Eric’s Archived Though…

Eric’s Archived Though…

M$ SHOULD be concerned about standards in their quest for world domination. More and more people dislike M$, authors for having to code twice (and debug 10 times too much) and users for having their systems compromized (again and again).

Firstly I’d like to thank you for being at the forefront of helping less-advanced web developers (like myself) to come to grips with standards in the real world. I had been building websites on and off since around ’96 using tables, spacer gifs and the like for layout. It was really very exciting to discover that CSS and semantic markup could finally be used to some effect. A very interesting article.

Personally I’d like to see IE clean up it’s act in regards to CSS regardless of the consequences. If I have to fix a few pages here and there to make them display the way I intended because of changes in IE’s display engine, so be it.

Finally, I am looking forward to IE7 and all it’s ‘features’/bugs.

Regards;
Poncho

I just tested some pages with XHTML doctype-transitional, and when I remove that and revert from standard to quirks mode in IE 6, the box model is not fixed as you describe, and IE does seem to revert to the broken IE 5.5 box model. Please run a test and verify….I could be wrong on that.

Mitchell, I think you’ve got the wrong end of the stick here. With IE6 in quirks mode, the box model deliberately remains broken compared with standards mode (it’s kind of the point of quirks mode).

What has been fixed in quirks mode is a bug which was exploited in the ‘Box Model Hack’, so-called because it was used to get around IE5′s broken box model. It is this bug to which Eric was referring – because the bug the hack depended on is now fixed, the hack no longer works.

Everybody will be happy!

So I fixed a few style sheets, tossed a hack out of my mental toolbox, and got on with my life.

I suppose he may have been refering to a mindset shift rather than a stylesheet change though.

I’m also guessing that a new IE may be tripped up by an old hack and at the same time support the intended behavior. Admitedly a leap, but from past experience, not a large one.

Incidentally, you guys can login and post comments to the IE team at channel9.msdn.com – Microsoft’s attempt to open up development of future releases much like Linux and Mozilla have done – and leave your opinions about IE if you like to the developers.

But, I think when the move happens, it wont be for some time, and there will be some minor shuffling of site code when it does, depending on your personal hacking strategy. I started applying styles for IE 6, then hacks for Mozilla. Ive since reversed that practice, and I think as long as your hacks and fixes apply to IE 6 in your code, you will be ahead opf the game. I know for one, I do use the child selector rule to separate IE ffrom Mozilla at times, and once or if thats “fixed” in IE, if they miss a standard, so will my code. Otherwise, if the hack and property works, we are all good to go with no changes. But like you say, browsers have been evolving since the 90′s, so there really is no argument in any form about worrying about breaking web sites. Especially with the standards/quirksmode design IE now carries. They are giving us as much flexibility as possible and Im sure will build on that concept in future versions.

Lastly, I could be wrong on this Eric, but I just tested some pages with XHTML doctype-transitional, and when I remove that and revert from standard to quirks mode in IE 6, the box model is not fixed as you describe, and IE does seem to revert to the broken IE 5.5 box model. Please run a test and verify….I could be wrong on that.

Thanks for the great body of work!

-Mitchell http://www.stormdetector.com

Fixing IE will do a few thing which Microsoft does care about:

If they fix IE they would be admitting the current version of IE is broken. Microsoft still won’t admit this, or at best, they downplay it.

If they fix IE they’ll also need to fix all the tools which produce broken mark-up, such as FrontPage, Word, and Visual Studio.

Finally, if they fix IE they may break some intranet sites. This Microsoft really does care about. Microsoft has downplayed Firefox’s continuously increasing market share by saying how it still has the corporate inrtanet market cornered. The funny thing is that they are starting to loose marked share here, too, but it has nothing to do with IE at all. That’s because they’re starting to loose OS market share to Linux and Linux doesn’t run IE (but it does run Firefox).

Good points. Except I don’t think Microsoft should hold back support for child selectors just because a (relatively) small number of web authors use them as hacks. That would be very silly.

IMO, that’s not silly at all; the thing is to implement child selectors after fixing all the other bugs. :-)

If designers remove the old hacks, IE 5, 5.5, and 6 users will be greeted by the broken design that the designer was trying to avoid, but who can say whether a new version would fall to the hack or rise above it.

Why would you have to remove the old hacks? Are those versions going to disappear all of a sudden?

Imagine, in say, a year’s time when IE decides to release a patch supporting CSS2 and PNG. The real developers/designers as whole will probably say: “Ya, so! Who the hell cares!” The bulk of their visitors will have been surfing with Firefox for a long time by then anyway.

Now, there is one area where I think the IE team would have to be careful about adding support, and that