Posts in the Browsers Category

Here’s a late-week call for assistance in the JavaScript realm, specifically in making IE do what I need and can make happen in other browsers.  I’d call this a LazyWeb request except I’ve been trying to figure out how to do it all [censored] afternoon, and it doesn’t [censored] work no matter how many [censored] semi-related examples I find online that work just [censored] fine, but still don’t [censored] help me [censored] fix this [censored] problem.  [doubly censored]!

I have a table.  (Yes, for data.)  In the table are rows, of course, and each row has a number of cells.  I want to walk through the rows and dynamically add an ‘onclick’ event to every row.  The actual event is slightly different for each row, but in every case, it’s supposed to call a function and pass some parameters (which are the things that change).  Here’s how I’m doing it:

var event = '5'; // in the real code this is passed into the surrounding function
var mapStates = getElementsByClassName('map','tr');
for (x = 0; x < mapStates.length; x++) {
	var el = mapStates[x];
	var id = el.getAttribute('id');
	var val = "goto('" + id + "','" + event + "');";
	el.setAttribute('onclick',val);
}

Okay, so that works fine in Gecko.  It doesn't work at all in IE.  I changed el.setAttribute('onclick',val); to el.onclick = val; per some advice I found online and that completely failed in everything.  Firebug told me "el.onclick is not a function".  Explorer just silently did nothing, like always.

So how am I supposed to make this work in IE, let alone in IE and Gecko-based and WebKit-based and all other modern browsers?

Oh, and do not tell me that framework X or library Q does this so easily, because I'm trying to learn here, not have someone else's code hand-wave the problem away.  Pointing me directly to the actual code block inside a framework or library that makes this sort of thing possible:  that's totally fine.  I may not understand it, but at least there will be JS for me to study and ask questions about.  Ditto for pointing me to online examples of doing the exact same thing, which I tried to find in Google but could not: much appreciated.

Help, please?

Update: many, many commenters helped me see what I was missing and therefore doing wrong---thank you all!  For those wondering what I was wondering, check out the comments.  There are a lot of good examples and quick explanations there.

• Need Help With Table Row Events was published on Thursday, May 29th, 2008.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and JavaScript categories.
• There have been forty-five replies.

In the course of building my line-height: normal test page, I settled on defaulting to an unusual but still pervasive font family: Webdings.  The idea was that if you picked a font family in the dropdown and you didn’t have it installed, you’d fall back to Webdings and it would be really obvious that it had happened.

Except in Firefox 3b5, there were no dings, web or otherwise.  Instead, some serif-family font (probably my default serif, Times) was being used to display the text “Oy!”.

It’s a beta, I thought with a mental shrug, and moved on.  When I made mention of it in my post on the subject, I did so mainly so I didn’t get sixteen people commenting “No Webdings in Firefox 3 betas!” when I already knew that.

So I didn’t get any of those comments.  Instead, Smokey Ardisson posted that what Firefox 3 was doing with my text was correct.  Even though the declared fallback font was Webdings, I shouldn’t expect to see it being used, because Firefox was doing the proper Unicode thing and finding me a font that had the character glyphs I’d requested.

Wow.  Ignoring a font-family declaration is kosher?  Really?

Well, yes.  It’s been happening ever since the CSS font rules were first implemented.  In fact, it’s the basis of the whole list-of-alternatives syntax for font-family.  You might’ve thought that CSS says browsers should look to see if a requested family is available and then if not look at the next one on the list, and then goes to render text.  And it does, but it says they should do that on a per-character basis.

That is, if you ask for a character and the primary font face doesn’t have it, the browser goes to the next family in your list looking for a substitute.  It keeps doing that until it finds the character you wanted, either in your list of preferred families or else in the browser’s default fonts.  And if the browser just can’t find the needed symbol anywhere at all, you get an empty box or a question mark or some other symbol that means “FAIL” in font-rendering terms.

A commonly-cited case for this is specifying a CJKV character in a page and then trying to display it on a computer that doesn’t have non-Romance language fonts installed.  The same would hold true for any page with any characters that the installed fonts can’t support.  But think about it: if you browse to a page written in, say, Arabic, and your user style sheet says that all elements’ text should be rendered in New Century Schoolbook, what will happen?  If you have fonts that support Arabic text, you’re going to see Arabic, not New Century Schoolbook.  If you don’t, then you’re going to see a whole lot of “I can’t render that” symbols.  (Though I don’t know what font those symbols will be in.  Maybe New Century Schoolbook?  Man, I miss that font.)

So: when I built my test, I typed “Oy!” for the example text, and then wrote styles to use Webdings to display that text.  Here’s how I represented that, mentally: the same as if I’d opened up a text editor like, oh, MS Word 5.1a; typed “Oy!”; selected that text; and then dropped down the “Font” menu and picked “Webdings”.

But here’s how Firefox 3 dealt with it: I asked for the character glpyhs “O”, “y”, and “!”; I asked for a specific font family to display that text; the requested font family doesn’t contain those glyphs or anything like them; the CSS font substitution rules kicked in and the browser picked those glyphs out of the best alternative.  (In this case, the browser’s default fonts.)

In other words, Firefox 3 will not show me the ear-Death Star-spider combo unless I put those exact symbols into my document source, or at least Unicode references that call for those symbols.  Because that’s what happens in a Unicode world: you get the glyphs you requested, even if you thought you were requesting something else.

The problem, of course, is that we don’t live in a Unicode world—not yet.  If we did, I wouldn’t keep seeing line noise on every web page where someone wrote their post in Word with smart quotes turned on and then just did a straight copy-and-paste into their CMS.    Ged knows I would love to be in a Unicode world, or indeed any world where such character-incompatibility idiocy was a thing of the past.  The fact that we still have those problems in 2008 almost smacks of willful malignance on the part of somebody.

Furthermore, in most (but not all) of the text editors I have available and tested, I can type “Oy!” with the font set to Webdings and get the ear, Death Star, and spider symbols.  So mentally, it’s very hard to separate those glyphs from the keyboard characters I type, which makes it very hard to just accept that what Firefox 3 is doing is correct.  Instinctively, it feels flat-out wrong.  I can trace the process intellectually, sure, but that doesn’t mean it has to make sense to me.  I expect a lot of people are going to have similar reactions.

Having gone through all that, it’s worth asking: which is less correct?  Text editors for letting me turn “Oy!” into the ear-Death Star-spider combo, or Firefox for its rigid glyph substitution?  I’m guessing that the answer depends entirely on which side of the Unicode fence you happen to stand.  For those of us who didn’t know there was a fence, there’s a bit of a feeling of a slip-and-fall right smack onto it, and that’s going to hurt no matter who you are.

• Characteristic Confusion was published on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and CSS categories.
• There have been thirty-two replies.

When I first wrote Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, the part that caused me the most difficulty and headaches was the line layout material.  Several times I was sure I had it all figured out and accurately described, only to find out I was wrong.  For two weeks I corresponded with Ian Hickson and David Baron, arguing for my understanding of things and having them show me, in merciless detail, how I was wrong.  I doubt that I will ever stop owing them for their dedication to getting me through the wilderness of my own misunderstandings.

Later on, I produced a terse description of line layout which went through a protracted vetting process with the CSS Working Group and the members of www-style.  At the time it was published, there was no more detailed and accurate description of line layout available.  Even at that, corrections trickled in over the years, which made me think of it as my own tiny little The Art of Computer Programming.  Only without the small monetary reward for finding errors.

The point here is that line layout is very difficult to truly understand—even given everything I just said, I’m still not convinced that I do—and that there are often surprises lurking for anyone who goes looking into the far corners of how it happens.  As I’ve said before, my knowledge of what goes into the layout of lines of text imparts a sense of astonishment that any page can be successfully displayed in less than the projected age of the universe.

Why bring all this up?  Because I went and poked line-height: normal with a stick, and found it to be both squamous and rugose.  As with all driven to such madness, I now seek, grinning wildly, to infect others.

Here’s the punchline: the effects of declaring line-height: normal not only vary from browser to browser, which I had expected—in fact, quantifying those differences was the whole point—but they also vary from one font face to another, and can also vary within a given face.

I did not expect that.  At least, not consciously.

My work, let me show it to you: a JavaScript-driven test file where you can pick from a list of fonts and see what happens at a variety of sizes.  (Yes, the JS is completely obtrusive; and yes, the JS is the square of amateur hour.  Let’s move on, please.  I’m perfectly happy to replace what’s there with unobtrusive and sharper JS, as long as the basic point of the page, which is testing line-height: normal, is not compromised.  Again, moving on.)

When you first go to the test, you should (I hope) see a bunch of rulered boxes containing text using the very common font face Webdings, set at a bunch of different font sizes.  The table shows you how tall the simple line boxes are at each size, and therefore the numeric equivalent for line-height: normal at those sizes.  So if a line box is using font-size: 50px and the line box is 55 pixels tall, the numeric equivalent for line-height: normal is 1.1 (55 divided by 50).

On my PowerBook, Webdings always yields a 1:1 ratio between the font-size and line box height.  The ten-pixel font size yields a ten-pixel-tall line box, and so on.

This is actually a little surprising by itself.  The CSS 2.1 specification says:

normal

Tells user agents to set the used value to a “reasonable” value based on the font of the element. The value has the same meaning as <number>. We recommend a used value for ‘normal’ between 1.0 to 1.2. The computed value is ‘normal’.

This is basically what CSS has said since its first days (see the equivalent text in CSS1 or in CSS2 for confirmation) and there’s always been a widespread assumption that, since 1.0 is probably too crowded, something around 1.2 is much more likely.

So finding a value of 1 was a surprise.  It was an even bigger surprise to me that this held true in Camino 1.5.2, Firefox 2.0.0.14, and Safari 2.0.4, all on OS X.  Firefox 3b5 didn’t render Webdings at all, so I don’t know if it would do the same.  I actually suspect not, for reasons best left for another time (and, possibly, a final release of Firefox 3).

Various browsers doing the same thing in an under-specified area of the spec?  That can’t be right.  It’s pretty much an article of faith that given the chance to do anything differently, browsers will.  The sailing was so unexpectedly smooth that I immediately assumed was that a storm lurked just over the horizon.

Well, I was right.  All I had to do was start picking other font faces.

To start, I picked the next font on the list, Times New Roman, and the equivalent values for normal immediately changed.  In other words, the numeric equivalents for Times New Roman are different than those for Webdings.  The browsers weren’t maintaining a specific value for normal, but were altering it on a per-face basis.

Now, this is legal, given the way normal is under-specified.  There’s room to allow for this behavior.  It’s actually, once you think about it, a fairly good thing from a visual point of view: the best default line height for Times New Roman is probably not the best default line height for Courier New.  So while I was initially surprised, I got over it quickly.  The seemingly obvious conclusion was that browsers were actually respecting the fonts’ built-in metrics.  This was reinforced when I found that the results were exactly the same from browser to browser.

Then I looked more closely at the numbers, and confusion set back in.  For Times New Roman, I was getting values of 1.1, 1.12, 1.16, 1.15, 1.149, and 1.1499.  If you were to round all of those numbers to two decimal points, you’d get 1.10, 1.12, 1.16, 1.15, 1.15, 1.15.  If you round them all to one decimal place, you’d get 1.1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.2, 1.1, 1.1.  They’re inconsistent.

But wait, I thought, I’m trying to compare numbers I derived by dividing pixels by pixels.  Let’s turn it around.  If I multiply the most precise measurement I’ve gotten by the various font sizes, I get… carry the two… 11.499, 28.7475, 57.495, 114.99, 1149.9, 11499.  As compared to the actual values I got, which were 11, 28, 58, 115, 1149, and 11499.

Which means the results were inappropriately rounded up in some cases and down in others.  28.7475 became 28 and 1149.9 became 1149, whereas 57.495 became 58.  Even though 11.499 became 11 and 114.99 became 115.

This was consistent across all the browsers I was testing.  So again, I was suspecting the fonts themselves.

And then I switched from Times New Roman to just plain old Times, and the storm was full upon me.  I’ll give you the results in a table.

Derived normal equivalents for Times in OS X browsers

font-size	Camino 1.5.2	Firefox 2.0.0.14	Safari 2.0.4
10	1	1.2	1.3
25	1	1	1.16
50	1	1	1.18
100	1	1	1.15
1000	1	1	1.15
10000	1	1	1.15

Much the same happened when comparing Courier New with plain old Courier: full consistency on Courier New between browsers, albeit with the same strange (non-)rounding effects as seen with Times New Roman; but inconsistency between browsers on plain Courier—with Camino yielding a flat 1 down the line, Firefox going from 1.2 to 1, and Safari having a range of values above the others’ values.

Squamous!  Not to mention rugose!

Now it’s time for the stunning conclusion that derives from all this information, which is: not here.  Sorry.  So far all I have are observations.  I may turn all this into a summary page which shows the results for all the font faces across multiple browsers and platforms, but first I’ll need to get those numbers.

I do have a few speculations, though:

1. Firefox’s inconsistency within font faces (see Times and Courier, above) may come from face substitution.  That’s when a browser doesn’t have a given character in a given face, so it looks for a substitute in another face.  If Firefox thinks it doesn’t have 10-pixel Times, it might substitute 10-pixel something else serif-ish, and that face has different line height characteristics than Times.  I don’t know what that other face might be, since it’s not Times New Roman or Georgia, but this is one possibility.  It is not the minimum font size setting in the preferences, as I’ve triple-checked to make sure I have that set to “None”.

2. Another possibility for Firefox’s line height weirdness is a shift from subpixel font rendering to pixelly font rendering.  10-pixel text in Firefox is distinctly pixelly compared to the other browsers I tested, while sizes above there are nice and smooth.  Why this would drive up the line height by two pixels (20%), though, is not clear to me.

3. Much of what I’ve observed will likely be laid to rest at the doorsteps of the font faces themselves.  I’d like to know how it is that the rounding behaviors are so (mathematically) messed up within faces, though.  Perhaps ideal line heights are described as an equation rather than a simple ratio?

Again, this was all done in OS X; I’ll be very interested to find out what happens on Windows, Linux, and other operating systems.  Side note for the Mac Opera fans warming up their flamethrowers: I’ve left Opera 9.27 for OS X out of this because it seems to cap font sizes at a size well below 1000, although this limit varied from one face to another.  Webdings and Courier capped at 507 pixels, whereas Courier capped at 574 pixels and Comic Sans MS stopped at 707 pixels.  I have no explanation, though doubtless someone will, but the upshot is that direct comparisons between Opera and the other browsers are impossible.  For sizes up to 100 pixels, the results were exactly consistent with Camino, if that means anything.

The one tentative conclusion I did reach is this: line-height: normal is a jumbled terrain of inconsistent behaviors, and it’s best avoided in any sort of precision layout work.  I’d already had that feeling, but at least now there’s some evidence to back up the feeling.

In any case, I doubt this is the last I’ll have to say on this particular topic.

Update 7 May 08: I’ve updated the test page with a fix from Ben Lowery so that it works in IE.  Thanks, Ben!  Now all I need is to add a way to type in any arbitrary font-family’s name, and we’ll have something everyone can use.  (Or else a way to use JavaScript to suck up the names of all the fonts installed on a machine and put them into the dropdown.  That would be cool, too.)

• line-height: abnormal was published on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, CSS, and Standards categories.
• There have been sixty-one replies.

So the feeds I read have been buzzing the past few days with running commentary of the WebKit and Opera teams’ race to be the first to hit 100/100 on Acid3, and then after that the effort to get a pixel-perfect match with the reference image.  Last I saw, Opera claimed to have gotten to 100 first but it looked like WebKit had gotten both with something publicly available, but I haven’t verified any of this for myself.  Nor do I have any particular plans to do so.

Because as lovely as it is to see that you can, in fact, get one or more browser implementation teams to jump in a precisely defined sequence through a series of cunningly (one might say sadistically) placed hoops, half of which are on fire and the other half lined with razor wire, it doesn’t strike me as the best possible use of the teams’ time and energy.

No, I don’t hate standards, though I may hate freedom (depends on who’s asking).  What I disagree with is the idea that if you cherry-pick enough obscure and difficult corners of a bunch of different specifications and mix them all together into a spicy meatball of difficulty, it constitutes a useful test of the specifications you cherry-picked.  Because the one does not automatically follow from the other.

For example, suppose I told you that WebKit had implemented just the bits of SMIL-related SVG needed to pass the test, and that in doing so they exposed a woefully incomplete SVG implementation, one that gets something like 2% pass rates on actual SMIL/SVG tests.  Laughable, right?  Yes, well.

Of course, that’s in a nightly build and they might totally support SMIL by the time the corresponding final version is released and we’ll all look back on this and laugh the carefree laugh of children in springtime.  Maybe.  The real point here is that the Acid3 test isn’t a broad-spectrum standards-support test.  It’s a showpiece, and something of a Potemkin village at that.  Which is a shame, because what’s really needed right now is exhaustive test suites for specifications– XHTML, CSS, DOM, SVG, you name it.  We’ve been seeing more of these emerge recently, but they’re not enough.  I’d have been much more firmly in the cheering section had the effort that went into Acid3 had gone into, say, an obssessively thorough DOM test suite.

I’d had this post in mind for a while now, really ever since Acid3 was released.  Then the horse race started to develop, and I told myself I really needed to get around to writing that post—and I got overtaken.  Well, that’s being busy for you.  It’s just as well I waited, really, because much of what I was going to say got covered by Mike Shaver in his piece explaining why Firefox 3 isn’t going to hit 100% on Acid3.  For example:

Ian’s Acid3, unlike its predecessors, is not about establishing a baseline of useful web capabilities. It’s quite explicitly about making browser developers jump… the Acid tests shouldn’t be fair to browsers, they should be fair to the web; they should be based on how good the web will be as a platform if all browsers conform, not about how far any given browser has to stretch to get there.

That’s no doubt more concisely and clearly stated than I would have managed, so it’s all for the best that he got to say it first.

By the by, I was quite intrigued by this part of Mike’s post:

You might ask why Mozilla’s not racking up daily gains, especially if you’re following the relevant bugs and seeing that people have produced patches for some issues that are covered by Acid3.

The most obvious reason is Firefox 3. We’re in the end-game of building what I really do believe is the best browser the web has ever known, and we expect to be putting it in the hands of more than 170 million users in a pretty short period of time. We’re still taking fixes for important issues, but virtually none of the issues on the Acid3 list are important enough for us to take at this stage. We don’t want to be rushing fixes in, or rushing out a release, only to find that we’ve broken important sites or regressed previous standards support, or worse introduced a security problem. Every API that’s exposed to content needs to be tested for compliance and security and reliability… We think these remaining late-stage patches are worth the test burden, often because they help make the web platform much more powerful, and reflect real-web compatibility and capability issues. Acid3’s contents, sadly, are not as often of that nature.

You know, it’s weird, but that seems really familiar, like I’ve heard or read something like that before.  Now if only I could remember…  Oh yeah!  It’s basically what the IE team said about not passing Acid2 when the IE7 betas came out, for which they were promptly excoriated.

Huh.

Well, never mind that now.  Of course it was a totally different set of circumstances and core motivations, and I’m sure there’s absolutely no parallel to be drawn between the two situations.  At all.

Returning to the main point here:  I’m a little bit sad, to tell the truth.  The original acid test was a prefect example of what I think makes for a good stress test.  Recall that the test’s original name, before it got shorthanded, was the “Box Model Acid Test”.  It was a test of CSS box model handling, including floats.  That’s all it was designed to do.  It did that fairly well for its time, considering it was part of a CSS1 test suite.  It didn’t try to combine box model testing with tests for PNG support, HTML parse error recovery, and DOM scripting.

To me, the ideal CSS test suite is one that has a bunch of basic property/value tests, like the ones I’ve been responsible for creating (1, 2), along with a bunch of acid tests for specific areas or concepts in that specification.  So an acidified CSS test suite would have individual acid tests for the box model, positioning, fonts, selectors, table layout, and so on.  It would not involve scripting or markup parsing (beyond what’s needed to handle selectors).  It would not use animated SVG icons.  Hell, it probably wouldn’t even use PNGs, except possibly alphaed PNGs when testing opacity and RGBA colors.  And maybe not even then.

So in a DOM test suite, you’d have one test page for each method or attribute, and then build some acid tests out of related bits (say, on an entire interface or set of closely related interfaces).  And maybe, at the end, you’d build an overarching acid test that rolled verything in the DOM spec into one fiendishly difficult test.  But it would be just about the DOM and whatever absolute minimum of other stuff you needed, like text rendering and maybe GIF support.  (Similarly, the CSS tests had to assume some basic HTML and CSS selector support, or else everything else fell down.)

And then, after all those test suites have been built up and a series of acid tests woven into them, with each one culminating in its own spec-spanning acid test, you might think about taking those end-point acid tests and slamming them all together into one super-ultra-hyper-mega acid test, something that even the xenomorphs from the Alien series would look at and say, “That’s gonna sting”.  That would be awesome.  But that’s not what we have.

I fully acknowledge that a whole lot of very clever thinking went into the construction of Acid3 (as was true of Acid2), and that a lot of very smart people have worked very hard to pass it.  Congratulations all around, really.  I just can’t help feeling like some broader and more important point has been missed.  To me, it’s kind of like meeting the general challenge of finding an economical way to loft broadband transceivers to an altitude of 25,000 feet (in order to get full coverage of large metropolitan areas while avoiding the jetstream) by daring a bunch of teams to plant a transceiver near the summit of Mount Everest—and then getting them to do it.  Progress toward the summit can be demonstrated and kudos bestowed afterward, but there’s a wider picture that seems to have been overlooked in the process.

• Acid Redux was published on Thursday, March 27th, 2008.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and Standards categories.
• There have been thirty-five replies.

If there’s a downside to becoming a cyborg, it’s the aftermath.  I’m not talking about the dystopian corporate-state shenanigans: those are fully expected.  No, it’s the painkillers that really suck.  They basically do their job, but at the cost of mental acuity.  That is not a trade I’m happy to make.  Granted, there were some interesting physical hallucinations that came along for the ride, but that’s nowhere near enough to balance the scales.

Here’s what I mean on that last part.  At one point yesterday, lying in bed as I had been all day, I decided it was about time to straighten out my legs, which were crossed at the ankles and starting to feel a little funny.  When I sent the relevant signals to my legs, nothing really happened.  Slowly I came to realize that nothing was happening because my legs weren’t actually crossed at all.  Furthermore, it gradually dawned on me that if the sensoria I’d been getting had been correct, it would have to mean that my legs were not only crossed at the ankles, but also attached to my body backwards.

So anyway, I thought I’d write up some of my observations (thus far) regarding IE8 beta 1.  What?

I’m going to say basically the same thing I said about the first betas of IE7: test and report, but don’t fix.  That is to say, you should absolutely grab it and run it across all your own sites, and all your common destinations.  Find out what’s different, broken, or just plain strange.

But don’t start searching for workarounds.  Not yet.  Submit bug reports, yes.  Boil down the problems you hit to basic test cases and submit those, if you like.  (I do like, but I’ve got kind of a history with that sort of thing.)  Just don’t think that beta 1 represents what we’ll face in the final release.

No, I don’t have some sort of inside track; never have.  That conclusion simply seems obvious to me just by looking at how this beta acts.  For example, there’s no support at all for :first-line and :first-letter.  That’s not just a glitch.  That’s a lack of support for a CSS feature that’s been present for three major releases.  I just can’t see that omission persisting to final release.

Another problem I noticed is evident here on the home page of meyerweb.  In the sidebar, each list item has a left margin and negative text indentation, creating a classic “outdent”.  Like so:

#extra .panel li {margin-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em;}

In each of those list items is a link of some kind, usually text.  The fun part is this: the hanging outdent part of that text isn’t clickable.  So the first couple of letters of each sidebar link are inactive.  They’re colored properly, but do nothing if you try to click them.  If you click on the active part of a link, the focus outline only draws around the active part.  And, for bonus yay, scrolling the page will wipe away any outdents that are offscreen.  So as you scroll down the page, you end up with all the sidebar links having their first few letters chopped off.  Whoops.

Again, that’s something I just can’t see going unaddressed in the final release.

In both these cases, flipping IE8 back to IE7 mode makes the weirdness go away.

I’ve seen more serious problems on the wider web.  Google Maps is currently busted beyond any hope of usefulness in IE8, as many have reported.  Also, I came across a site where loading the home page just locked up IE8 completely.  I had to force-quit and relaunch.  Every time I hit that page, lockup.

Flipping to IE7 mode allowed me to browse the site without any trouble at all.

These things, taken together, have really driven something home for me: there really is a new rendering engine in there.  I don’t just mean in the sense of fixing and adding enough things that the behavior is different.  I mean that I believe there’s truly a whole new engine under the hood of IE8.  And if the Acid 2 results and public statements of the IE team are to be believed, there’s a whole new standards-based rendering engine under that hood.

That’s kind of a big deal in any event.  The last time I remember a browser with an extended release history replacing its old, creaky, grown-over-time, crap-piled-on-crap engine with (what the browser team felt was) a new, improved one was the transition from Netscape 4.5 to Netscape 6.0.  And remember how well that went?  Yee haw.

I really shouldn’t be surprised about this.  Chris Wilson, for example, used the exact words “our new layout engine” during the WaSP roundtable (transcript).  I guess I’d been assuming that was verbal shorthand for “our much-improved version of our old layout engine”.  I guess I was wrong.

So I would personally argue that this release was mislabelled.  This is not a beta release.  As far as I’m concerned, it’s an alpha, even under the kinds of old-school naming conventions I prefer.  I’m not going to go around calling it that, because that would just be unnecessarily confusing, but it’s how I’m going to think of it.

Now I’m wondering just how long it will be until final release, given the kinds of distances one usually sees between alpha and final.

Unfortunately, I just took the 6pm set of painkillers, so I’ll be wondering at about one-third speed.

• Drugs, Bugs, and IE8 was published on Sunday, March 23rd, 2008.
• It was assigned to the Browsers category.
• There have been twenty-one replies.

I woke up this morning (duh DAAAH dah DUH) and yesterday’s announcement was the first thing on my mind.  No doubt it’ll be a recurrent topic, at least for a little while.

One of the takeaways is what this change demonstrates about the IE team:  standards is and was their preferred default.  If it weren’t, they just would have found a way to square the IE7-default behavior with the Interoperability Principles announced late last month (slightly tricky but entirely possible).  That they initially chose otherwise speaks volumes about the pressures they face internally, and their willingness to publicly change direction speaks volumes about their commitment to supporting standards.  While I’m sure community feedback informed their decision, they pretty much knew what the reaction would be from the get-go.  If that was going to be the deciding factor, they would’ve chosen differently up front.

So what drove that change?  I keep coming back to two things, both of which were explicitly mentioned in yesterday’s announcement.

The first is, perhaps obviously, the previously mentioned Interoperability Principles.  Head on over there and read Principle II, “Support for Standards”.  If that isn’t a solid foundation on which to build an internal case for change, I don’t know what is.  I’m wryly amused by the idea that the IE team used the Interoperability Principles as a way to batter their way out of the grip of those internal pressures I mentioned.  The former aikido student in me finds that very satisfying.  True, the Principles came under fire for being just another set of empty words, but it would seem that they can be used for at least some concrete good.

As for the second, there’s a phrase repeated between the two announcements that I didn’t quote yesterday because I was still pondering its meaning.  I’m still not certain about it, but having had a chance to sleep on it, my initial reading hasn’t changed, so I’m going to quote and comment on it now.  First, from the press release:

“While we do not believe there are currently any legal requirements that would dictate which rendering mode must be chosen as the default for a given browser, this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue,” said Brad Smith, Microsoft senior vice president and general counsel.

And then in Dean’s IEblog post:

While we do not believe any current legal requirements would dictate which rendering mode a browser must use, this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue.

Okay, so they’re on message.  And the message seems to be this: that Opera’s move to link IE development to the larger EU anti-trust investigation bore fruit.  I was highly critical of that move, and unless I’m seriously misreading what I see here, I was wrong.  I’m still no fan of the tone that was used in announcing the move, but that’s window dressing.  Results matter most.

Speaking of Opera, there’s another side to all this that I find quite interesting.  So far, the reaction to Microsoft’s announcement has been overwhelmingly positive.  The sense I’ve picked up is, “Hooray! IE will act like browsers always have, and the problem is solved!”.

But is it?  The primary objection raised by Opera and several members of the community was that version targeting is an anti-competitive move, one which will force browser makers like Opera and authors of JavaScript libraries to support an ever-increasing and complex web (sorry) of rendering-engine behaviors in the market leader.  So far as I can tell, the change in default behavior does next to nothing to address that objection.  The various versions will still be there and still invoke-able by any page author who so chooses.  Yes, the default will be better for authors, but I don’t see how things get any better for Opera, Firefox, Safari, jQuery, Prototype, et. al.

Perhaps I’ve missed something basic (“Again!” shouts the chorus).  If so, what?  If not, then why all the hosannas?

• Principles and Legality was published on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and Standards categories.
• There have been thirty-one replies.

Now here’s something I didn’t expect to see when I woke up this morning:

“Microsoft Expands Support for Web Standards: Company outlines new approach to make standards-based rendering the default mode in Internet Explorer 8, will work with Web designers and content developers to help with standards behavior transition.”

Seriously, that’s the title and subhead of Microsoft’s latest press release.

About halfway through, there’s this from Ray Ozzie:

…we have decided to give top priority to support for these new Web standards. In keeping with the commitment we made in our Interoperability Principles of being even more transparent in how we support standards in our products, we will work with content publishers to ensure they fully understand the steps we are taking and will encourage them to use this beta period to update their sites to transition to the more current Web standards supported by IE8.

See also the IEblog entry Microsoft’s Interoperability Principles and IE8, where Dean Hachamovitch says:

Microsoft recently published a set of Interoperability Principles. Thinking about IE8’s behavior with these principles in mind, interpreting web content in the most standards compliant way possible is a better thing to do.

We think that acting in accordance with principles is important, and IE8’s default is a demonstration of the interoperability principles in action.

In other words, the IE team seems to have used recent Microsoft PR efforts to their, and our, advantage.

I’m relieved and glad on the one hand, and a little worried on the other.  It’s not like the issues I discussed, or Jeffrey wrote about, have gone away.  It’s just that the way in which they’re handled by IE has shifted—which in some ways is a huge difference.

I think what worries me most is the possibility that when the public beta hits, there will be enough incompatibility problems that pushback from other constiuencies forces a change back to the original behavior.  I hope not.  I hope that what will happen is that any problems that come up will be addressed by spreading the news far and wide that there’s a simple one-line fix for those sites.

I’m glad that IE will act as browsers have always done, and default to the latest and greatest in the absence of any explicit direction to the contrary.  I’m doubly glad that the IE team is willing to do that, even knowing what they have to handle.  And I’m triply glad that the proposal was made in public ahead of time, with plenty of opportunity for debate, so that we could have a chance to weigh in and affect the browser’s behavior.

• Meta-change was published on Monday, March 3rd, 2008.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and Standards categories.
• There have been forty-seven replies.

A List Apart #253 brings the issue of version targeting back into the limelight with opposing-view pieces by Jeremy Keith and Jeffrey Zeldman.  (And I love the “Editor’s Choice” on this issue, J. David Eisenberg’s “‘Forgiving’ Browsers Considered Harmful“.)

I’m not going to comment on the views presented; both gentlemen do a fine job.  What I do wish to add, or perhaps to restate, is an observation about everyone interested in, and thinking or arguing about, this topic:

We all care about the same thing.

We all want to advance web standards.  We all want browsers to improve their support.  We all want better and more advanced specifications.  We all want to reduce inconsistencies.  We all want a better web.

The disagreement is over how best to get there given the situation we face now, as well as how we perceive that current situation.  A recurrent metaphor for me is that we’re a large group of pioneers trying to chart the best course through an unknown country, and there is disagreement on which route entails the least risk to the whole group.  Cross the desert or the mountains?  Traverse a swampy delta or a hilly forest?  Move through this valley or that one?

Sometimes what binds us is strong enough that the few differences seem sharper by comparison.  That shouldn’t keep us from remembering what we have in common, and the importance of that commonality.

• Common Bonds was published on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and Standards categories.
• There have been eighteen replies.