Making IE Standards Compliant 582
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."
Kudos, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Kudos, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Shows the power of IE (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice (Score:5, Insightful)
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?? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's just simple text!
Do people just blindly click on links just because they are posted?
Re:Kudos, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
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:firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:MSIE is the standard (Score:3, Insightful)
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!
Shows the power of Open Source (Score:5, Insightful)
> 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:Microsoft should hire him (Score:5, Insightful)
Wouldn't life be grand if Microsoft shipped the open source Mozilla as their default browser?
Re:Making IE Standards compliant? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. (Score:2, Insightful)
Judging from the angry shouts and grumbles in lab when someone decides to mass-message a goatse link, I'd say the answer is yes.
Why did notobdy grab and torrent the file (Score:4, Insightful)
If somebody had grabbed the files we could had a torrent mirror delivering the files in seconds.
Re:Useful stylesheets (Score:5, Insightful)
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,...).
Re:Shows the power of IE (Score:5, Insightful)
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:MSIE is the standard (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Kudos, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
IE (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Making IE Standards compliant? (Score:4, Insightful)
I gotta say that IE is one of the worst. (Score:1, Insightful)
I was expecting another kind of patch (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Cute, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Kudos, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
> with no consideration for what browser they may be using,
> then you are taking the position of Microsoft: "Let's
> commandeer the html standard so that ppl write for our
> browsers instead of according to standards!"
Not right. You can build pages that conform to HTML standards which won't work right in IE due to defects in IE's handling of the HTML standards. This style sheet appears to work around those bugs in IE. Those same standards-compliant pages may well work (or not work) in Mozilla, etc. So, you aren't creating pages that only work in a specific browser, you are creating pages that are valid, standard HTML code - that won't work in IE. There's a difference.
Of course, you can also create pages like that that fail in other browsers. IE is the most prevalent and, arguably, visibly deficient of them.
Re:Useful stylesheets (Score:3, Insightful)
That would be silly, because it would be stooping to the IE's level.
If I ever see a web page that specifically excludes me because I use a Non-Supported Browser, or deliberately crashes my browser, I'm not going to listen to that web designer's plea of Using Another Browser. Instead, I go elsewhere.
But if I see a site promoting the [microsoft.com] author's favorite browser [mozilla.org] in a sensible, non-intrusive way [opera.com], I'm not annoyed at all - still might not be interested to switch this very instant, but at least I'm not annoyed. =)
Didn't we learn anything from the last browser wars?
Re:Shows the power of IE (Score:3, Insightful)
Because it's used by the majority of the people on the Internet, and the people this "fix" is aimed at are the ones who are responsible for getting websites to work for everyone, not just those that use the developers' favourite browser.
Sure, it would be great if nobody used Internet Explorer, or if Microsoft fixed Internet Explorer, but that simply isn't the case, and pointing fingers at Microsoft won't solve the problem, whether it's their fault or not.
Re:Making IE Standards compliant? (Score:4, Insightful)
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:All he has to do now (Score:3, Insightful)
- stylesheet can be cached: no penalty on website size
- a central version with the latest stable release: less fuss for website maintainers
Re:Making IE Standards compliant? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Kudos, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Useful stylesheets (Score:3, Insightful)
Useless (Score:2, Insightful)
Then again, what I would really like is M$ forced to use the standards, and any improvements to that have to go through the appropriate bodies for inclusion...In fact, i'd just like to see IE gone....and Windows...oh, and M$...
Re:Kudos, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The correct way (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
A patch to IE means:
It is exactly something like Cygwin, which implies UNIX-style programs are correct programs. When you move to Linux is just your choice.
Re:Making IE Standards compliant? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Making IE Standards compliant? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's all part of the 'secure computing' initiative. The fewer vendors you are dealing with, the more secure it is, right?
Re:Making IE Standards compliant? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:firefox (Score:3, Insightful)
I knew somebody would bring this up. Pedantism pays off when coding, it's not unwarranted criticism.
You state that "no browser in the world will break with this behaviour". It's already happened once with this exact error. This error was even more common in HTML documents a while ago, and then a version of Netscape came out that couldn't understand links that were broken in this way. The result was that anybody using Netscape (the most popular browser at the time) would have to deal with broken links if the author thought they could get away with these errors.
There are lots of examples where people think that error-handling or proprietary behaviour can be relied upon, and then a new version of a browser comes out that catches them out. It's such a simple thing to get right that it's just plain stupid to not do so.
Re:Making IE Standards compliant? (Score:3, Insightful)
I have found that the DoNotUseIE.patch file has upgraded it to 100% open standards compliance, and this cannot be overridden by any future version of IE or other Microsoft extensions.
Microsoft lawyers will contact you shortly about your violation of the DMCA. Applying this patch violates their copyright. All your browser are belong to us!
This is just peachy (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:What's up with that comma, dude? (Score:2, Insightful)
Many
Unless the error substantially changes the meaning of the post, these types of comments should be rated as Off Topic.
Please don't (Score:3, Insightful)
Pages should not be designed for browser x (replace x with browser of choice). This is bad web design. Web pages should be designed to follow standards, as should web browsers. In many cases I would also recommend not using the latest rendition of a standard, since most browsers probably don't support it. The philosphy of web design, is 'write for all, view by all'. NOT 'write for one, view by one' as this is lazy, shows bad design and is just careless. I like to be able to use the browser on whatever computer I am sitting at and still have it display correctly.
This is a rant, but one which I feel passionatly about. Now don't get me going on how Macromedia Flash also shows signs of poor web design.
Re:Kudos, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
What you're forgetting here is that not following the "standard" doesn't necessarily make Microsoft wrong, or bad, or erroneous. It merely makes them non-compliant with the standard. Now hold on before everyone mods me down as some sort of crackbrained troll, and hear me out.
History is replete with all sorts of "standards" that were completely and totally ignored. In each case where the standard was bypassed, something else eventually became dominant and was eventually recognized as the de facto "standard." How, then, is this "proprietary" standard any less valid than the original "standard" standard?
The short answer is: it isn't, unless you give a great deal of weight to design by standards committee. If Microsoft's market share is ubiquitious enough to force 90% of the world's web pages to be written with that share in mind, they are now a standard whether anyone says they are or not. The argument could logically be made that the HTML specification is lacking, and ultimately it is the HTML spec that is non-standard. In the sheer number of desktops sporting IE versus any other browser, that logic would win the day.
Now, that being said, I'm all for standards compliance whenever and wherever possible. I do, however, acknowledge that many "standards" have been woefully inadequate in the past, and they were rightfully disregarded by the innovators of the field (remember Netscape and frames?). I'd prefer it if Microsoft would play by the rules, but reality says they are actually capable of making the rules by sheer market force.
Re:What's up with that comma, dude? (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually, MOST people I know from other countries who speak/write English as a second language do it FAR better than most native English speakers I know.
I would wager dollars to doughnuts that the person who makes a mistake like that is NOT foreign.
Embrace and Extend fodder (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Kudos, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
My memory of that time was that there was plenty of free software, yes. But that it was often nearly unusable. The university software was always highly functional within its scope, but you were expected to modify it to make it actually work in any sort of easy way.
You and I may be capable of using a very complicated command line or shell script to string tools together for a task, but I find that I'm less inclined to do so when I need to get a report to a client immediately and must have processed data for the presentation.
The fact is that the free tools available at the time were usually superior to their commercial counterparts, but the level of knowledge required to use them was also.
As for the generally available free software it was usually unsupported and public domain. Often it was of such poor quality that it was unusable. Which brings me to my primary argument against your first point; Before RMS created the GPL you essentially had only two ways to make free software available. You could use a University license (if you worked for a University.) That would give the author some protection against his work being raided by someone who wanted to make a quick buck off of someone else's work. Or you could put it in the public domain and if it was good, be guaranteed that someone with the resources to publish it would make a bundle at your expense.
Without the GPL (and similar licenses) there would be no OSS movement to speak of. High quality free software requires a return on investment. That investment may be intangible, but it is very real.
as for your second point, I think that commercial enterprises have become involved because there is a market for software support and supporting good software is cheap. Since most companies don't know the difference between good and bad software they pay the same for support of either. Essentially Microsoft, and others, are encouraging OSS publishers to exist and make big money by charging a competitive rate for a less expensive product.
For the first time there is a financial incentive for the creation of quality software and its associated support. But without the incentive of copyright retention offered by open source licenses, authors would not produce it and we would be back in the bad old days of generally crappy free software with the occasional gem. Perhaps I have selective memory, but I think that the OSS movement is fairly recent and markedly different from just free (as in beer) software.
Re:Kudos, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
most users are so ignorant of what is good software that they just buy whatever is most shinny and pretty and expensive.
Not just software, either.
Intelligent, educated, discriminating buyers are a minority in most marketplaces.