IE8 Will Be Standards-Compliant By Default 383
A number of readers wrote in to make sure we know about Microsoft's change of heart regarding IE8. The new version of the dominant browser will render in full standards mode by default. Developers wishing to use quirks mode for IE6- and IE7-compatible rendering will have to opt in explicitly. We've previously discussed IE8's render mode a few times. Perhaps Opera's complaint to the EU or the EU's record antitrust fine had something to do with Redmond's about-face.
Huge assumption in the title (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Huge assumption in the title (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Huge assumption in the title (Score:5, Insightful)
It is much higher than "more standard than IE6".
Re:Huge assumption in the title (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft has the be the only organisation on earth *slower* that the W3C. I mean, it's not exactly a moving target.
Re:Huge assumption in the title (Score:4, Funny)
If by "standards compliant" you mean "compliant to the standards up to year 2004", then yes, that sounds about right.
Re:Huge assumption in the title (Score:5, Insightful)
No, this statement is incorrect.
> No browser exists today that is completely compliant.
That is true. But it has no connection with the last statement.
I understand your point, and it's well taken, but you are introducing a tautology. Standards compliance is absolute, by _definition_.
Some attempts to comply with written standards may fail, and as such are not compliant. It may well be true that no browsers exist that are standards compliant, as the standards are written. However, please don't go waving around poisonous ideas like "standards compliance is a relative term".
Americans seem to have adopted a very lax relativism of late, a kind of fuzzy belief that everything is subjective. Some things are not. Some things are just facts that must be heeded. The definition is not up for negotiation, that's what _makes_ it a standard.
Re:Huge assumption in the title (Score:5, Insightful)
From the standard:
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [34].
When the people writing the standards write standards with the words "SHOULD" or "SHOULD NOT" or "RECOMMENDED" or "MAY" or "OPTIONAL" you now have a standard which can have many different faces, or compliance levels. IMHO, this is poor standards writing. They MUST make the specs using the terms "MUST" and "MUST NOT" and bump the version number. Then you can easily have automated unit tests which show absolute compliance. But we don't, and must rely on what developers "THINK" or "MAY NOT THINK" is correct about the spec.
--jeffk++
Re:Huge assumption in the title (Score:5, Informative)
When you get to the should / should not stuff, it comes down to in most cases you really want to listen to it, but there tend to be specific cases (say, embedded devices) where it really doesn't make sense to follow the normal behavior. Generally, if you run into one of those cases, it tends to be obvious that deviating from the spec is the right thing to do.
The optional and recommended stuff tends to be things that really depend on the specific product and shouldn't be forced.
Making things more strict would be a bad thing and make people break the standards more. The current setup acknowledges that different implementations have different needs and does a good job of accommodating.
Re:Huge assumption in the title (Score:5, Funny)
For those too busy to consult RFC 2119 in detail, it basically states the following:
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If you define a standard as a particular chunk of language, it is possible to create something which is technically compatible with the language, but not with any existing implementation of it. It is possible that this is because the existing implementations followed the spirit of that language, and you followed the letter
Re:Huge assumption in the title (Score:5, Interesting)
In the case of HTML/XHTML and CSS, there's been quite a bit more effort invested into making sure the standards are properly documented and are internally consistent, but these standards are constantly evolving. Is it enough to support HTML 4.01 and CSS 2, or must you support HTML 5 and CSS 3? Do de-facto standards count? Remember that XMLHttpRequest (the basis of AJAX) is mostly a de-facto standard; the W3C has published a working draft [w3.org] of a specification for it.
Standards compliance isn't always as cut-and-dry as you make it sound.
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However, there are a few ways what he said could be interpreted, and it seems to me that by saying "it's relative", he's merely stating the obvious - that the implementation is relative to the "set-in-stone" standard.
If you still doubt this, then explain why he said "What we can say is that this one appears to be more compliant than before"
Re:Huge assumption in the title (Score:5, Insightful)
No, I don't agree with that stipulation.
Reality is in its essence unknowable. Theories are models of reality that are simpler, and are based on a multitude of assumptions. And many of those assumptions go unstated. For instance, I am aware of no theory of gravity that takes into account the color of the objects being described, yet there is no scientific basis on which we can exclude color (or smell, or taste) from gravitational considerations. We do so because at this moment in history it seems silly to include it, but that is a literary arts judgment, not a scientific judgment. If you want to get your pet theory on Electric Pulse Gravity published, you'd do well to heed the literary aspects, but don't mistake them for the science.
A standard, however, is the formal statement of a group's conceptualization about a process, such as how a distance shall be measured, or how a web page shall be rendered. A standard has nothing to do with reality. It is all in your head (and the heads of everyone else who familiarizes themself with the standard). Because a standard is a human production that has no physical reality, it is possible to fully comply with its every detail (assuming that it is a well-written standard). Perhaps more to the point, it is possible for someone to completely learn a standard, including any of its weaknesses like internal contradictions or ambiguities. However it is impossible for anyone to completely learn reality, or learn all there is to know about any theory of reality.
In this sense, Euclidean geometry is a standard. You can do a lot of neat things with it, and you can spend lots of time exploring places where it is still ambiguous (things not yet proven). But you can't violate its established rules and still claim it is Euclidean geometry. You can replace those rules with other rules, but then you have a non-Euclidean geometry, like spherical geometry as one instance.
It is possible for a web browser to be standards compliant in the absolute sense. It is also reasonable to describe the relative compliance of non-compliant browsers. And since in nearly every case the context will make it clear as to whether the meaning is absolute or relative, there is no rarely any need to specify that. Unless, of course, one is pushing a hidden agenda, where the intent of talking about the subject is to create as much heat and smoke as possible while putting out no light.
There's probably a really succinct way of saying all the above, but I left my Zen Pocket Companion at work.
Re:Huge assumption in the title (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure there are. For instance, parsimony. Repeated experimentation holds that these properties are pretty much unrelated to gravity*. Besides, other models that appear consistent seem to adequately explain colour and smell and taste in ways that are incompatible by virtue scale with consistent gravitational theory.
Anyway, I recognize and respect your distinction here, although I do think it's hypothetically possible to come up with a model for reality accurate in every respect, we can just never truly comprehensively know that we have found the answer. That's neither provable nor disprovable, and thus, neither here nor there.
But I agree that context makes things clear pretty much always. If you look at the original context of my statement, he first used compliance as an absolute term, then declared that Microsoft viewed it as relative. I argue that the relative interpretation is quite valid. As for the hidden agenda, I don't think any of us (you, me, the guy I originally responded to, the Anonymous Coward in between) was pushing any hidden agenda, so I don't know where that came from.
I apologize if I looked like I was pedantically claiming that the absolute interpretation was invalid and retract any implication thereof. From my perspective, the person I responded to was saying that the relative interpretation was invalid, and the guy who responded to me agreed with absolutism-only.
* pigments for colours are slightly different composition, smells are different aromatic molecules, taste from that and other factors; all of which can reflect subtle molecular differences that lead to different mass per molecule which can in turn lead to different gravitational forces. Let's not analyse that one too deeply
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Because a standard is a human production that has no physical reality, it is possible to fully comply with its every detail (assuming that it is a well-written standard).
And therein lies one hell of an operating assumption, WRT practically any standard generated by the W3C in the last decade. (CSS, DOM, XHTML, SVG... HTML 4.01 may well be the last thing they wrote that wasn't a complete [bleep]ing joke.)
And your point is....?
And why do exclude HTML 4.01 or the earlier work? Seems to me the split between HTML 4.x and XHTML 1.x has proven to be a pretty funny joke. And we were all laughing so hard at HTML v3.0 that no one actually got around to figuring out how to implement it. And the continuing giggles from that joke were so side-splitting that HTML v3.1 was dropped before we even got it to the punch line.
Nobody ever said a standard had to be serious. Look at the clowns of Redmond: they make money hand
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You're welcome for the link.
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Come on, let's not be like that. I test my website layout in Opera and Firefox and then move on to IE to see what needs to be fixed so it looks as intended. With IE7 I rarely need to fix something, and it's usually minor. IE6 however is a completely different story and I never get away without a conditional comment introducing an extra stylesheet that picks up the pieces. So let's give credit where it's due: IE7 is a hell of a lot better than IE6 and I hope IE8 is even
Re:Huge assumption in the title (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Huge assumption in the title (Score:4, Informative)
Acid2 is now obsolete! (Score:3, Informative)
I suppose this is why they already designed Acid3. [webstandards.org] Hint: Firefox 2 scores 50/100.
Acid3 (Score:5, Informative)
Firefox3 nightly from March 3rd: 66/100. (Second closest to the reference rendering.)
Safari 3.0.4: 39/100.
Opera 9.26: 46/100. (Looked the least like the reference rendering though.)
Webkit nightly from March 4th: 87/100. (It also looked the closest to the reference rendering.)
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They also said Windows NT was POSIX compliant. (Score:4, Insightful)
However, this is Microsoft. Their behavior in the past has shown they're not above:
(1) hard-coding stuff to make test cases work
(2) bending definitions to claim compliance.
(3) announcing out-and-out vapor to intimidate competition
It's also good to remember they've never before delivered anything like what they're claiming to have.
If I were laying money on an outcome, it would be that IE 8 will continue to lag annoyingly behind the alternatives.
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Maybe not. Maybe the standards-compliance will go exactly so far that code developed against the standard (as far as it is supported by the competition) will also work in MSIE8, thus obviating the need to install an alternative browser if you have MSIE8 already. This would be a Good Thing for web developers, because they would no longer have to work around MSIE's non-compliance, and a Good
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1) better security
2) better UI
3) plugins
That's it. Anyone who tells you people don't use IE because it's not standards compliant are idiots. Every web developer makes sure their pages work with IE, no matter how much extra work it takes.
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None of the mainstream Unix vendors actually did this, so most Unix code was written on the assumption that very little was not implemented. Windows, OTOH, returned ERROR_NOT_IMPLEMENTED everywhere it could. With fairly predictable results.
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Re:Huge assumption in the title (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because a browser passes Acid2 doesn't mean it's "standards-compliant". It means it complies with the specific parts of the standards that Acid2 tests for, which is only a few things that most browsers (at the time Acid2 was created) got wrong.
Re:Huge assumption in the title (Score:5, Insightful)
strike
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Let me inject a little optimism into this thread by saying that IE8 can indeed be standards-complaint because it will be the standard.
Re:Huge assumption in the title (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Huge assumption in the title (Score:5, Insightful)
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Fantastic point.
I wonder how many little sites built by IE-centric coders are going to need a lot of work in order to function well with IE8.
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Correct link (Score:5, Informative)
Or perhaps... (Score:3, Insightful)
But that doesn't get the juices flowing as effectively as the "they did it because I think they're scared of the EU" editorial byline. Must have those ad impressions.
Re:Or perhaps... (Score:4, Funny)
Windows Versions? (Score:4, Interesting)
Will this be installable on XP and later or will it only be available for the Vista follow on: Vista ME?
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That link is from 2004.
Not that I use it but... (Score:2)
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Hmmmm (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Either way everyone gets a better browser. Win-win.
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IE 8 is to move people onto VISTA it most likely won't run on XP... but that's only my experience and my opinion.
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Competition is good.
Competition is good, when it is fair competition in a healthy market.
If Microsoft actually goes and creates a superior product then IE users get a better browser which forces Firefox to either "up it's game" (giving FF users an even better browser) or remain the same while everyone switches back to IE because it's superior.
The problem is, what if IE isn't better or what if IE 8 is better but IE 9 is worse? In the first case most people still use IE even though it is inferior, because they assume a normal free market is operating and if there was a better browser Dell or Gateway or Sony would put it on their computer for them. Worse yet, every time a person buys a new computer (every few years) the whole thing is reset and MS gets another shot at being "
Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
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Also, I would say that most people who use Firefox are experienced users. Firefox cannot grow beyond this market simply because my inexperienced father is happy with what comes bundled with the computer. I hope you understand that analogy. Most people simply don't see the difference, nor do they care.
Booga booga (Score:2, Interesting)
Tell them that IE leaks passwords and will run scripts that can read your hard drive and send credit card numbers to malicious servers.
Tell them that FireFox has the "Do Everything" feature too, but it is disabled by default. It can be turned on later, though "in your experience, you've never had any trouble with it off."
Tell them that FireFox is free and is based on Netscape (they will probably remember that name) which turned the browser business over to "Mozilla" w
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people switch because of standards?!? (Score:2)
Standards compliance in this case will result in broken pages, at least in the short term. Not sure why people would switch for that. Also surprised that you think people when to Firefox for the standards compliance. I thought they went over for the usability the add-ons that didn't suck. Standards are, and always will be a nerd issue. Everyone else just wants you
Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Funny)
OMG WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO YOUR BROWSER!?!? And how? Whatever it is, I don't think Firefox actually wants your memory that badly.
On the other hand, perhaps you meant, "memory hog."
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First, that page is several years and versions of each browser old.
Second, it's an uptime kind of thing in my experience. If I'm working on an older machine, I typically need to close Firefox every few hours because it's hogging a few hundred meg of memory. IE doesn't, in my experience, bloat over time as bad.
If you're not prone to leaving a browser open for days of browsing at a time, you might not ever notice it. This doesn't invalidate the many good points of Firefox, it's just a littl
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If the 3 beta is fairly stable I'll have to give it a try.
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Here's an interesting one off of Microsoft's own live.com A blog entry with pictures [live.com]
IE gets up to 250MB and then doesn't render the page. Yet Firefox works fine. Interestingly though if you save the Firefox content and then load it in IE is also works fine, so maybe not a fair comparison as it seems to be serving up different material to each browser.
+1 Informative (Score:2, Informative)
If you moderate in a thread and then post in it afterwards, all moderation will be erased. This happens even if you are posting anonymously.
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But, why would you leave your web browser open for weeks at a time? You should be turning the machine off when you go home for the night / leave for work in the morning (depending on home/work status) to save electricity. Only servers need to be on all the time.
EPIC WIN (Score:2)
huge success!
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Of course, the devil will be in the details - let's see how how well they implement the new support.
/mike
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Not until users stop using IE7. On a web site I recently did dev work for, IE6 was still considered the primary target.
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Put it all on Silverlight!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder if they're serious. Will they really be standards compliant enough so that I don't have to hack around IE8's deficiencies? Will this still be true for IE9? It's possible. Will this include SVG and XHTML and CSS3? What about XUL and HTML 5?
If all of the above work in the next couple of version of IE, do you know what that would indicate to me? That would indicate that Microsoft is betting on Silverlight to lock in users in the next 5 years... because they've pretty much convinced me they will never compete based upon features and the merits of their software, rather than trying to make it as hard as possible for users to switch to anything else.
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There are many web technologies, but there isn't a single browser that fully supports all of the standards you listed. I wish there was. Feel free to correct me If I'm wrong.
No, here is no browser that supports all of those completely. Some of the specifications are still in draft form for some of those technologies. So far, however, Firefox, Safari, Konquerer, and Opera all have at least some support for every one of the specifications I mentioned. Explorer has some support for some of them, but is behind on all of them compared to every other browser.
The difference is which browser teams are committed to implementing standards going forward and advancing the Web technolog
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Perhaps... (Score:2)
Good news (Score:2)
missing the point (Score:2, Insightful)
This Will Cost MS Dearly (Score:4, Interesting)
While this is good news for those of us in the geek crowd, I'm extremely surprised MS went this route. When IE8 is pushed out and it breaks a bunch of non-conforming non-tagged pages built for IE7 and IE6, there will be much hell raising to be had. MS will of course be blamed since they're the ones that changed things and I wouldn't be surprised if the backlash was well in excess of IE7's, if not close to the kind of backlash Vista initially got.
Ultimately everything will be worked out as developers fix their pages, but in the short-term period following IE8's release it's going to cost MS dearly. I can't for the life of me figure out why MS would want to put their neck on the line like this, it's not doing them any favors and "benevolent" usually isn't a term we use to describe Microsoft.
Re:This Will Cost MS Dearly (Score:5, Informative)
You must not have read the press release [microsoft.com]!
They aren't putting their neck on the line... it's already there. :)
It's a trap! (Score:5, Funny)
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IE becomes the browser that can best view all the old broken IE-only HTML, all the compliant HTML, and all of the Silverlight pages that "enhance" the web. All of the other browsers will only render standard HTML well.
Sure Mozilla renders XUL, but Silverlight probably has more adoption than XUL already. Too bad someone didn't come up with a really friendly IDE to X
Developers & the half-life of accumulated cont (Score:5, Insightful)
I think Microsoft has finally genuinely started to realize a very simple fact:
Client-side web developers hate them.
And it's probably the one thing MS has thoroughly earned with all the IE bullsh*t over the last 10 years.
This is a really great gesture, it's a good start if they want to allay any of that and gain back trust. But honestly, nobody gets over 10 years of being treated like crap overnight, and the half-life of contempt isn't short.
Personally, I'd like to offer my congratulations to the IE Product management team, and let them know that in time, I'll probably only wish debilitating terminal illness on them, rather than painful and extended death by torture.
Improved standards isn't the story here (Score:5, Informative)
The real story here is that "Developers wishing to use quirks mode for IE6- and IE7-compatible rendering will have to opt in explicitly."
If you've been following any of the design / developer blogs and community response about this, you'll know that in a previous plan [alistapart.com], all web pages would render in IE7 standards mode unless the developer inserted a specific meta tag
into each web page of a site. (For the truly avant garde, one could set the content to "edge", which would tell IE to render in the most current standards compliant version available). The outcry was that while it was clear that IE was making progress in standards, in order to take advantage of those improvements, developers were being asked to touch each page of their sites and tell IE to use its more standards compliant mode. That discussion is what was at play here.Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Look closer. The meta tag with http-equiv argument means that the browser should treat it as if it was an HTTP header field. You can accomplish the same effect by configuring the web server to include a "X-UA-Compatible: IE=7" header. On Apache it only takes a single line in the configuration file to add a static header to every page. I imagine the same is possible on IIS.
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Old web pages will not have a DOCTYPE. If they don't have a DOCTYPE, IE 8 will render them using quirks mode. They will work exactly the same.
As a Web Developer, by including a strict doctype at the top of your current IE6/7 page, you are promising to be standards compliant. You shouldn't be ignoring standards and at the same time promising to browsers that you comply with standards.
If your strict IE6/7 junk doesn't render in IE8, then how is it currently working with firefox/opera etc.
If a developer car
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Yes, but the new way is just as idiotic: Every single existing web page that is who knows how old and currently IE6- and/or IE7-compatible will have to be updated with a meta tag telling IE8 that it should not render them in IE8 mode.
This is only true if 1) those old pages are currently rendering in standards mode (really old stuff designed for Netscape 4 will still render in Quirks mode and will therefore not be affected by this) and 2) the improved standards compliance of IE8's rendering engine actually breaks your site. Chances are, if your web site looks OK in Firefox, Opera and Safari, it will also look OK in IE8. On the other hand, if you actually meant for your page to look like this [inspirated.com], IE8 will cause a problem for you.
Note that
Getting all this in perspective (Score:3)
The lesson ought to be clear. If you want better Windows software, start switching to Linux and other free software offerings now - because it is only when MS are under threat from competition that they bother with customer needs.
Re:I don't care about IE at all (Score:4, Insightful)
The day that web developers all reach a "standard" where they refuse to implement these things will be a joyful day for humanity. They all have the power to do that now, but it seems that some developers are not at the same standard as the rest.
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What you should be doing is refusing to use them. Switch bank, don't use the service, or whatever - but make sure you write them an email or letter explaining why.
/mike
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Funny? 99% of people think that way.
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Re:I don't care about IE at all (Score:4, Informative)
That aside, I think supporting an open web is worth it.
/Mike
Re:I don't care about IE at all (Score:4, Informative)
Hence the fact that Wine runs it is moot.
/mike
Re:I don't care about IE at all (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't care about IE at all (Score:5, Funny)
Comfortable and quite a nice looking number, too.
/Mike
Re:I don't care about IE at all (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:I don't care about IE at all (Score:4, Insightful)
I think some people may be doing tremendously over-complicated things with CSS and page elements though. There are only two things that I generally need to implement a (rather trivial) workaround for when implementing designs - transparent
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Re:I don't care about IE at all (Score:5, Informative)
I disagree. At my last employer I used OmniWeb for a while (a very niche browser). Most of the Web UI developers used Firefox, but a couple used Konquerer. A few used Safari. A few used Camino. A few used Opera. Regardless of what you used, when you found a bug, you tested it with a couple of other browsers and if the remote Windows box was available (or you had an emulator running), you tested it on multiple browsers and multiple platforms.
The upshot of all of this was, when a bug was listed, it was pretty easy to see which bugs were specific to a given browser. Bugs that appeared in some version of IE, but in no other browser at all, were by far the most common occurrence. Realistically our approach boiled down to, "write to standards; then hack for IE. " Make no mistake, we did not code for some other browser then try to make it work on every one, because that was not needed for the most part. We were programmatically generating Web pages and interfaces from XML data and a couple of databases. For the vast majority of the time, all browsers but IE were close enough to the standards we used (HTML3, CSS2, XHTML) so that there were no discrepancies when tested.
Re:I don't care about IE at all (Score:5, Informative)
Well, since the link you provide is largely question marks for the Webkit based browsers, that's hard to say. Also, the comparison you link to is missing a lot of standards where Firefox is a bit behind. These include:
That is not to say Firefox is necessarily behind other browser for standards compliance in general. No one with a clue would cite the Acid tests as proof of anything in that regard, but it does indicate that the link you provide is not particularly strong evidence one way or another. The whole question is probably too vague to be answered. There are a lot of Web standards and what really matters is which ones are most universally supported and what functionality cannot be used because of lacking support in one browser or another.
In summary, I reject your assertion, not because I'm convinced you're wrong, but because you haven't provided enough evidence to support it and there is significant contradictory evidence (cited above).
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Re:2008 - the end of Slashdot??? (Score:4, Insightful)
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