On Sun, Jul 11, 2004 at 08:56:55AM -0700, Dennis Allison wrote:
Bodgen -- I quite agree that IE is a poor "standard" to target, but the reality is that it is the browser in place in somthing like 95% of the seats of our users. It departs from w3 standards. The result is, sad top say, that we must support it in preference to w3-compliant systems.
No. Well, I monitoring this thread and would not like to flamebait here. And, Dennis, I really would not like to offend you, but I have to say for while people will think like you, than 95% of people (including *you*) will suffer from stupid software been lobbied through. I _agree_ for we need to _test_ our stuff how it looks like on MSIE. But I found that MSIE stuff looks well only when you use old HTML 3 with <FONT>, <CENTER> stuff, or XHTML with Microsoft non-standard features. But both are sux. Please answer mostly to yourself: - Why you still would like to receive strict RFC822 e-mail messages while Outlook*.* supports lots of uncodumented non-standard things? Instead, your mailfilters are screaming and tries to de-mime and de-html messages, then message gets spam marked... - Why you use pure XSL, not MS-XSL (sure, if you use)? - Why you would like to use ECMAScript, but hell not VBScript or JScript in your projects? - Then is CSS2 or HTML4 or XHTML1 worse from stuff I had listed above? OTOH, I found when I made my projects (for _bankers_, BTW) with only W3C standards (and Alpha Channel in PNG's, mwhahahaha!), then I can confirm that: - Count of visitors was not less - Mozilla/Opera/Firefox currently are ~86% in our statistics (it was big surprise for me either!) - None of screaming from users, like "this <censored/> shows me wrong" or "page not loaded, because of error in advanced undocumented JavaScript DOM3 feature which tries to highlight copyright message of above of the page". - People usually say: "Well, we found how beautiful system looks like in Mozilla and how ugly in MSIE. Then we desired to install Mozilla..." ;-) - You have less pain while something looks wrong: all browsers are buggy. You just support standards. Well, common standards, usually... Instead, we have other projects, which are supports MSIE and Mozilla separatedly. I would not like to tell you HOW MUCH pain developers have to support both! And funny that nor Opera 7.51, neither Konqueror 3.3 even does not works there. But you still can use my projects even from PDA's, Links, ELinks, Lynx, w3m or whatever with no user scream. Finally, MSIE with its undocumented technology-bastards from M$ could not be that bad if it could be: - Secure - Crossplatform - RFC and W3C recommendations support - Opensource But yet we have Firefox already which fits on these requirements. -- 暮 Oh, and we just set fire to your desktop.