[thelist] Re: IE and Standards Compliance (was: Re: news.com article on browsers and mainstream sites etc..)

Tim Luoma luomat at peak.org
Tue Jul 9 17:00:01 CDT 2002


James Aylard wrote:

>    Except in reality, that list is hundreds or thousands of items long,
>which is why I think the analogy -- as all analogies inevitably are -- is
>too simplistic.
>
Obviously.  It's an illustration.

>If Microsoft has done 950 out of 1,000 items (pulling
>numbers out of thin air), I think that is worthy of consideration. Sure, the
>other 50 things -- especially pet items that are especially important to a
>particular developer -- are going to chafe a bit. But it's not like the
>job's only half done.
>
But instead of working on this I get a "patch" to XP that re-installs
MSN Messenger when I had to go through gyrations to get it off in the
first place.

>    In rough guesstimation, I'd say Microsoft has about 95% compliance on
>HTML 4, and probably nearly that on CSS 1. CSS 2 support is quite spotty,
>admittedly. Lack of support for CSS 2 selectors, especially, and everyone's
>favorite "position: fixed", is disappointing.
>
It should be an embarrassment to them that should have, and very
conceivably could have, been fixed long ago.

>"Proprietary hacks" misses the mark, IMO. Very few of these are hacks in
>the common sense -- they are features, technologies, extensions, what have you.
>
Let's not argue semantics... the point is clear -- they are adding their
own proprietary "stuff"

colored scrollbars are a hack, a useless hack at that.

>>You don't get any credit for the "innovations" (which benefit your
>>market share and stranglehold over the industry) until you get to the
>>level of standards compliance.  The irony is that Microsoft has the
>>
>>
>
>    That's a bit absolutist for me. I give credit for innovations on one
>hand, and dings for shortcomings on the other, although lacking full CSS 1
>and HTML 4 support carries more weight than adding scrollbar coloring, for
>instance.
>
You're right... perhaps I should have said "You don't get MUCH credit"
rather than "any"

>Agreed. But accomplishing full standards-compliance has not
>traditionally been Microsoft's goal -- garnering users has been. One of its
>key target markets, IMO, has been corporate Intranets, and many of the
>proprietary features implemented in IE are geared toward this. As
>developers, we can argue whether this is good, bad, or indifferent -- but
>this is certainly part of the reason for IE's success.
>
That and the 8,000 lb gorilla that "requires" that IE be installed and
used to access some features.

(yes I am familiar with IEradicator and its ilk)

I love that I ***have*** to use IE to close Windows security holes -- not.


>Now that IE has achieved nearly complete market domination, hopefully
>Microsoft will show a stronger interest in standards compliance, and wield
>its software development weapon for this purpose.
>
I'd like to believe that.


>>Don't give me colored scollbars before you can handle "border-type:
>>outset" or <q> or "float: right" ...
>>
>I'm pretty sure you mean "border-style: outset", right?
>
yeah... I always use the

    foo { border: outset red 2px; }

so I didn't remember what the correct hyphen was

>IE does support that, and has since IE 4.
>
Um... no it doesn't.... IE6/win renders it as a solid border... I use
"outset" all the time at TnTLuoma.com and it renders ugly on IE


>Lack of full support for <q> (or any support for
><abbrev>, for that matter) is disappointing.
>
I actually had someone on an MS newsgroup tell me that IE did support
<q> it just didn't add the quotes to it... which is somewhat true... If
you apply, say "bold" to <q> it will show up in IE, but real support for
it would be proper quoting in the document's language.

>>I hope I don't sound rabit-anti-MS or anti-IE... I'm not really... I've
>>
>>
>    Oh, you don't like Microsoft! I hadn't noticed... :)
>
Ok, so it wasn't a subtle point.

TjL







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