Reason #13984 to despise Microsoft
Mar 17, 21:13
All these years I’ve been waiting for everyone’s favorite monopolist to fix its damn browser, and now it looks like IE 7 won’t implement CSS2. Awesome. (Yes, it’s really only a rumor at this point, but I’m standing by my prediction “Internet Explorer will continue to suck for the foreseeable future”. And this summer, when the IE7 beta is supposed to come out, is most certainly within the foreseeable future.)
There have been some references in various articles to a chat with Microsoft engineers in which CSS2 was referred to as a flawed standard that ‘nobody has full support for’. This is a remarkable example of software engineers employing Republican double speak tactics to confuse the issue. In reality, every other major rendering engine (gecko, KHTML, Opera’s) that I know of supports almost all of the important parts of this ‘flawed’ standard. Sure, Firefox is missing a few obscure abilities, but their absence is nothing that will prevent a page from performing its basic functions.
For web developers a lack of standards compliance is a serious issue: without near complete compliance with CSS2, web sites are restricted to using outdated techniques for the sake of compatibility. When designing I already ignore some of the behaviors Internet Explorer has; if a page still looks acceptable and is legible in the Evil E, it is good enough most of the time. Otherwise I end up completely rewriting my CSS (and sometimes the HTML) in order to get it to more similar in both IE and the KHTMLs and Geckos. And that is when achieving such equality is possible, which it often is not.
Microsoft has (had?) a chance to solve this problem with a new version of IE- it’s too bad it seems to be turning a deaf ear toward the innumerable complaints about the current version’s rendering. This is the wrong course of action. To my eyes Microsoft has two decent options:
- Implement CSS2.1 (or CSS2, which is actually more tricky) in Internet Explorer 7.
- Scrap the piece of shit, grab one of the many open source HTML rendering libraries, and stop using a web browser for things that it was never designed to do.
Neither of which is likely to happen, but wishing can’t possibly hurt. Doing neither of the above choices sends a clear message that Microsoft is ok with shipping a monumental pile of shit. Perhaps this is because IE directly generates little revenue? In any case, if I was a customer I’d be rather upset by this- I’m glad I am not.
The big question on my mind is this: if IE7 doesn’t include better standards support, what exactly is it going to offer that IE6 doesn’t already?