Just a friendly reminder - IE Sucks.

[Michael Morris]

Michael,

I suppose you've considered using conditional comments to load a different stylesheet for IE, but dismissed it?

Cheers

Not really - PAM evals the stylesheet as it sends it. My stylesheet may have a line like this

[[IE6: background: url(images/top.gif)
[else]
background: url(images/top.png) ]]

PHP reads the sheet before sending it and adjusts as necessary. This way I don't have to maintain multiple sheets nor do I need to rely on CSS hacks.

 

[IronWolf]

No no no! That's a little like saying "vomit over your food before eating it. Millions of houseflies can't be wrong!"

Web standards are good. IE is bad. IE7 was better but still defaulted to quirks mode so that nobody had to worry about poorly coded sites breaking. At least IE8 promises to use standards mode as default - short term some broken sites, longer term better usability for the web all round.

Standards are important (if people didn't follow the HTTP standard there would be no internet as we know it today! If browser manufacturers didn't follow the HTML standard we'd be in a sorry state. The CSS standard is no different.

Buggy software which doesn't conform to the standard needs to be fixed; workarounds may be necessary to support buggy software, but the software needs to be brought up to spec.

Very well put! I agree wholeheartedly.

The very fact that MS has *finally* decided to actually use standards in IE8 is a testament to those of us who have stood up for standards compliance.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

If they update from IE6 at work I will be able to view the pages correctly and get even less done.

Thanks for trying to make it look at least passable on IE6 and 7, Michael.

 

[drothgery]

No no no! That's a little like saying "vomit over your food before eating it. Millions of houseflies can't be wrong!"

Web standards are good. IE is bad. IE7 was better but still defaulted to quirks mode so that nobody had to worry about poorly coded sites breaking. At least IE8 promises to use standards mode as default - short term some broken sites, longer term better usability for the web all round.

Of course, if you go back to the beginning, Netscape was terrible and IE went from at least trying (IE3) to quite good by the standards of the time (IE5/6 -- remember that IE6 was out years before FireFox was useable). Despite building in a lot of stuff to handle Netscape's quirks. Microsoft did far more to get CSS from 'a nice idea' to 'something that can actually be used' than anyone else.

 

[Elephant]

(IE5/6 -- remember that IE6 was out years before FireFox was useable).

Well, more than one year, anyway. I was using it back when they called it Phoenix, and it was definitely usable. Despite there being a few sites that didn't behave properly when viewed in Phoenix, it was usable long before they renamed it Firebird.

Internet Explorer 6: August 2001
Mozilla Phoenix: September 2002
Mozilla Firebird: April 2003
Mozilla Firefox: February 2004

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Internet_Explorer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mozilla_Firefox

 

[Dinkeldog]

Maybe Safari will work for me. Firefox has been acting up on me for the last 9 months.

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

Standards are important (if people didn't follow the HTTP standard there would be no internet as we know it today! If browser manufacturers didn't follow the HTML standard we'd be in a sorry state. The CSS standard is no different.

On the flip side, a lot of the standards we have and use are standards because someone got tired of waiting around for a de jure standard to evolve, said 'screw it' and did something good enough that it became a de facto standard.

Personally, I think it's a big mistake relying on lots of custom stuff to make the site work. It'll just lead to the same situation it's in now, where only one person can maintain it, and if Spoony gets hit by a bus, we're screwed. If it's a choice between a shiny feature or pretty style that needs a lot of custom code to make work, and basic functionality right out of the box, I'll take the latter.

And yes, IE sucks. I've been using Opera since 2000, and would have a hard time giving it up. It annoys me no end when I have to revert to IE for something.

 

[Mark]

Personally, I think it's a big mistake relying on lots of custom stuff to make the site work. It'll just lead to the same situation it's in now, where only one person can maintain it, and if Spoony gets hit by a bus, we're screwed.

QFT Loads of problems can be traced to this sort of situation.

 

[Michael Morris]

On the flip side, a lot of the standards we have and use are standards because someone got tired of waiting around for a de jure standard to evolve, said 'screw it' and did something good enough that it became a de facto standard.

Personally, I think it's a big mistake relying on lots of custom stuff to make the site work. It'll just lead to the same situation it's in now, where only one person can maintain it, and if Spoony gets hit by a bus, we're screwed. If it's a choice between a shiny feature or pretty style that needs a lot of custom code to make work, and basic functionality right out of the box, I'll take the latter.

And yes, IE sucks. I've been using Opera since 2000, and would have a hard time giving it up. It annoys me no end when I have to revert to IE for something.

I disagree. Much of the problem can be traced to lack of documentation in the code. Twin Rose for instance didn't leave behind more than 20 words of comments in the entire store code. Bad documentation or no documentation plagues most custom work. Contrawise I tend to write more comment text than functioning code because I have a lot of products and poor memory and I don't want to stare at a block of code I wrote 6 months ago and wonder "what the hell?"

 

[Dinkeldog]

There is no such thing as "overdocumentation" of code.