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IE8 May Not Pass the Acid2 Test After All
Posted by
Zonk
on Wed Jan 23, 2008 01:02 PM
from the follow-me-indy-i-know-the-way dept.
from the follow-me-indy-i-know-the-way dept.
dotne writes "CNET has published an article called Acid2, Acid3 and the power of default. The article predicts that IE8 will not pass the Acid2 test after all: '[Another] scenario could be that Microsoft requires Web pages to change the default settings by flagging that they really, really want to be rendered correctly. Web pages already have a way to say this (called doctype switching, which is supported by all browsers), but Microsoft has all but announced that IE8 will support yet another scheme. If the company decides to implement the new scheme, the Acid2 test — and all the other pages that use doctype switching — will not be rendered correctly.' Microsoft's IE8 render modes have been discussed here previously, and they've caused an uproar in the web development community. According to the scheme, authors must put Microsoft-specific <meta> tags into their pages in order for them to be rendered correctly. I doubt Acid2, nor Acid3 will have Microsoft extensions in them."
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Technology: Microsoft Confirms IE8 Has 3 Render Modes 525 comments
Dak RIT writes "In a blog post this week, Microsoft's IE Platform Architect, Chris Wilson, confirmed that IE8 will use three distinct modes to render web pages. The first two modes will render pages the same as IE7, depending on whether or not a DOCTYPE is provided ('Quirks Mode' and 'Standards Mode'). However, in order to take advantage of the improved standards compliance in IE8, Web developers will have to opt-in by adding an additional meta tag to their web pages. This improved standards mode is the same that was recently reported to pass the Acid 2 test, as was discussed here."
Submission: IE8 will not pass Acid2 — nor Acid3! by Anonymous Coward
[+]
Technology: IE8 Will Be Standards-Compliant By Default 383 comments
A number of readers wrote in to make sure we know about Microsoft's change of heart regarding IE8. The new version of the dominant browser will render in full standards mode by default. Developers wishing to use quirks mode for IE6- and IE7-compatible rendering will have to opt in explicitly. We've previously discussed IE8's render mode a few times. Perhaps Opera's complaint to the EU or the EU's record antitrust fine had something to do with Redmond's about-face.
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Page specific tuning (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Page specific tuning (Score:5, Interesting)
Note, though, that he doesn't say that explicitly, and you shouldn't assume that he will. It's my own conclusion, and you should draw your own, etc...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
With that setup if people really wanted their website to render the old way they could just add a meta tag, and it doesn't mess with the new version of ie
Re:Page specific tuning (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft is so committed to their long-standing policy of coddling the incompetent that they want a way to be lax on pages that specifically request a strict interpretation.
Parent
Re:Page specific tuning (Score:5, Insightful)
They already corupted the doctype tag. The logic behind the new tag is to indicate the renderer you want so future releases do not break the current page.
They dont want to break the web again (like IE7 did). So the web will work by default (as defined by IE 6) and new stuff that targets the new browser should not break when IE 9 is released.
They are attempting to end a cycle of new browsers breaking older pages.
What they need to do is do it right the first time and fix rendering bugs quickly. force people to fallow the standard and it will work. Microsoft should be the most accurate implementers of the specs because they have such a huge install base.
Parent
Re:Page specific tuning (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Page specific tuning (Score:5, Insightful)
Opera, Mozilla/Firefox don't have this problem so why should Microsoft. By adding a tag that specifies the browser it makes the page browser specific and since we are talking IE it is now OS specific .
Sure a web developer could code other browsers in the tag but it will be ignored by other browsers because other browsers already follow standards and don't require the hint. The metatag might as well be called "IEVersion(tm)" because that's what it is. Once again, Microsoft is trying to make a standard Microsoft specific because they are too stupid, lazy or ignorant to implement what everyone else on the planet has agreed to.
Microsoft has no intention of ever being the "most accurate implementors of the specs" because they have no incentive. Implementing a standard does not make Microsoft more money, tying people to Microsoft products does.
The tag gives Microsoft a get out of jail free card so they don't have to follow standards ever again. Using the tag only reinforces their behaviour.
Parent
Re:Page specific tuning (Score:4, Interesting)
My current version of Firefox does not pass Acid2. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11
Any browser that follows the standard deserves my admiration. Adding more meta tags where this stuff should be in the doc type is not a correct decision and should be reviled.
Parent
Re:Class action suit? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Class action suit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Class action suit? (Score:5, Insightful)
New standards don't mean anything if no one uses them. A non-developer switching to a browser like Firefox simply because it "supports standards" would be like buying a high definition television fifteen years ago; you're still getting the same quality broadcasts.
W3 standards don't catch on because they're not intended for the end-user, they're intended for developers. End-users don't care that the columns on your website were coded in CSS rather than a table. If you want people to switch to a more developer friendly browser, you have to give 'em the old razzle dazzle. For example, let's say Macromedia Flash was introduced later in the game, relied on a W3C standard instead of a browser plugin, and that standard was only supported by non-IE browsers. Developers would be so anxious to use Flash that they would leave IE users in the dust, encouraging them to switch if they wanted to see the fancy dynamic content. IE users would then feel left out and switch to Firefox, which would end up with a 70% market share before Microsoft could even blink.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But I don't think that we are going to see much of that special tag anyway since those who care about standards will shy it and those who doesn't will ignore it anyway and continue with their broken pages...
But wasn't Microsoft going to push Silverlight (or whatever they call it) instead???
At least - we need this tag and the circumventions for special pages about as much as we need severe dandruff...
And 100000 slashdotters... (Score:5, Funny)
Steamrollin' On (Score:5, Insightful)
But lots of web pages will.
Re:Steamrollin' On (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Steamrollin' On (Score:4, Insightful)
Then the tag won't serve your purpose. It won't make IE6 or IE7 render like IE8 would. The objective of the tag is the opposite, is for newer versions keep rendering broken pages as they render in broken versions of the browser.
As long as you'll need to support IE6 (or IE7 for what it's worth) you won't need the tag at all.
Parent
This just in.... (Score:4, Funny)
News at 11.
Amazing (Score:5, Insightful)
Another Microsoft "We'll do it our way, and you'll do it our way too if you know what's good for you."
I wish Microsoft would at least learn to fake sincerity in actually following common standards. This isn't even lip service. This is "We follow standards (for certain Microsoft-centric values of 'standards')."
Of course, the market has rewarded them, so why should they change? All they need is smoke, some mirrors, and some moderately-skilled PR, et Voilà! "standards-compliant!"
Re:Amazing (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you're missing the point somewhat here, as are a lot of people. The core issue is that Microsoft have painted themselves into a corner by not following the specifications in the past. This makes it difficult to follow the specifications today, as all the pages that expect Internet Explorer to deviate from the specifications will break if Internet Explorer starts following the specifications.
They solved this in the past by inventing doctype switching, which is a pretty poorly-thought out hack, and with conditional comments, which uses non-standard syntax. This approach, on the other hand, uses standard HTML syntax and is designed for this purpose.
Far from being "A Microsoft extension to HTML" as some people are describing it, this is an attempt to retain backwards compatibility while fixing Internet Explorer to more closely follow the specifications. It does this using the standard HTML way of incorporating additional metadata. Let me repeat that: what you are seeing is Microsoft improving conformance with the specifications. The mechanism they are adding is so that older code doesn't break, which is an entirely reasonable thing to want.
If you have a better idea of how they can satisfy the constraints of backwards compatibility and closer conformance to the specifications, please, describe it. As far as I can see, this is the best way of doing it. Sure, it's their own fault they are in this mess, but bitching about their past behaviour doesn't mean that this attempt to fix things is the wrong approach. Microsoft are doing the right thing here.
Parent
Re:Amazing (Score:4, Insightful)
First, Microsoft only does things to further their own goals. This is not a matter for the convenience of non-Microsoft developers. This is an internal engineering decision for the benefit of internal Microsoft Windows developers same as the paragraph-spacing-for-word96-for-macos "tags" in MSOOXML.
Second, Internet Explorer is a critical operating system component. Moreover, it functionally has a similar role to that of the Unix shell. As such, its defaults for how it renders HTML is a fundamental system interface. Nobody is perfect here. As an analogy, consider how on Linux systems,
Do you see how this makes sense? IE8 can't break IE6 stuffs because that's a critical O/S interface that too many internal components rely upon. We can just say "You're an idiot. If you must use bashisms in scripts, you must also use #!/bin/bash #!/bin/bash-4.0.6 or whatever." Microsoft doesn't have the same luxury.
Defaulting to IE6 behavior makes total sense if you think of it this way. So what would you rather have, standards compliance when viewing web pr0n and a non-functional MS Windows O/S (which probably cannot boot far enough to even get to the point where you can look at pr0n in the first place) or having your O/S continue to work as it has?
As a general engineering solution, relying on specific version numbers to control behavior went out of fashion a couple decades ago. I'm not surprised other browser developers are not enthusiastic about the idea. However, I'm also not surprised to see this kind of thing in an end-to-end controlled environment where you can trace specific desired "non-standard" behavior to a specific version number and act accordingly.
I will now present the source code to Internet Explorer 8:
#include <ieglobals.h>
extern int getDesiredIEVersion(int, char **, char **);
void main(argc, argv, envp)
int argc;
char **argv, **envp;
{
switch (getDesiredIEVersion(argc, argv, envp)) {
case 6:
default:
ie6_main(argc, argv, envp);
break;
case 7:
ie7_main(argc, argv, envp);
break;
case 8:
ie8_main(argc, argv, envp);
break;
}
}
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Re:Amazing (Score:4, Insightful)
But this is a major new rendering engine, switching to it by default when it is totally unproven is a really bad idea.
The idea is that MS would test their engine before shipping. A bit of an assumption, I know, but that's the theory.
Parent
Make Acid2 the Default (Score:5, Interesting)
I think we're at the moment when developers want standards, where in the IE4/NS4 war, everyone and their brother was trying to hack-together web pages, and IE did some nice exposition of the DOM via the ID attribute in tags, which accomodated less-skilled programmers. Now that the baseline-developer's skills are improved, and the IDEs out there are actually pretty decent (e.g. Not FrontPage, Not MS Word) I'd say the time is right.
While the Acid2 test is niceity, what I'd really love to see is a standard plugin model shared by FF and IE. It has been a while, but I always thought the "EMBED" inside of an "OBJECT" tag was lame. I don't like ActiveX but I get in intranet environments where it can be useful, where the code should be "trusted" and "signed", where you're essentially using a browser to "publish" applications that should probably be desktop applets, or use a native HTML (AJAX?) interface rather than "VB applet on a webpage." That being said, we need an out in the wild, "safe" plugin/viewer model.
Re:Make Acid2 the Default (Score:5, Interesting)
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8;FF=3;OtherUA=4"
What is there to not like in this? It's a simple, elegant and practical solution to this very real problem. Sure, it could have arrived earlier, but better later than never.
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Re:Make Acid2 the Default (Score:5, Informative)
It's a problem, though, that only Microsoft has. Everyone else is just expected to conform to the standards.
Read here [webkit.org] for the WebKit team's response to this and why they're not going to define or obey any such tags themselves.
Parent
Re:Make Acid2 the Default (Score:5, Insightful)
The possible downside is that precisely because these buggy pages work in IE, noone will bother to fix them. Imagine you're at IE12 and it's now a super anal 99.9% standards compatible browser in IE12 mode. What good will it do if pages still call for IE7 compatibility mode and are still broken on every other browser? That said, between "We won't fix the browser because it'd break sites" and "We won't fix the pages because they work" I think the latter is easier to fix and new code would presumably be written to spec and work in all browsers. So it's something of a percieved downside which I don't think is real.
Now, if I take on my hat as an IE user it's a slam dunk. More pages will work. If I take on the hat as a web developer, I know my pages won't suddenly break (because you were forced to use an IE hack to make it work right in the first place). Also a slam dunk. If I take on the hat of Microsoft, they don't get screaming customers about how they broke the intranet. Also a slam dunk. If Microsoft was really really nice, they'd put in their status line "This web page is designed for a higher version of IE. Please upgrade to ensure optimum performance" too, so we'd lose these buggy versions as quickly as possible.
It's easier to cut the developers loose and let them fix IE than the pains of trying to slowly break IE while not getting killed by angry customers. The sooner they get a standards compliant browser out there, the sooner we can get to *really* fixing the problem.
Parent
Re:Make Acid2 the Default (Score:5, Insightful)
Secondly, it encourages the web to come to a halt, technology wise. As an expensive consultant to big companies, my experience has been that they all want to try to tell you "our web site has to look perfect on every version of every browser ever invented, period." Of course that's impossible, so once I drill it through their head that it's impossible, they have to settle for some major subset, at which time they always want me to use ancient UI technology for maximum compatibility. (Seriously, I deal with people who freak out if I want to use CSS positioning or an iframe, and god help me if I mention AJAX.) If they got the idea that browsers have a magical compatibility mode so that all future browsers will support pages written for today's browsers, they'll instantly write up a corporate policy that basically says that nothing will ever change again and for the rest of time their web site will be maintained as if it is forever 2005, and then they won't change it until someone practically holds a gun to their head to force them to.
Now, you're asking yourself, why should you care? Because it's more than a few idiots, it's a substantial portion of the web. Sure, there will always be little guys who will come along and innovate, but do you really want to deal with a web full of sites that forever use 2005 technology and just a few sites that have caught on to the latest stuff?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, I'd be fine with that, but that is unfortunately not how it works. IE8 will default to IE7 mode, and will only be standards compliant if you add the tag telling it you want it to be. That's what the uproar is about. This solution basically makes sure IE7 will be around (and targeted by developers not knowing any better) forever.
Re:Make Acid2 the Default (Score:4, Informative)
Read it and weep [msdn.com], I know I did. (Last 3 paragraphs are the relevant ones.)
Parent
IDGI (Score:5, Funny)
Therefore, if you are against Microsoft, you must be a terrorist.
Please report yourself to the nearest detention center for correction.
Eh? (Score:3, Funny)
This is Microsoft's mistake to pay for (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft kept redefining the meaning of "standard" so that they were right and everyone else was wrong. Now that they are actually starting to follow the standard, they are scrambling trying to make sure that it doesn't look like they were ever wrong.
Please live in the real world.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, in a magical perfect world, Microsoft would use DOCTYPE to tell if a page wants standard-compatible rendering, and simply break all the pages which have a correct DOCTYPE but then rely, either on purpose or by accident, on IE6 and IE7 bugs. But most of their customers don't want them to, and so they aren't going to.
Therefore they are trying to offer an alternative. An alternative you can either put in as a meta tag or a HTTP header. I can't think of anything they could do in practice which would be better than this, other than the one thing they would never do, which is break old webpages which rendered correctly on IE6/7.
IE Is Not A Web Browser (Score:4, Insightful)
That leaves open the question of exactly what IE is.
History repeats itself (Score:5, Funny)
The real problem is Dreamweaver (Score:5, Insightful)
The real problem isn't on the browser side. It's in Dreamweaver, the most popular web page design tool. Dreamweaver does not create valid HTML or XHTML. Not even close. Create a page in Dreamweaver for anything later than HTML 3.2 and run it through the W3C validator. It will fail.
The basic problem is that the Dreamweaver people never really figured out what to do about CSS. In theory, CSS is supposed to have some abstract model of the format of some block of text, like TeX does. In practice, there's usually a big block of CSS with machine-generated names at the beginning of the web page. There's a fundamental disconnect between the CSS model and the Dreamweaver "Properties" box. So Dreamweaver is still inserting I, B and FONT tags.
In layout, Dreamweaver does table-based layout quite well, but DIV/FLOAT/CLEAR layout isn't handled well. Much of this is due to the limitations of the DIV/FLOAT/CLEAR approach. Tables are a 2D grid system, and map well to the drag-the-lines editor in Dreamweaver. DIV/FLOAT/CLEAR doesn't map well to a visual layout editor.
The end result is a mess. And HTML 5 doesn't help.
Worst... Proposal... Ever! (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft claims that the X-UA-Compatible flag is necessary on standards-compatible content to avoid breaking IE-specific content. I call BS.
For years, Microsoft has been telling everyone to put version-specific IE hacks in conditional comments [microsoft.com], in case IE's behavior improves in future versions. Now that they are finally fixing IE, they spring this X-UA-Compatible "solution" on us, punishing those who have been producing standards-compliant content and rewarding the zombies who have been writing IE-specific code. If your site is standards-compliant, you have to do the extra work to tag it as such, and keep that crufty tag around for the foreseeable future!
If you sat down today and wrote a new standards-compliant browser, it would work just fine with almost all the content and web applications out there. Apple did this recently with Safari. Microsoft claims to have done this with IE 8. Safari didn't need any X-UA-Compatible flag. Why should IE 8 need one?
The only reason IE 8 would need the X-UA-Compatible flag is simply because it is IE 8. If their new browser identified itself as, say, "Microsoft Trident VI [wikipedia.org]" instead, things would just work. Microsoft could still call it "Internet Explorer 8" for marketing purposes, but web developers would know that "MS Trident VI" means IE 8, just as "WebKit 4xx" means Safari 2 (or similar browsers) and Gecko means Firefox (or similar browsers).
Dear Microsoft, here's a sane solution for you:
As you see, it is possible to fix IE in a backward compatible way without introducing a X-UA-Compatible flag. The chances of Microsoft taking these steps is almost nil, since it places IE 8 on an even playing field with other standards-compliant browsers. That's why they are proposing X-UA-Compatible -- they can claim to support web standards while knowing that web developers will find it easier to muddle along than to use their stupid flag.
Re:It's the most logical decision (Score:5, Insightful)
In other news, many Americans against government bailout of mortgage companies that made bad loans...
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Re:It's the most logical decision (Score:5, Insightful)
I get your point, and you may have a more real-world-ready opinion than some of us, but I am not ready to concede anything to MS in this regard.
There are other ways MS could address this issue rather than continuing their embrace extend destroy strategies. There is no reason IE specific tags should be required to make a page display according to an international standard.
If anything, broken pages should require tags to inform the browser that they do not conform to standards, and thus require special attention - not the other way around.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It's the most logical decision (Score:5, Informative)
ACID is designed to test a browser's adherence to a set standard. Its not designed to just 'test' a browser to see if it works. It's designed to see if it works the way a browser should. I say break the millions of web-pages and force them to get updated.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I really think that'd be the best way to go, and you'd probably agree that this isn't an anti-ms rhetoric. I code HTML, too, and I really think that if IE8 can do ACTUAL standards c
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
the tag should instead be a tag to go into "Legacy" mode.
There's the problem... WHO is going to go through all of the Legacy websites to update that HTML?
In the last 8 years I've probably done 20 websites for various NFP's, schools, and organizations I've been a member of or was hired by. The vast majority of those sites are for organizations that have little to no internal IT department. If IE8 renders the page differently than IE6/7, even if it does so in a more standards compliant way, it is still going to make their pages appear incorrect, and they have no o
Re:It's the most logical decision (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:It's the most logical decision (Score:5, Informative)
IE (just like Firefox, etc.) has a "quirks" mode which renders things in a non-standards compliant way, but is designed to "more or less work" with all the pages out there that are not strictly coded. This new tag is supposed to apply to web-pages where the web author has already explicitly said he wants strict rendering, because he said so in the DOCTYPE. But instead of just fixing IE so that it renders that standards-compliant code better and better, they propose to freeze that rendering sub-engine, and force web-developers to add a new tag that basically says "yes I really meant I wanted you to render strictly!"
It seems to me that the majority of pages that rely on rendering quirks will be okay, since they will be rendered in quirks mode. But pages that were intended to be standards-compliant should be treated as such.
Microsoft's plan isn't sustainable or elegant: they basically want the entire web-community to add another tag each time MS releases a new version of IE. (If they want a custom tag for the IE7->IE8 transition, they probably will want a new one for the next transition...) The entire point of these standards was to get away from browser-specific tags and hacks. A web developer shouldn't have to think about what browsers are on the market today (or 3 years from now): he should just code to the standard.
Put otherwise: Instead of asking everyone who has written a standards-compliant page to add-in a non-standard tag to make it work in IE... wouldn't it be easier to tell everyone "hey, if you've coded a page that is ~almost~ standards-compliant, but relies in some way on IE7-specific behavior, then add in this <NotQuiteStandard> tag, and IE8 will render it like IE7."
Parent
Re:It's the most logical decision (Score:5, Insightful)
No, that's not at all the case.
Way back when the web was first taking off in a big way, browser vendors were adding lots of proprietary element types and attributes. Most of them weren't very well thought out, but there was a pressing need to get them into a specification to ensure interoperability. The result was HTML 3.2, with a lot of stuff that really shouldn't be in there.
The next version of HTML took all these out again because better ways (e.g. CSS) had been developed to handle their functionality. Of course, there needed to be an upgrade path from HTML 3.2 to HTML 4, so the W3C published HTML 4 in two major forms — a backwards-compatible document type, called "Transitional", and a modern document type, called "Strict".
That's what the "strict" refers to in the doctype. It's got nothing to do with rendering modes.
Now, when Internet Explorer 5 for the Mac was being developed, Microsoft realised that they couldn't improve its conformance to the specifications without breaking backwards compatibility. They came up with a hack that guessed whether to be backwards-compatible or specifications-compatible by looking at the doctype to see if it was there, if it was out of date, etc.
This "doctype switching" is a proprietary, non-standard hack, that happened to catch on amongst browsers. The fact that a document refers to the strict doctype does not imply that the developer is choosing a particular rendering mode, it just means that they are using a modern document type.
No, this is exactly what they are doing, and this is the very reason why such a switch is necessary.
No, this isn't the case. Any developer who wants Internet Explorer to use its most recent rendering engine at all times can select "edge" and be done with it.
Yes, and this is an attempt to do just that. Doctype switching is a proprietary hack. <meta> is the standard HTML method of including metadata. Furthermore, providing a switch like this allows them to slowly deprecate the older rendering engines over time.
No, this would cause mass regressions because there are a hell of a lot of unmaintained websites out there.
Parent
Re:It's the most logical decision (Score:4, Insightful)
Setting -- 2014 AD. Microsoft's IE10 includes a dramatically improved rendering engine with better compliance to standards. This causes it to render pages significantly differently from IE8 and IE9.
Microsoft: "To take advantage of our new rendering engine, please add the following tag to each page: [...]"
Us: "What about the 'edge' attribute? Shouldn't you force everyone who specified that to follow standards by rendering their pages with the new engine?"
Microsoft: "Too many pages are using that to mean 'render like IE8/9,' and using browser-specific hacks for those engines. It would break the web if we changed the rendering of those pages. Don't worry, we've added the attribute 'modern' that will always mean 'use the latest rendering engine,' so you'll never have this problem again."
Us: [facepalm]
Parent
On bad assumptions and lack of proper focus (Score:3, Insightful)
IF MS were to change the way pages rendered with existing doctypes, millions of pages could/would render differently requiring businesses and individuals across the world to either re-vamp their websites or at least change the existing doctype to a new name that referred to the old rendering style.
Allow me to vehemently disagree with this premise. As it has been said, "no, there is ... another" and in this case there is an option you and Microsoft have totally overlooked. Think of the ignored person behind the keyboard; let the user decide!
Yes, let the site break by default. Let it render like hell, without any change to the site. Just offer the user a "try to make this site look better" button, that will switch through the various so-called "compatibility" rendering modes.
Microsoft always d
Re:so? (Score:5, Informative)
MSFT dug itself into a hole. instead of getting out and filling the hole back in they are digging another hole to bring people down to their level.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)