Making IE Standards Compliant

spin2cool writes "Dean Edwards has taken it upon himself to make Internet Explorer W3C compliant. How? Well, it isn't by patching the application, as you might suspect. He's created a stylesheet, dubbed 'IE7' that uses DHTML to load and parse style sheets into a form that IE can understand. Just include the style sheet in your HTML pages, and things should render correctly. The complexity of the CSS transformations is really amazing and shows off the power of this stuff."

Making IE Standards compliant?

I'm sure IE 6.05.1 will feature a small modification which happens to cause this fix to stop working. ;)

Re:Making IE Standards compliant?

My problem with this patch is its name - it was DoNotUseIE.phoenix, then DoNotUseIE.bird, now - apparently - its DoNotUseIE.patch. Enough already!

;)

MS releases patch to fix Security bug in IE

MS released a patch today to fix a major Security Bug in IE today. MS offcials say that a malisious hacker, is destroying websites around the world, by making them compatible with other web browsers. We at MS can abolutely not have any competion, so we are funding a $1 billion reward to the person who finds this man and breaks his even hack. We would do it ourselves but all 80,000 of our developers are busy trying to get longhorn out by 2010.

Re:What's up with that comma, dude?

Man, you need to leave Mr. Shatner alone when he's trying to make a point!

Re:What's up with that comma, dude?

You've been modded a troll and it's probably right. But it's Friday, and I'm fed up with illiterate morons and I agree with you.

I come across this all the time. People send emails with stuff like:

"Can someone, please look at, this."

What does it mean? By the way, this is a manager. She gets paid more than me and yet she can't string simple written English together.

Sometimes I wonder what goes on in peoples' minds, then I realise I'd rather not know.

Re:Making IE Standards compliant?

So I'll ask the burning question here: How is creating a stylesheet to be included in individual web pages considered making IE standards compliant? Wouldn'the the article be more acurate if it read "modifying web site allows it to be rendered correctly in IE6?"

Re:Making IE Standards compliant?

I think the OP had a good point...the problem as I understand it isn't limited to IE users who can't view compliant web pages. It's also lazy web developpers who use a M$ products to produce a web page that only renders well in IE...complete with the "This page best viewed using Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher" to make it all okay.

So your analogy would be more accurate if you said "Here's a dictionary so you can read the signs around town. If you want to talk to a native, though, I recommend you continue shouting slowly in English."

It's not useless, but it's also not a complete solution to the fact that IE isn't standards compliant.

Re:Making IE Standards compliant?

If you can just sniff and serve up IE a different style sheet to make your site render correct, who cares? No more hacking to make work arounds for IE. As long as you dont have to change the design of your site (except for a sniff for IE), who cares.

Re:Making IE Standards compliant?

Just to clarify slightly - IE7 doesn't rely on serving up a different stylesheet, but an additional 'sheet. In other words, if you reference IE7 as your first 'sheet, existing stylesheets for compliant browsers will then render OK in IE.

If I've read it right you don't even need to sniff (well, at least not in the old-fasioned, java-script or server-side script sense): it's all done through CSS.

Re:Making IE Standards compliant?

"f you can just sniff and serve up IE a different style sheet to make your site render correct, who cares?"

The trouble is...what if you don't have a windows computer to see how 'it looks' under IE? I can run just about any other browser under the sun on my development stations, all linux....except IE.

I'm still trying to figure how to run IE under wine...but, never have been able to do it with no windows partitions...

Re:Making IE Standards compliant?

> I always take a series of shots showing scalability from 640x480 up through at least 1280x1024,

You're probably doing this, but many other sites (heh, usually IE-only sites) sure as heck aren't. What about 320x480, 400x600, 640x1024?

Not everybody browses with their web browser taking up the full window! Half a window, aligned portrait-style, is easier on the eyes because it requires less horizontal eye movement than "fullscreen". Horizontal scrolling is evil -- doubly so to users who go out of their way to minimize read-speed and comprehension-slowing horizontal eye movement by resizing their browsers to prevent it.

Re:Making IE Standards compliant?

The trouble is...what if you don't have a windows computer to see how 'it looks' under IE?

This is an age-old problem for web developers. Good developers test their work in multiple browsers, and should also do a test in browsers a few versions back. This might mean keeping an extra box lying around that runs Windows, or using VMWARE or WINE to run Internet Explorer. People might flame me and say that any good developer KNOWS what the content will look like in different browsers and tries to produce a browser-agnostic design, but experience tells me that there's nothing like a quick test to find your mistakes.

Re:Making IE Standards compliant?

Wouldn'the the article be more acurate if it read "modifying web site allows it to be rendered correctly in IE6?"

That's a pretty good question. But the beauty of this thing is that it allows web designers to use all W3C compliant techniques and then make them work correctly in IE6 without massive changes to their code. Just saying "modifying web site allows it to be rendered correctly in IE6" leaves people with the impression that they need to go through a re-coding project instead of just including a style sheet.

Maybe a better headline would be: "New standards compliancy stylesheet for IE6 clients eases cross-browser development for web developers." Or something like that.

All that's missing

All that's missing now, is a stylesheet that'll close all remaining security holes... :*)

Re:All that's missing

I wonder if it's possible to implement a DHTML hack for proper PNG support :)

Check here [eae.net] and here [ntlworld.com].

Re:All that's missing

I wonder if it's possible to implement a DHTML hack for proper PNG support :)

To a limited extent, yes [howtocreate.co.uk].

Kudos, but...

.. it's a sad state of affairs when a developer outside of Microsoft actually ends up doing something that MS should have done themselves. So they can say 'screw it' to standards and someone else does the finger-work.

Re:Kudos, but...

It is even a sadder state of affairs that they are a large enough company for this fix to matter, all things considered when it comes to customer service as a whole.

Re:Kudos, but...

I know. They are the largest software company in the world, they have billions in the bank, and it takes one individual without access to the source to fix up some of the most glaring errors that have lain there untouched for over two years. Microsoft ought to be ashamed.

Re:Kudos, but...

If you could build really bad software that looks good on the surface, get other people fix it for you for free, and still get paid, would you do it?

I suppose that the reason I'm not rich yet is because I wouldn't. Building software is usually time consuming and costly. Building good software is more so. I wonder that the OSS movement didn't gain popularity so much because of a desire to contribute, as out of a sense of frustration that there was very little good software available at any price.

The market dosen't reward good software because most users are so ignorant of what is good software that they just buy whatever is most shinny and pretty and expensive. The only alternative seems to be to write good software and give it away for free so that you don't have to sit in the Microsoft (and others) stench all day long. It's not just Microsoft, but they're the best example.

Re:Kudos, but...

Not really. It's perfectly natural to many of us for someone to change things to work in the way they want them to. It's a basic freedom that many of us try to protect.

What's unusual in this case is that closed proprietry software has been "changed" without access to the source.

It's not sad that someone other than Microsoft had to do it. It's sad that people other than Microsoft can't do such things a whole lot more.

(in reality, they can of course by not using closed source software, but for some it seems percieved convenience is more important than freedom, but I digress)

Re:Kudos, but...

in reality, they can of course by not using closed source software, but for some it seems percieved convenience is more important than freedom, but I digress)

What this does is allow developers of standards-based sites, which they have under their own control, to provide a stopgap for users who don't understand the issue of standards and so haven't themselves chosen freedom. So your digression doesn't quite match the facts. As a developer, I can choose to make my site work in Mozilla and KHTML - and will - but I can't choose to force my audience to use them. With this, if it works as advertised, I can choose to follow standards and still provide some means for those who have, for whatever reasons, chosen to use a non-free browser to use my content.

Re:Kudos, but...

Good theory. Unfortunately, MS has made that very difficult. There are several basic CSS/HTML formating options that work differently under IE than the standard specifies; differently enough that if you were to use them the page would either work in IE or in standards-compliant browsers. (But not both.)

There are work arounds, using semi-legit CSS that fails in one browser or another and lets each browser see what it understands. But that is really just coding to the browser again, and occasionally breaks as groups upgrade their browsers. This promises a one-stop shop for all the main problems.

Useful stylesheets

I think I'd personally be more interested in a stylesheet that redirects IE browsers to www.mozilla.org/ [mozilla.org] :) Or even better: crashes them.

Re:Useful stylesheets

Or even better: crashes them.

That doesn't require style sheets, just normal webpages.

Re:Useful stylesheets

I think I'd personally be more interested in a stylesheet that . . . crashes them.

Your wait is over [webmasterworld.com].

Re:Useful stylesheets

Yeah! Doez enyone no off a goot spel checing stile sheet?

Re:Useful stylesheets

try this one [tudelft.nl]

Re:Useful stylesheets

What sites do you go to? I've been using Mozilla on all my computers (Windows and Linux) for over a year now without problems except for a few sites I had to use for clients (time reporting and Outlook web mail). I complained to the time reporting company, which explicitly says it only supports IE, that one cannot report time from a Linux box.

Other than that, every other site I use works great in Mozilla, including banking sites and other sites that you'd think would be tempted to make the IE-only mistake.

What I don't miss is the pop-up I used to have to endure in IE when I disabled ActiveX, not to mention it's countless lack of features (tabbed browsing, popup blocking, etc,...).

Shows the power of IE

This will probably get modded down - but this hack really does show the power of IE that you can deploy a script fix to browser problems.

And before people start attacking ie for saying that mozilla supports xyz css and ie6 doesn't - mozilla was last released yesterday - ie6 was released 2+ years ago. Most of these css3 features weren't even finalised as w3c guidelines when ie6 was released.

Great to see the css3 support though - removes the need for so hard-to-manage javascript hacks.

SharedID [sharedid.com] - Single Sign On for web applications

Re:Shows the power of IE

Fact is that IE 6 doesn't even support CSS2 properly which became a W3C recommendation in 1998.

Re:Shows the power of IE

AFAIK there is no browser available that correctly renders CSS 2.0 -- the entire spec.

IIRC Moz and Opera do render all of CSS 1.0 correctly and nearly all of CSS 2.0 correctly. But doing some advanced things with CSS 2.0 (especially doing all formatting with it, instead of old table hacks) you really run into problems with both Moz and Opera.

Re:Shows the power of IE

current project i'm working on i did all css layout (ie; no tables) and had opposite experience: same code was fine in moz / opera, needed completely different version for ie5 and ie6 due to various bugs in each.

now actually reverting to tables for a lot of the layout because of it.

Re:Shows the power of IE

I feel your pain!

I've had weirdness with different IE versions too, like where I have some content with images floated right; words okay in IE5 and IE6, but in IE5.5, the images cover the content. And don't forget that Mac IE is different again!

But I have found myself that using standards compliant code, and then JavaScript to fix "anomalies" is pretty good. Using CSS hacks always seems to be asking for problems to me, whereas with JS you can target specific browser versions.

Re:Shows the power of IE

AFAIK there is no browser available that correctly renders CSS 2.0 -- the entire spec.

You are right, which is why some of the more esoteric features have been removed from CSS 2 and CSS 2.1 is about to be released.

However this is a lot different to Internet Explorer 6's situation. There are massive amounts of CSS 2 that simply aren't implemented, such as a whole bunch of selectors and tables.

The next time you see somebody complaining that CSS layout is hard, remember that there's probably a way to do what they want in a few lines of CSS, but that part of CSS simply doesn't work in Internet Explorer (but does in Mozilla, Konqueror, Opera, etc).

Re:Implementing CSS is HARD

It really isn't so shocking that years elapse between the recommendations and implementations

The W3C have now changed policy so that in order to get to full Recommendation status, a specification has to have at least two independent implementations. If nobody can implement it, it gets kicked back a stage or two for reevaluation. This should help combat the "nice specs, shame about the real world" problem a little.

Re:Shows the power of IE

And what's more, it doesn't even fully support CSS1, which was released in 1996! Try the ComplexSpiral [meyerweb.com] demo, which is a neat demo of the effects possible in Mozilla, Opera and Safari with the 'background-attachment:' CSS1 property, which IE supports only on the BODY tag. Also, let's add 'position: static' support onto our wishlist (for watermarks/menus on pages) and PNG alpha support, and a whole bevy of regular CSS rendering bugs [positioniseverything.net] that have remained unsolved for years. MS claims "full CSS1 compliance", but in reality they only support the reduced CSS1 core spec.

And to think it'll be a wait of several years before IE is updated with Longhorn... until then, writing pure CSS sites is going to remain a bug-whacking chore. Let's all be collectively glad that MS fought so hard for their "Freedom to Innovate" back in the anti-trust days ;).

P.S. redesign slashdot [alistapart.com] using modern web standards, editors!

Re:Shows the power of IE

but this hack really does show the power of IE

The power of IE is that it's broken but it may be possible to fix it?

I have a powerful car for sale if you're interested.

Shows the power of Open Source

> mozilla was last released yesterday - ie6 was
> released 2+ years ago

So, you're saying that the problem is not IE but the broken proprietry way of building softwarwe that can't can release new versions in time to answer real customer needs?

I think I agree :-)

Gilad

Re:Shows the power of IE

And before people start attacking ie for saying that mozilla supports xyz css and ie6 doesn't - mozilla was last released yesterday - ie6 was released 2+ years ago.

Remember when Microsoft was releasing and improving IE on a rapid basis? Let's see, when did Microsoft allegedly win the browser war? Oh, about two years ago. When did Microsoft stop innovating IE? Oh, about two years ago. Since then, Microsoft doesn't care cause they have the browser market locked up. Therefore we need to download stuff like this and google toolbars to add pop up blocking and all kind of other third party stuff to get IE up to some modern day level.

Re:Shows the power of IE

this hack really does show the power of IE...ie6 was released 2+ years ago. Most of these css3 features weren't even finalised as w3c guidelines when ie6 was released.

I call BS on that. Even features which IE did implement, it couldn't get right. For example, IE's implementation of getElementById is extremely flawed [mikepalumbo.com]. It also doesn't support lots of things, like the CSS Width property [mezzoblue.com], properly. (IE treats width as min-width, and doesn't provide real width support.)

This isn't a testament to IE's scalability, hackability, or another ability you might come up with. It's just another reason why it's a piss-poor browser. We need additional code to make IE properly understand standards; that's atrocious.

Also, if you want to see how IE stacks up against a browser like Firefox, I have made a quick comparison [realfx.com] between the two. Its a little old now, and it was using Firebird 0.7 (not Firefox), but it's still a valid comparison. IE 6 chokes horribly on CSS, plain & simple.

All he has to do now

Is ponder how to get over the Slashdotting of his site.

I'm sure the CSS is a work of technical art; seeing it would be even better.

Re:All he has to do now

Umm . . . Sourceforge?

firefox

I wish someone would release such a sheet for firefox : /. itself still doen't render correctly on FFox 0.8 under XPpro. As shown here [kuleuven.ac.be], the left column tends to dribble into the article summary...

Re:firefox

This isn't a problem with FFox not being standards compliant, but a problem with the slashcode not being standard html. See the faq [slashdot.org]. Bugs [sourceforge.net] have [sourceforge.net] been [sourceforge.net] filed already.

Re:firefox

But this is why FireFox still isn't onto release one. I also get problems on my XP box using some sites, especially forms; but there are also still sites that don't work correctly in any release.

IE has the usual MS philosophy in that if something doesn't comply with the way they've done it, who cares because everyone will change to their way of thinking. I agree with those who don't like that someone else has to clean up after MS but what else are you going to do? For better or worse it is, and will be for a while yet, what most non-techy people use.

Re:firefox

Perhaps it's slashdot that needs to be made standards compliant! It would seem that someone doesn't want us to know [w3.org] how compliant it is.

It seems WDG had better luck getting through [htmlhelp.com], but look at all those errors!

Re:firefox

Downloading the index page, then uploading it to the W3C validator throws an error about being unable to determine character encoding. Forcing character encoding to iso-8859-1 results in 371 errors!

Re:firefox

That's pretty sad, for /. to mess with their server settings to disable the w3 validator. Their HTML has been terribly broken for years. I don't understand what they do with all that money they have, because they sure haven't been improving the site very much. Makes me glad I don't subscribe and I block their ads.

Re:firefox

Check those errors a little more carefully. There are a whole bunch of errors about URIs of the type 'http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=2336&alloc_id=5672&sit e_id=1&request'. I'm too lazy to check if this is actually a valid to skip the pagename on an URI with a query, but I belive it is. But no matter what, each such URI generates about a dozen errors, which is bogus. Most of the other errors have to do with rendering hints like 'marginwidth' and 'bgcolor', which where not a part of the HTML 3.2 standard but are noncritical.

Re:firefox

The SGML definition of HTML 3.2 declares attributes as CDATA.

Actually, it varies; not all attributes are defined in that way. If you limit your remark to the href attributes of <a> elements, the HTML 4.01 specification defines them to contain CDATA as well. However you are misinterpreting the meaning of CDATA - CDATA includes character entities [w3.org].

Re:firefox

You are wrong. The HTML specification [w3.org] is very clear on the matter.

to use the URI "http://host/?x=1&y=2" as a linking URI, it must be written <A href="http://host/?x=1&#38;y=2"> or <A href="http://host/?x=1&amp;y=2">.

Re:firefox

Perhaps it's slashdot that needs to be made standards compliant!

The magazine A List Apart [alistapart.com] has already redone Slashdot's design with web standards. Look here:

• http://www.alistapart.com/articles/slashdot/ [alistapart.com]
• http://www.alistapart.com/articles/slashdot2/ [alistapart.com]

Re:firefox

although: Slashcode [slashcode.com] has a recent article on the subject...

Re:firefox

Slashdot isn't valid HTML, so it doesn't _have_ a correct rendering ;-)

Fixed in nightlies

Use a Mozilla Firefox nightly build [squarefree.com], the bug (217369 [mozilla.org], I think) that caused this problem is fixed in them.

More major changes since 0.8 here [squarefree.com].

They're going to completely rewrite IE?

Wow... who woulda thunk it?

Google cache

Site is already slashdottet. Here's Google's cache [66.102.11.104] of the document.
So - how are the plans going with implementing a slashdot cache?

Re:Google cache

I still don't know why Slashdot doesn't reference non-high bandwidth sites using the freecache service [archive.org]. All that needs to be done is prefix the URL with http://freecache.org/ and follow it with the full regular URL, eg:

http://freecache.org/http://www.slowsite.com/big _p ictures.html

It benefits the site owner by having reduced bandwidth costs and it also benefits Slashdot as we can read the articles.

Re:Google cache

Unfortunately, some (most?) sites are dynamic in nature, especially concerning advertising. By using the freecache service, a static version of the page gets cached and the same ad would _may_ appear if the site owner is using his own advertising code and not some remote service like google or doubleclick, likely going against the wishes of the website. Or perhaps the content itself requires dynamic code to work properly.

Although this would be very useful for tiny sites like those hosted on cable connections, but it's hard to tell in advance which sites will be slashdotted.

And either way, the choice should really be up to the web site owner. I'm sure most would prefer that people see their content versus having their server crushed, but you never know until you ask.

Id say

Judging by the loading lag, and eventual time out hes managed to make his webserver IIS compliant also ;)

Get firefox.

If you havent already yet, you should of switched from IE to Firefox. It is now my default browser on Windows, and on Windows XP it even puts it as the top Start menu item. It is fast, light, small download (6Mb), Tabbed Browsing, Popup blocking, Download manager, Cute icon and standards compliance are all good reasons to use it. So don't use an ugly hack to transform your pages for IE, put a firefox icon on your site.

So if you havent downloaded it yet, get it now! [mozilla.org]. Avalible for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and more!

Nice

The site is /.ed, but from what I can make out from the front page, this is making IE CSS standards compliant. Does it also work some magic to make it compliant with HTML (or even better, XHTML) standards (which would be far more useful), or is that just impossible?

In any event, this may allow me to actually use some CSS 2, a standard that was published in May 1998 (almost 6 years ago!) and still isn't (fully) supported by the leading browser in the world...

No-one has a copy of the stylesheet??

Sometimes to me /.-ing a site doesn't compute with me- So the server has had so many incoming requests its gone kaput, but in all those hits not one person has kept a copy of this stylesheet.. ??
It's just simple text!
Do people just blindly click on links just because they are posted?

Misleading title : corrects CSS2 selectors only.

The title of the news is misleading : this JS component only corrects some CSS 2 selectors that IE doesn't natively support.

So it doesn't really make IS standards compliant, it just extends some functionnality. It doesn't, for example, correct the box model of IE5.

So I'm afraid it doesn't spare us of using CSS hacks [centricle.com] to filter out IE.

Dean Edwards

I thought this was something about the democratic nominations, but then saw Kerry [mithuro.com] was missing.

Flippancy apart, I think using CSS to make IE7 W3C compliant is a really brilliant idea. However, the browser itself is a small part of the equations. Very few websites are W3C compliant. Vast majority of them are geared to a certain browser, depending on the whim and fancy of the designer.

For my part, I run my sites thru Anybrowser [anybrowser.com] to make sure they will render on, well, as the name suggests, any browser.

Microsoft should hire him

Anyone who cares this much about the company's product should be given serious consideration for employment.

Microsoft should hire him...

Re:Microsoft should hire him

Microsoft has little benefit in ensuring that IE complies with standards -- as a matter of fact, now that they have over eighty percent marketshare, I would go so far as to say that it is to their benefit to have divergent behavior. Nobody cares about a bunch of web designers grumbling about a broken browser when the masses Just Want It To Look Right and blame the designer when it doesn't.

Wouldn't life be grand if Microsoft shipped the open source Mozilla as their default browser?

Re:Microsoft should hire him

"Microsoft should hire him..."

There's a greater possibility that Microsoft will pay him to STFU.

Mirror made

I made this mirror [jhu.edu] based on the Google cache. It has the full source code, as well as the docs he wrote.

This is temporary, of course.

No wonder it's /.'ed...

Quoted from the main page of the site:

• This is my site
• for my personal use
• running on my machine
• in my kitchen!

I imagine his ISP's going to want to have a few words with him about bandwidth usage... ;)

Microsoft can fix IE

If what I have seen in the "file list" from the leaked MS code still holds true, all the HTML rendering, CSS, PNG and etc stuff is in DLLs that are totally seperate from the OS and could easily be updated independantly.

When Microsoft says "we cant fix xyz", it usually means "we cant fix xyz because it would cost us more (in money, programmer time etc) than we are going to gain (in sales, PR etc)"

Source Code for IE7 htc

via Google Cache : IE7.htc [google.com]

Why did notobdy grab and torrent the file

Seriously the slashdot effect is one of the reasons that Bittorrent was originally developed.

If somebody had grabbed the files we could had a torrent mirror delivering the files in seconds.

This is a great idea

The code itself at the moment is 27k, which is kinda hefty for most pages on initial load (though you'd only have to load it once per site). However, it includes loads of comments, which might slim it down to about half that if you stripped them out. And the savings in other code areas by not having to write double-code and browser-detection are probably worth it overall.

This would certainly make development a lot easier... I look forward to trying it out :-)

Mirror

Can someone temporarily host my site? some of it is php4. is that ok? mail me at [e-mail] and cc [e-mail]. i can chat on the msn account if necessary. thanks. dean edwards

PNG Support?

It would be nice if IE could view transparent PNG files

I was expecting another kind of patch

Rather than fixing IE, how about using the same method to make Mozilla render pages designed for IE correctly?

Mozilla is my favorite browser in both Windows and Linux platforms, and it works so well that whenever I stumble with a broken page, I blame it to site designers, not Mozilla, and move along.

However, sometimes I need to browse the broken page. Wouldn't it be cool if you could fire up some DHTML code to parse the broken page and make it standards compliant, so Mozilla (and others) can read it flawlessly?

This wouldn't encourage correct site design, but while in that fight, it would be a nice temporary solution.... do you think this could be done?

Useful for enhanced IE browsers

This would be useful for something like AvantBrowser [avantbrowser.com], CrazyBrowser [crazybrowser.com] or MyIE2 [myie2.com] which use the IE rendering engine but add other nice features such as pop-up blockers and tabbed browsing.

It would be pretty simple for them to have a local copy of the stylesheet and modify the HTML from the server to include this before rendering.

Cute, but...

This type of solution doesn't really fix the problem that the CSS2 W3C standards aren't correctly supported in any browser. We deal with having to support old browser versions all the time, and believe me, the W3C standards (particularly the DOM), really help to reduce the amount of logic we need to duplicate for various user agents. However, we haven't the luxury of saying, "bah, forget the old browsers, our users have only the very best". So, our server scripts output HTML 4.01 and scripts redirect on failed functional tests and noscript tags to non-script versions of the site.

The point is, CSS2 doesn't fill its intended purpose for those who must support legacy apps. Its faster to bite the bullet and format layouts with tables, and it works for ancient browsers (Netscape 4.x anyone?). To me, that's one of the main advantages of JSP, PHP, ASP, and the like: I can include complex logic in my site and output lame ole' HTML 4.01. Code and UI are separated, and everyone is happy.

Besides, take a lesson from Google, simple layouts are best.

Corporate Business Strategy

Did you hear? McDonald's heard about this move by Microsoft, and was inspired to imitate their strategy. McDonald's is now pushing through the Department of Agriculture to add "Big Mac" and "Chicken Nuggets" to the Food Pyramid, placing them just below the highly-coveted "Dairy Products" block. McDonald's argues that since such a huge percentage of the population is eating their food, everyone should consider their products a nutritional standard.

Mirror

thanks to all those who have offered to mirror/host my site. i'm currently working on a solution so i should be back up again soon. thanks to Asheesh Laroia there is now a temporary mirror here: http://jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu/~alaroia1/dean/ [jhu.edu] please note: only the html test files work on this mirror. thanks again. dean edwards

Still no cure for bug #97283

Still no cure for bug #97283 in Mozilla [mozilla.org]. Simple thing:

<div style="overflow:auto; height:50px; width:50px">

1<br />
2<br />
3<br />
4<br />
5<br />

</div>

Mousewheel: Does not scroll down
Space: Does not page down
Page-Down: Does not page down
Cursorkey-Down: Does not scroll down

"Microsofts Invention", the iframe works like a charm in Mozilla, simple W3C CSS fails. Since 2001.

Standards or just plain common sense?

I know this is not new to a lot of people judgeing by the number of hits I get when searching for solutions. IE's submit button doesn't lock, as many times as you click it, is as many times as it breaks its former connection and makes a new one.

I can't believe even MS would do something that stupid!!! Since I learned about forms on Netscape, it never occured to me that this problem could exist until I saw it for myself.

I couldn't care less about DHTML or CSS "compliance" when IE can't even act like a simple web client correctly!!

Eric

The correct way

It is meaningless to comment by saying "hey I use firefox", because the rest of the world is not using it. Now still 25% of my visitors are using IE 5.5, given that IE 6.0 is there 4 years ago.

Yes, it is much easier to make Mozilla/Opera more IE-complaint. [See IE Emu [eae.net]]

It is also quite easy to design a new set of API such that they are deligated to the correct version supported by the browser in runtime. [See DHTMLLib [siteexperts.com]] [See CBE [cross-browser.com]]

But these are just the wrong way.

1. It gives excuses for IE people to think that they are right. It works well for all sites. (but of course we can't afford IE not supported (tm)
2. It makes our code bad. We are not coding for the standard, but for the bad browsers. It created the economics that bad browsers will never be gone.

A patch to IE means:

1. We are coding for the standard. Sooner or later when there is no more IE, just remove the line and our code works pretty well.
2. IE works by emulation. This means it will definately be made slower. When there are enough such sites, it gives people one more sites to move away from IE. That is, IE works, but not as good.
3. IE is considered second class. We focus on standard, and IE just work, by mistake. This is important when IE-to-Mozilla has become 50%-50%. It gives people more comfort to use Mozilla because it has the "brand" to work better.
4. Be prepared that IE can stop working at any time. When IE-to-Mozilla has become 30%-70%, we can start withdrawing this script, forcing extinction of IE.

It is exactly something like Cygwin, which implies UNIX-style programs are correct programs. When you move to Linux is just your choice.

Mirror of IE7

With permission of Dean Edward, I have copied the IE7 information and src download to my webserver for mirroring purposes. http://opensource.worldhuman.net/mirror/IE7 [worldhuman.net]

Re:Gone with only 3 comments

on the root of the site (http://dean.edwards.name/) it says:
* This is my site
* for my personal use
* running on my machine
* in my kitchen!

jesus christ, someone create a mirror before his computer blows up from being slashdotted.

Re:MSIE is the standard

that's right, and that's why all developers have the right to bitch about it and let off some steam, i myself having just spent the last 2 weeks developing 3 versions of a site design; firefox/opera (ie; standards compliant), ie5 and ie6.

at least in ie6 they've fixed that div padding and margin issue (where ms blatantly ignored w3c standards and made their own), but it's still annoying because now it means you have to do a version for ie5 and a version for ie6!

and ie6 ignores div heights, aaargh.. never ends!!

and unfortunately i can't add any comments on this actual article cos i still can't get to it!

Re:MSIE is the standard

Unfortunately if MS continues like it has done, the web will stagnate with no cool new features appearing. MS has made it clear they're not interested in making IE standards complient or adding any new enhancements. Since 95% of people use IE (and probably have no clue that there is anything other than IE available), if IE is never enhanced then web developers will forever be stuck in the trap of never being able to use any cool new features that IE doesn't currently support. Very few web developers will be happy adding features to their website that make it unusable for 95% of their visitors (although it seems that professional web developers have no problem with making their sites only work with IE).

What I'd love to see someone do at some point is re-skin FireFox to look like IE and then abuse one of IE's many security holes to replace IE with the reskinned FireFox on any machine that visits the website. :)

Re:Welcome to 2004

>> IE is the suck.

This should be displayed whenever IE starts up.