March 28th, 2005
Emergent Microformats That Acid Buzz Nifty Corners: rounded corners without images The Next Big Thing in [...]

But Håkon’s article was spesificly about IE7 and not about acid2. So of course he had to put it like he did. I got an entirely different view of what he was saying after I read his article, than from what you were saying.

I’m looking forward to that test as everyone there has something to iron-out, but Microsoft by far has weakest CSS and seems to be least interested in improving it, so I’m not surprised that Hakons challange is targetted towards MS.

Opera causes you problems? The only major problems you should have are those relating to badly-written markup or out-of-date scripts. Any minor problems can easily be catered for.

You’re kidding, right? I suppose these :first-line CSS bugs, one of which causes text to disappear, are caused by invalid markup or out-of-date scripts?

Kyle, in comment #5, wrote: “Opera causes the most serious problems for me (our company no longer supports Opera by default).”

To single out probably the most capable browser available right now, used by millions of users worldwide, strikes me as wrong. Opera causes you problems? The only major problems you should have are those relating to badly-written markup or out-of-date scripts. Any minor problems can easily be catered for.

Each browser has layout differences. Firefox does not display things exactly the same as Opera, nor IE6/Win. Then there’s Safari et al. But if your code is valid, it should work in any major browser without hassle. Opera offers nothing to warrant blocking it completely.

Opera 8 (due any time now) offers many improvements. Opera 7 already has great support for CSS2.1 and some CSS3 – media queries, generated content, lots of things no-one can use much because Firefox or IE can’t handle them.

Kyle again: “On the other hand, I feel Opera changes it’s layout engine far too often, causing severe display difficulties distinguishing between different versions.”

I’ve seen no evidence of “severe” changes, and I’ve been testing in Opera since version 6. You could test for the different versions with the User Agent string though. Anyway, at least they’re constantly upgrading their browser, unlike a certain Redmond-based company I could mention…

There is however a chicken and egg problem. We know that one very popular browser lacks a bit in comparable standards support. We also know that the same browser is very much targeted by web application developers in business.

To get developers to change their behaviour we need to educate them; this has been done by WASP and others for many years now. But when you tell developers “This is the way it should be done”, but their pet browser needs a set of CSS hacks I can understand the scepticism. (Practically we need to tell developers: your way of hacking is wrong, here is a new way of hacking).

Microsoft tells us “we follow the demands of businesses” (and that seems to be a succesful strategy) and businesses don’t switch their way of working as long as Microsoft does not release a browser that supports at least the same set of standards as other mainstream browsers. How to break that cycle?

I have a little hope after reading Molly’s comment.

So much of the time the ‘browser wars’ get misreported as being “Internet Explorer verses Web Standards”, it just doesn’t help anyone.

In some ways there is a calmness that comes from seeing over the media circus that surrounds ‘the state of IE’, but I can’t escape the fact that it ultimately hurts our cause and our profession to just single out IE as the pivotal villain.

(Oh, and just to stress, I don’t mean to include any of the talented, honest and inspired web standards and browser product evangelists in my branding “fanboi”. I’m sure you know the kinds of people that I do refer to).

I do think that IE has the most to fix right now, and it’s not unreasonable to want to grab the IE7 devs at this point and shake them up a bit, but I don’t think the negative angle is a good one.

The good news is Scoble has been helping negotiate relationships between WaSP and Microsoft on all levels – not just IE but the dev tools as well. So that’s something very cool that’s come out of all this hot controversy.

So, no – it’s not just IE. It’s browsers in general. If we can get the next generation of browsers to fully support CSS2 properties, and limited CSS3 support – maybe in 5 years we can really start moving forward.

While IE7 is the highest-profile target for obvious reasons, I can assure you that the test will reveal bugs in other browsers too — including Opera and Firefox.