111 Untitled

“Why don’t they make IE8 be standards-compliant by default (it’s not caused problems with all the other browsers has it?) and have a meta (hack!) tag that says “run as IE7” for bug-dependant sites?”

Well, which page do you think is vastly more likely to get a header tag added to it. The old page that isn’t being actively maintained by anyone that thinks that all browsers are IE6? Or the newly developed page where the developer wants to be able to code to the standards?

Old stuff should keep working. It would be backwards to require a change to the old stuff to keep it working so you don’t have to add a change to the new stuff. And highly impractical.

posted at 06:06 am on January 23, 2008 by Paul Rivers

112 Untitled

“I don’t see many companies making print ads, or book covers, and then letting them sit and reprinting every so often – that stuff gets redesigned, or refitted to a new generation with new needs.”

I don’t see many companies selling books that suddenly stop being readable because you moved to a new house or are reading them outside. Do you? Wouldn’t that be painful?

posted at 06:08 am on January 23, 2008 by Paul Rivers

113 You're joking right?

“guaranteeing a site we build today will look as good and work as well in five years as it does today.”

If that’s your main concern, you should make books, not websites.

I seriously can’t believe I’m on ALA, it really feels like the IE blog around here… even the angry comments from practically everyone… I’m trying to stay polite and calm here but then I read things like: “any two contemporary browsers may offer completely different renderings of the same CSS” and I have to wonder what the hell you’re talking about… And why is this published on ALA?! Is this a bad dream I’m having?

In that sentence, you simultaneously negate Web Standards completely and too conveniently use the word “may” to turn a big fat lie into an innocent hypotheses. Every single ALA reader knows that “any two contemporary browsers” pretty much “offer” the exact same rendering of valid CSS… EXCEPT IE. We don’t need proprietary version targeting, we simply need a Standards Compliant version of IE8. Period.

And about your own example with the Word 1.0 doc not opening in recent versions of MS Office (hey look! Microsoft again! Let me guess… text file open just fine I bet…), then it’s a perfect example of why this “solution” makes no sense. MS Office has evolved, and it had to let go of some of the compatibility with older file formats in order to evolve. Are you saying OS X 10.5 should support OS 9 programs? Photoshop CS3 should open Photoshop 1.0 files perfectly?

Sorry, but before you try to provide a solution, you should have a basic understanding of the problem. I wish there was a nicer way to tell you this but you clearly have no idea of what you’re talking about, and so do all the people that helped in the process if any…

This is unbelievable… I still can’t believe I’m reading this on ALA.

posted at 06:31 am on January 23, 2008 by Yann B

114 Maybe This is Salvageable

So, I’ve been thinking about this solution, and it seems like maybe it could work. I’m a pragmatist, so if the solution solves the problem then I am alright with it. We’ll work on bonus points for elegance later.

First, in regard to the issue of increasing browser code bloat, which was my initially negative reaction, I have a solution.

Instead of shipping several rendering engines with each browser, it seems logical to me that vendors could just come up with some rule sets (possibly even written in CSS…) which are applied to documents which use an older engine. For example… my document specifies that it works with IE7, but IE8 is what’s hot right now. Instead of including the IE7 rendering code in IE8, the IE team would just include some rules that use the IE8 renderer to create the look of the IE7 renderer. We do this all the time for Microsoft’s stuff already, we’re just hacking in the opposite direction. Let’s make them implement the hacks now instead of us.

Second, let’s stop complaining about the meta-tag fix. It’s not that bad. The use of the meta-tag is no worse, in my opinion, than microformats, which use existing HTML to make sub-standards that have nothing to do with semantics, rather than creating original XML formats and utilizing the power that we will one day have with XHTML. We’re already breaking our own rules, at least this one has practical benefit.

posted at 07:28 am on January 23, 2008 by Nicholas Sloan

115 Please reconsider..

My take on this suggestion:
http://my.opera.com/hallvors/blog/2008/01/23/suggestions-for-chris-wilson

posted at 08:13 am on January 23, 2008 by Hallvord R. M. Steen

116 Precedence

>For example, it is possible to set a baseline lock on a whole site using the header method and then override that header on individual pages, as needed, using the meta element.

But http headers take precedence over corresponding <meta> elements, right? Or maybe this particular header would be an exception…

(Btw, the official abbreviation of Firefox is “Fx”, not “FF”.)

posted at 09:47 am on January 23, 2008 by Magnus Markling

117 Untitled

Aside from all the stuff about how impossible this is to support over the long term, doesn’t it also give Microsoft (or whoever else) the perfect excuse to break standards compliance in the future wherever they see fit?

e.g. some new feature is added only to IE9, if all pages that use it are tagged with the IE9 UA, then it could in some ways be claimed they’re following the required standard.

Surely the best solution is just to stick with the standards that already exist. If some internal corporate web site really needs IE 6 compatibility, then it’s up to Microsoft to make some IE 6 compatible browser available to them somehow. It’s their mess – no other browser has this problem…

posted at 09:52 am on January 23, 2008 by Rich K

118 Endless chaos ensues

This is wrong, wrong, wrong.
Imagine what will happen once we move to new versions of the browsers in question. Will Firefox 4 have to keep the buggy Firefox 3 behavior locked away within some obscure rendering mode just to satisfy sites that say they work best with Firefox 3?
IE already has two distinctly different rendering backends, now with IE8 adding a third. There will have to be interaction between the modes even (think iframes, DOM manipulation etc.)
This makes our job as web designers even worse because now we can’t even rely on standards compatibility within our sites but we also need to update all the sites to tell the latest and greatest browsers that, yes, we indeed to want them to render the site as they originally should do.

All this is a big mess and getting out of it isn’t easy at all but adding another tag to work around another different browser implementation… you really call that an improvement?

posted at 09:54 am on January 23, 2008 by Dennis Lichtenthäler

119 Some IT Benefits?

Maybe some IT departments would appreciate this. Financial institutions often require the use of specific browsers set with strict security. Employees cannot upgrade their browsers. Newer browsers may plug security holes, yet they’re stuck with the older version that work with older systems. Maybe this method would allow the use of newer browsers with backwards-compatible rendering methods and heightened security. IT may be able to relax, knowing security improvements are in place without the loss of front-end compatibility.

posted at 10:04 am on January 23, 2008 by Kevin Davison

120 financial institutions and strict security

“often require the use of specific browsers set with strict security”

which is usually a non-issue, and mostly related to the ignorance of developers who believe that only IE can do 128 bit encryption and the like, or who use that as an excuse for their completely arcane coding.

posted at 10:28 am on January 23, 2008 by patrick lauke

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