However, in the long-term, the amount of effort saved by providing an incentive to switch browsers and forcing Microsoft to fix Internet Explorer, will pay off, since you can divert all the effort you used to hack for Internet Explorer into actual improvements to your websites.
I would LOVE If tomorrow all the major websites said, "Notice - We are now supporting web browsers which support web standards"
I'd love it too. But because it's very harmful in the short-term, no businesses will do it. If one business took the lead, their competitors would sit back and watch their traffic rise as all the Internet Explorer users found alternatives.
Can we start a new movement here on slashdot?
On Slashdot? Surely you jest :).
I think this kind of thing only has a slim chance of taking off at best. It would need a acronym/buzzword too. It's kinda like BrowseHappy on steroids.
Perhaps an IBM or similar company has a new feature that they want, or worse, need, in the Linux kernel, and as such they spend all their time working on that.
The reality might be however that an improved VM is needed but all the Red Hat guys are busy working on some scheduling code that really isn't as crucial.
If an improved VM is needed, then who needs it? Why would there not be anybody to "scratch that itch" if people need it? The presence of large companies contributing scheduling code does not mean that other people can't contribute VM code.
But I propose that we watch what is being worked on and that our priorities are appropriate.
From your post, I suspect what you mean is that you want Redhat's priorities to be appropriate for your needs. Free Software isn't about getting other people to do what you want.
If there's nobody contributing code that satisfies your needs, then perhaps the rest of the world doesn't consider it as necessary as you do, in which case, you have an unusual problem and you know exactly what you can do to fix it - code it yourself or pay somebody else to.
As far as I know, Linus himself still verifies all submissions and deems which baselines they appear in, but I hope that since he's also a professional and getting paid by Corporate if our priorities are straight.
That sentence doesn't make sense.