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."
Shows the power of IE (Score:4, Interesting)
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:firefox (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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:.name? (Score:2, Interesting)
Dean Edwards (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Useful stylesheets (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft should hire him (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft should hire him...
Re:firefox (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Shows the power of IE (Score:5, Interesting)
now actually reverting to tables for a lot of the layout because of it.
Re:Shows the power of IE (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Google cache (Score:5, Interesting)
http://freecache.org/http://www.slowsite.com/bi
It benefits the site owner by having reduced bandwidth costs and it also benefits Slashdot as we can read the articles.
Re:firefox (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:firefox (Score:2, Interesting)
Microsoft can fix IE (Score:5, Interesting)
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)"
Re:Shows the power of IE (Score:4, Interesting)
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:firefox (Score:5, Interesting)
The magazine A List Apart [alistapart.com] has already redone Slashdot's design with web standards. Look here:
ignorance (Score:2, Interesting)
i can see it now...
windows xp recomended update #5946468
css.net:
this update gives IE6 the ability to properly* display css using the
*through emulation only, we're microsoft damnit! we don't bow down to anyone bitch!
Re:Implementing CSS is HARD (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Microsoft can fix IE (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Useful stylesheets (Score:3, Interesting)
The sad thing is that the law does not get applied to the biggest criminal of them all, the Convicted Monopolist.
Re:Shows the power of IE (Score:3, Interesting)
It does however show a great degree of skill on the part of the programmer, in the use of the limited and corrupt subset of CSS which actually works on the obsolete browser, and a great deal of patience in finding and working around countless undocumented bugs and features, despite the obstruction and wilful obfuscation caused by the actions of the Criminal Monopolist.
Useful for enhanced IE browsers (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Useful stylesheets (Score:1, Interesting)
msie crashes because of the p:first-letter and the em in the first paragraph, (p)(em)text
it probably doesn't know how to handle this, maybe tries to applie the style to the em-tag or something, anyway it takes the easy way out and crashes ;)
One a side note, had that document been a proper xhtml1.1 document, which should have been sent as application/xhtml+xml not as text/html as it is. msie wouldn't have displayed it at all, giving you a download dialog when trying to load it. xhtml media types [w3.org]
Re:Shows the power of IE (Score:2, Interesting)
Some posters perceive a climate of hostility on Slashdot to certain ideas, particularly pro-Microsoft and pro-government-regulation ones.
Although these ideas may attract a disproportionate share of hostile reaction, the very fact that they generate so much reaction indicates that people are interested enough in the ideas to debate them. It suggests that a large number users are looking for an argument.
Passionate intensity [well.com] is no measure of truth and is often a mask for uncertainty. However, it can be a measure of the importance of an idea or proposition. It indicates that something important may be at stake.
The benefit for more dispassionate readers is that they often learn more when conflicting ideas are forcefully presented than when everyone takes a measured approach.
Still no cure for bug #97283 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Get firefox. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Kudos, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Shows the power of IE (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Useful stylesheets (Score:2, Interesting)
Can I feign ignorance? "Sorry, officer. I was just trying to use legitimate stylistic commands that render so nicely in Netscape/Opera/Safari/etc. I had no idea that Microsoft's browser was so buggy."
Re:Useful stylesheets (Score:2, Interesting)
<input type='crash'
Seems kind of ironic.
Re:Shows the power of IE (Score:3, Interesting)
What it shows is the power of DHTML behaviors. Microsoft has only ever used them for cutesy little hacks, but with them you can pretty much filter and transform selected elements into arbitrary HTML, including script elements. The closest thing mozilla has to this is XBL, which aside from being almost completely undocumented, is insanely difficult to write.
I understand the author of this hack has behaviors for mozilla
Re:Useful stylesheets (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Making IE Standards compliant? (Score:3, Interesting)
Exchange screenshots with another webmaster who does use IE. I've got a couple
of people I trade screenshots with regularly. They like this arrangement,
because my screenshots show some edge cases that most people would miss.
I always take a series of shots showing scalability from 640x480 up through
at least 1280x1024, and I always show what the site looks like with and without
page colors turned on (and my system colors are medium-contrast light-on-dark,
which shows up stuff that gets missed if you use black-on-white). Also I tend
to take screenshots with about three different rendering engines (always Gecko,
plus usually Konqueror and one or more of Opera, W3, Links, Lynx). So my
approach shows up a lot of edge cases that more typical setups (black-text,
white-background, MSIE, 800x600, page colors enabled) won't see.
Yes, it's possible to design a web page that looks "right" under all of the
above settings. (By "right", I mean it looks like it was designed for those
settings.) Eye candy in the graphical browsers, without breaking the text
browsers; client-side scripts that automate things if scripts are enabled,
without breaking the site if scripts aren't enabled. Images that look good
(no jaggy edges) against either a light _or_ dark background. (This is
tricky if you have to support browsers with no proper alpha channel, but
it can be done; the trick is to set the background color when you save your
PNG images, so that non-alpha-channel browsers (*cough* MSIE) will antialias
against that color -- set that to the same color as the surrounding background
and you get to be Bob's nephew. Or use the MSIE PNG-alpha-channel hack, but
not all versions of MSIE support that, and it still leaves old versions of
Opera out in the cold.)
Re:Useful stylesheets (Score:1, Interesting)
From IE About:
Version: 6.0.2800.1106.xpsp2.030422-1633
I'm not running XP SP2, however. Which is odd.. Just XP SP1 with all the latest Windows Updates on it.
Re:What's up with that comma, dude? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.