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It used to be Netscape 4... for those with experience no explenation neccesary.
But for those dedicated to perfection and who like creative freedom and cross browser compatiblity it's hard to swallow that simple bugs still exist that give us reason to groan.
Although it's taking an eternity for the Mozilla team to fix a simple scrolling issue for DIVs (now finally fixed at LEAST in their 1.8 Alpha) one of the things thats really bugging me of late has been in regards to my revising my CSS.
DIVs if my perception is correct are supposed to be the replacement for tables. However after a bit of frustration in pixel by pixel placement with borders included I found that not only IE but also Opera fail to render the border seperate from the width in CSS on DIVs.
I haven't gotten in to the nitty gritty I suppose you could say about IE until of late and IE 6 has been out much longer then of late. It's an OS release browser it seems and unlike Opera and Moz little word seems to leak about IE 7. What I am wondering is if IE7 will follow standards this time around? If not I'm sure it will be yet another long wait if MS maintains an IE/OS release only policy. If that happens AND IE fails to meet such simple standards browser compatability will remain a painful issue that we'll have to continue to deal with.
Should IE 7 come out without the simple fixes it needs I'm not prepared for another 4 more years. I'm more interested in learning to enrich my understanding of development then play patty cake all night with CSS in frustration because MS simply can't follow W3s standards.
play patty cake all night with CSS in frustrationvery nicely put, JAB. Been there, done that, probably fated to keep doing that until 2008 if browser upgrades tend to go the way they have in the past.
My guess is that MS will create a fairly standards-compliant browser. Front Page doesn't do nearly as well as ie, and MS has become such a pariah in the web design community they won't be able to pull off anything proprietary in the HTML / css department anymore that has much of a chance of getting widely adopted. The web standards movement has really been a huge success, the awareness is out there now and the web is slowly, very slowly, coming around. I couldn't imagine the web coming around any faster, given the nature of the beast. I hope that MS has learned from opening up channel9 at msdn that it appears to have largely mortgaged its future when it comes to good standards practice (interoperability and software standards) and good practice standards (engaging in web-friendly behavior and credible marketing) that it realizes there'll be regular payments due - no huge sacrifices, but at least turning down some 'killer marketing techniques' that it previously might have taken up, and upholding standards even when convenient excuses are at hand. If there is any real danger of making the web and the office a less nice place due to nasty proprietary practices, I'd guess that it'd be in protocols other than HTML and css. Webservices, or perhaps even some sort of new 'security protocol' like the palladium initiative we heard so much of about a year ago. The latest tiff regarding e-mail security disheartens me somewhat - if this was so important, why doesn't MS put the patent into the public domain, instead of waffling around about who might get a free license? We've burned our fingers on MS in the past - sure, MS wasn't the only guy back then twiddling with the market via proprietary technology in what is supposed to be an open front, but the thing is, they've firmly saddled us with a sad relic of the browser wars for two years already, and it will be another two years. When it comes to internet caches, 'eternity' is considered to be ten years - so that'll be 40% of an eternity. MS could probably feed a good part of some third world country with the wages and manhours spent on getting stuff to work in msie. People are employed, but this isn't the kind of thing we want to employ people for. We'd like to put our money and people somewhere else.
For those who haven't been there, channel9 is a sort of 'community' site for developers using ms stuff and is basically a forum board, except not with topics like 'PHP - 31,125 posts' as you'll see here (and this is only one forum board's php topic), but rather topics like 'Visual C# 2005 Express Edition - 83 posts' -- and that's the forum on a scripting tech with the most posts, the others ranging from 9 to 36. I've seen dinky php scripts get massively more postings on their home boards, and granted, these are just 'express editions' of their stuff, but really, rather telling for MS's popularity, isn't it?
I found that not only IE but also Opera fail to render the border seperate from the width in CSS on DIVs.
This is interesting. I haven't heard of any version of Opera with box-model problems, and I also haven't seen any problems like this with it. Since you also mention that IE has this problem, I suspect that the page(s) you're working on are not using a full doctype [google.com], and that both IE and Opera are therefore rendering the page(s) in what's called 'quirks mode [google.com]'.
-B
Also, I just checked a couple of layouts of mine; if the box-model has problems with borders in Opera, then they ought to break - they don't.
Is MS able to integrate their next browser with the OS, after the various legal rulings over the past year?
That approach is the single biggest threat to their OS security which, if you listen to what the MS mouthpieces have been ranting about for a long time now is their "top priority".
Here is MS' position paper on the future of web applications:
[w3.org...]
I don't understand their refusal to acknowledge W3, either. At first I wasn't so sure - I found the w3 standards a bit 'behind' - but today I am firmly behiind them. Especially since I've begun coding in XHTML.
For that matter, I don't understand whay any browser should suck. The standards are out there for all to see, use and peruse. The rest is just GUI as far as I'm concerned.
MS has been shot down continually in their efforts to get their homegrown stuff into the standards because of patent issues. We'll have to see if they can convince their ring of hardcores to dive into "XAML" without it being adopted by a standards org.
It probably includes stuff to work with MS' version of "security" that the open standards will have trouble with, if history is any reference.
Excerpt:
A Microsoft-backed proposal for verifying the source of e-mail has been shelved by the Internet engineers working to turn it from specification to standard, in a final blow for antispam technology Sender ID.
and
Closing shop comes roughly a week after MARID voted down a proposal by Microsoft to make some of the company's intellectual property a mandatory part of the solution. The group decided that Microsoft's insistence on keeping secret a possible patent application on its proposed technology was unacceptable.
They probably already started building Sender ID into MSIE7. Now what?
Change a couple features, fix a few bugs, and call it IE 7. :)
That's not really their style. It's more like this: change a couple of features, fix 2 bugs, add 3 new bugs and increase the version number. Repeat every 5 years whether needed or not ;-)
-B
It appears that MS is stumbling to get its new features together, see "Longhorn Becomes Shorthorn" [pcmag.com...]
If the above article is any indicator of what IE 7 will be, then things don't look too good. But, then again, if MS can continue its tradition of copying what other successful companies have done, there might be a reason to believe that IE 7 might be decent.
How about MS just pays Apple or Mozilla $50 billion so that then can take/borrow/steal/"your word here" Safari or Firefox and put a ugle IE interface on it and call it IE 7.
I wish those clever virus/bug producing hackers would come up with a virus or bug that would uninstall all versions of IE, and repalce them with Firefox or Safari...wishful thinking.
How about MS just pays Apple or Mozilla $50 billion so that then can take/borrow/steal/"your word here" Safari or Firefox and put a ugle IE interface on it and call it IE 7.
Typically the MS concept of opening source has been to let selected large clientel threatinging to go elsewhere see portions of their code. By nature this model disallows most of the perks of open source development, for instance a bug reports that include a patch has no place in this model, rather the bug is fixed by MS and only by MS (and furthermore generally only after its exploitation).
I for one would hate to see MS go open source with a large product (such as IE) in a manner developers would support, because it would undermine and take development resources (generally end-users) away from what I think are better alternatives. So let us be thankful that MS will make a proprietary version of IE 7, yet again incorperate it in their OS to a level that an exploit for this single program is capible of modifying the Operating System, yet again break away from standards and introduce proprietary extensions that developers will not support, and in generally create smoke and mirrors such that those unwilling to explore third party alternatives rest confident that theirs is the best product.
But instead of wistfully wishing for someone to 'do things to them' to make them fall, we should be doing our best to develop widely-available low-cost working solutions that will force them to change their (cough) market stance. Think thousands of people contibuting their idea of what a "great" browser would be. Open source is headed in the right direction in that regard. And MS is doing all it can to stop them.
MS must be listening to all the who's who of the internet bash their junky browser and it's poor web standards support, right?
What harm would it do MS to make IE 7 completely compliant. That would be the best of both worlds for everyone. Those blinded or lassoed by MS's marketing tactics (remember Apple's lemmings: [flamingmailbox.com...] ) will continue to use IE like always, and everyone else will go about their own business, like always. Web developers will breath a sigh of relief knowing the the most used web browser will support their bleeding edge markup.
[edited by: tedster at 8:06 pm (utc) on Sep. 26, 2004]
[edit reason] fix link [/edit]
