What is Digg?112 Comments
- Brilhasti, on 10/12/2007, -1/+36Well if I weren't a web developer I wouldn't be able to see the flaws in your logic. For a long time IE did their own thing in the DHTML world. They basically said "We're not going to follow the WC3 guidelines, they can follow us if they want". Well, a few years down the road now, they're busting their asses to make IE7 truly WC3 compliant.
I don't doubt I spend about half my time coding for cross-browser issues. More often than not, there's code that says "If it's IE, do this. If it's ANY OTHER BROWSER, do that". So who's the odd man out? IE is. They're doing their own thing and it's screwing the entire industry. - saleens281, on 10/12/2007, -6/+34people are migrating from IE to firefox because of the security holes in IE, and possibly because of some of the features, most definitely NOT because of standards. Please stop trying to kid yourself. 99% of the public has no idea what web standards are, much less care about them.
- tony23, on 10/12/2007, -12/+36Why am I not surprised?
- hchaudh1, on 10/12/2007, -2/+23I work on web sites and I f***** hate IE. Think web standards here. For example, just today (I kid you not), I needed to make my iFrame transparent. I created an iFrame. On FF, I can easily make it transparent or change its color etc. Then I spent 5 hours going through inane forums to make an iFrame transparent in IE. This is what I had to do.
in the iFrame element, add this : style="filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(opacity=0);"
I was blown away by the fact that at this point, I am not coding HTML or CSS, just some BS MS attribute which is not even documented. Anyways, I just solved this IE problem and included it here just in case someone else is looking for it. Almost had to put through a change management for this crap.
And that's not just today, everyday I have to code something so that it will work in IE. Select boxes showing up through div's anyone. Or the fact that IE treats element id's and names the same.
I usually spend 4 hours everytime I need my web page to do something clever just to make it work with IE. - cleverboy, on 10/12/2007, -4/+24gschoots: "I think we should stop complaining about this, with a 80-90% percentage of IE users they have the power to dictate standards"
I remember the first time I read some "webmaster" complaining that Firefoxe's rising popularity was making more work for them, and "breaking" all their pages. (Fake tear dabbed from my eye.) I almost burst a blood vessel. Firefox isn't Netscape 4.7, people. If its making your websites virtually unuseable, its generally not going to be Firefox, it's really your STANK ASS CODE.
I'm sorry, that's the only expression I can think of for it... and it keeps my blood pressure in check by making me smile. - tony23, on 10/12/2007, -3/+18@gschoots - I'm guessing you don't do a lot of web programming :)
- Brilhasti, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12@gschoots
I'm sorry but from your little experience you can't possibly grasp the larger picture. Web developers bitching about having to write different branches of code for different browsers is not the only issue here.
Following web standards means that disabled peoples' accessibility tools and software are going to work correctly. There are tons of companies finding themselves facing lawsuits now because their sites aren't standards compliant and consequently disabled people are unable to use them.
Additionally, following web standards means less markup for sites which translates directly to faster downloading & rendering pages.
Finally, I'll mention that standards-compliant web sites have numerous other benefits that is far beyond the scope of a digg comment.
Are you starting to understand that there is more to this than simply web developers bitchin about their jobs being more difficult than they should be? - eklitzke, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13@cawpin
"learnt" is an acceptable spelling of "learned" outside of the US. - jkaiser, on 10/12/2007, -4/+14Am I the only one who sees that it is still in beta? Not only that but Atlas is a framework people. It is up to the developer to make sure the Javascript works well in all browsers.
Also, the author did a review of the *control toolkit*, not Atlas itself. - Brilhasti, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11IE is easily the least standards-compliant browser. Peroid. Ask any true web developer. (Read: One that doesn't call themselves one just because they built a few sites in a WYSIWYG).
- p3ngu1n, on 10/12/2007, -3/+12I sure hope you're joking. The problem is with standards-compliant browsers?
- panic, on 10/12/2007, -4/+13wow thats funny. IE is the least standard-compliant browser around, unless you count the Microsoft's own standards that it complies with (there's probably a lot of those!).
- jawngee, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10I develop ASP.NET for a living, amongst other things.
Atlas is still in beta, thus this review is entirely premature (much like most of the ejaculatory experiences of people bitching and moaning about this article).
If you do a little bit of research, support is planned for those browsers once Atlas is out of CTP mode.
Until then, no digg. - bouche, on 10/12/2007, -3/+11from: http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2006/4/18/3648
"Unfortunately, Atlas failed on the very first control, the “Cascading Drop Down.” Though it worked in Firefox on Mac OS X, it failed in both Safari 2 and Opera 9. After going through three or four of these, Atlas was batting a very low score, and I decided to keep track of results more scientifically."
It doesn't seem terrible to me if it is supported by IE and Firefox. - saleens281, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10It's not "ajax" which isn't a standard. FYI, Microsoft was wayyyyy ahead of the game on AJAX, what do you think outlook 2003 web access is?
- StatusQuoRules, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8according to google...
Fully supported browsers:
- Microsoft IE 6.0+ (download: Windows)
- Mozilla Firefox 1.07+ (download: Windows Mac Linux) - bouche, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9I've been working a little with Atlas and it has been VERY impressive. Everything I tried worked in FF perfectly. I haven't tried the control toolkit yet, nor can I view that blog site. Is there another link it really points to?
- Cbeck527, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7why does wordpress always have an error?
- eklitzke, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7AJAX is a bunch of tricks/hacks to make your page work interactively, it is not a standard like HTML of JavaScript.
- philovivero, on 10/12/2007, -8/+15This is amazing. After Microsoft's long track record of standards compliance and cross-platform compatibility? I'm going to write an email to Bill Gates himself to see if this problem can't be rectified.
Actually, wait, maybe Bill reads comments on Digg. Bill? Are you reading? You should roll some heads in your internet standards division. Those guys are just slacking off lately. This just makes Microsoft look bad, and will probably cause Digg (and... gasp! Slashdot!) readership to disrespect your company. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7As a web developer, standards are pretty ***** important to me. You know what? I really, really don't like spending 10% of my time designing and coding and the remaining 90% going through a million ***** hacks because browsers can't properly adhere to or form standards.
I honestly can't imagine why anyone would support or praise a set of controls this fundamentally broken. I don't care what company this stuff is linked to. This isn't a fanboy rant. Internet Explorer 7 is making some good strides in broader standards support, but Atlas seems like a huge and dumb step backwards. - phpirate, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7@saleens281: Obviously you misunderstood me. They're migrating because of microsofts lack of attention to the browser. Standards can be part of the reason, but its mainly the lack of security and new browsing technology (tabbed browsing, extentions, etc)
@cawpin: Learned what lesson? - fahrvergnuugen, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9You're missing the point. End users will get forced to use applications created with atlas. What are you going to do if the next version of your bank's online banking software was created with atlas? You're either going to have to not use the software, switch banks, or use IE.
- ThatsUnpossible, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Where on earth did you get this idea? Atlas is intended as Microsoft's .NET Ajax solution, and .NET is intended to be used to write all server applications, not just internal business stuff...
- hchaudh1, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5The excuse "its still beta" is irrelevant. Have you ever used any of Google's beta products. the work bottomline.
Betas are supposed to be a fairly working piece of code which could be improved based on user input. But that's missing the point. once again, MS is putting out some piece of crap API tailored for the lesat common denominator which people would use and consequently be tied into IE. These could be any sites running Atlas built AJAX, banks, hospitols, government websites. If I don't have IE, I can't access those.
This is what happened recently when a lot of Katrina victims were locked out of some relief agency's websites because it was built for IE and it would not run on other browsers. People using Macs without IE or people using any other browser were shut out of the relief which they were entitled to.
MS fanboys are really people who use computers for gaming etc. and just don't get the bigger picture. - funkpucker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4@saleen - correction... closer to 99.999%
But the reason standards are there is so the users' experience is the same. It doesn't matter if the users know what standards are, but it's important that standards are followed so the user, who has no idea about standards, does not start cursing at F$%^*# Firefox for not displaying their favorite page correctly.
For a company with as large of a user base as Microsoft, surely they should be able to code their browser to behave the same as other developers. This doesn't mean restricting innovation. You can always create a new language and support it only in your browser. But languages that are already standardized should all act the same.
If it isn't incompetence on the part of Microsoft, it's malicious anti-compatability in hopes of locking users in to their crappy, broken, old product... a basic concept in business theory is buyer lock-in... kinda obvious - lunarship, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Because they have an antitrust ruling against them that states that they misused their operating system monopoly to artifically gain control of the browser market. If I were working for Microsoft's legal team and I saw that a development kit for the web only worked with Internet Explorer, I'd be hiding under the desk, praying to Yog-Sothoth.
- althe3rduww, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Not trying to flame here, just explaining.
The problem here is that since microsoft bundles its browser in its os, 99% of users don't know that their is anything else out there besides IE. Hence why they have gotten sued so many times. As a web developer, I have a huge problem with this because sure Microsoft builds sites for their own browser but the rest of the world has to worry about all browsers. So Microsoft is being the petulant child by not using the standards that everyone else uses. It's for this very reason that certain sites don't work on certain browsers. The best way I see to combat this is for web developers to make a huge sacrifice and only develop for firefox and other browsers and not IE. This would force IE to wake up to standards but until they do it would cause a huge issue with all the home users who can't understand why they can't see the website. But most developers can't afford that sacrifice, so in other words it won't happen. Microsoft will be the brat they are and not get punished for it. - joeyjojo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5"These MSFT tools (Atlas, ASP.NET, etc) aren't really intended for widespread use on the Internet... instead, most ASP.NET apps are run inside enterprises, where they are sheilded from the outside world and [your favorite browser here]."
as a .net developer, I must say that that is sad, but true.
That said, the simple fact that MS has supported Firefox in the new .net 2 and Atlas, is a nice direction for them to head in. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6As long as it works in Internet Explorer, 90% of the market doesn't give a toss whether anything supports Firefox. You better have some cushioning when you hit the bottom of your slippery slope.
- bouche, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4live.com and the windows live mail beta so far need to have IE to work correctly. I hope that gets fixed for Firefox.
- csimpkins, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6I saw a bunch of guys behind Atlas at the devconnections conference in Orlando a couple weeks ago. They were pretty excited about the product and had me convinced that they are dedicated to making it cross-browser compatable.
Getting on their case about this when the product is still in beta is pretty weak.
And for *****'s sake... it's a FREE add-on framework that enhances functionality. You don't have to use it if you think it sucks. - dieseltravis, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7@hchaudh1
"in the iFrame element, add this : style="filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(opacity=0);"
I was blown away by the fact that at this point, I am not coding HTML or CSS, just some BS MS attribute which is not even documented"
Not even documented?
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/filter/reference/filters/alpha.asp
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/filter/filters.asp
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/filter/reference/properties/opacity.asp
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/filter/reference/properties/style.asp
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/samples/author/filter/Alpha.htm
those were just from MSDN. MS allows you to apply directX filters via CSS. Its handy for IE-only apps. Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see them support the standard as well, but it didn't exist for opacity when IE 6 came out. - dan90251, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4The real point of ATLAS is to make it an easy to use standard is ASP.NET, I was honestly surprised it wasn't released along with VS 2005. What'll happen is while all us PHP guys will be struggling to choose for the multitude of different Javascript based API's, the ASP.NET guys will simply drag an ATLAS control onto the screen set a few properties and be done with the whole thing. It'll make me start to drool over ASP.NET
Also if they can get us all using the ATLAS it'll eventually turn into an unhealthy addiction like we have to the Win32 API. IE7 will go for standards I'm sure, but the real innovation for IE7 will be the bundling of support for WPF and XAML (think Webstart but better using 3D directX stuff) and maybe they'll even compile in ATLAS somehow and make it faster?? maybe not who nows.
Personally I think when Vista launches the Web browser as we know it, is going to be up against some serious competition/eye candy. I expect to see funky 3D Ebay applicaions and Amazon application, all prehaps launched from the browser. Think itunes but with Amazon and eBay products, ATLAS is surely just a half arsed attempt to keep people happy... lockin through WPF(Avalon)/WCF(Indigo) is surely the MS Future.
What's more with Windows on 90% of PCs it's doubtful they're gonna fail. - Brilhasti, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@rileyjt
There are still some differences between the non-IE browsers but they are all far closer to the standard than IE is. I agree it is odd that some code that works in FF doesn't work in virtually every other non-IE browser. That's definitely how it usually goes. - thewebguy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3in other news, 99% of all word press users receive an F in surviving the digg effect.
i'm sure there is some sort of caching feature they could be using in order to avoid such an embarassment. - geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -6/+9So, the problem is the W3C setting standards? Because last time I read, that was a /good/ thing.
This is a very clear-cut case of Microsoft "Embrace and Extend". - p3ngu1n, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3http://atlas.asp.net/atlastoolkit/
I don't know if that's what the blog pointed to, but that's the atlas website. - jeffgtr, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5"as a percentage of browser market share, Atlas supports over 90% of the browsers, thats an A- at worst."
So if everyone else jumped off a cliff you'd follow? Using IE is a huge liability and not really a smart thing to do, especially if you use windows. - phpirate, on 10/12/2007, -17/+19Once again, Microsoft thinks they are the gods of internet standards. Apparently, they haven't learnt their lesson in the very reason why people are migrating from IE to firefox.
- panic, on 10/12/2007, -4/+6in all fairness, it is beta, and hopefully that's on their list of todos *fingers crossed*. microsoft has made several great strides in the last year to becoming more cross browser compliant. msdn and microsoft.com now have official support for firefox and other browsers. i do a lot of asp.net 2.0 development and i do all of my debugging in firefox. all of their web controls render properly in firefox, too. back when I was working with asp.net 1.0 and 1.1 i couldn't use firefox. needless to say, that sucked.
- hchaudh1, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3@dieseltravis
You just don't get it do you? I am coding HTML and CSS. I don't work with .Net. I don't care for .Net. In my company all development is in JEE. I don't want to goto an MS forum to learn how they hacked something to make it work in IE. IE is a browser, it should work with standard HTML and CSS.
All I really should have to do is type: background-color='bla-bla' to do what I want to do. Instead, I have to goto an MS forum to learn how to hack up my code, making it ugly and unwieldy to make it work for IE for a feature that should be supported out of the box.
BTW, from my post, you knew what you had to paste into Google to get that bunch of links. I did not. I had to dig through websites to get to that link. - ThatsUnpossible, on 10/12/2007, -5/+7Microsoft invented Ajax... IE supports it alright. I don't know why Calendar doesn't work in IE yet, assuming that's true, but I am sure it will eventually.
- pgouy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4@rcomegys: Get the facts right, mmmkay?
- maldrax, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2The Icefaces Ajax framework (Java, JSF) is cross browser compatible, and free!
http://icesoft.com - brandizzle, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Even if they don't know what the standards are they still know "this page looks weird in IE" and "this one is broken in firefox". That means most likely they're going to base their browser choice on whichever one displays more pages correctly.
Get people to make pages by the standards instead of just using whatever MS made up and you'll get alot more users going to firefox. But if most of what they visit works in IE then they'll stick with IE.
(It'd probably take 50% of the pages to not work correctly in IE for them to switch, but only one or two broken pages in firefox for them to switch back) - dbre2, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Doesn't matter...the "10 best designed websites" article from a few days ago had some pages that wouldn't load in internet explorer at all.
- hchaudh1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Accessibility refers to the accessibility for people with handicaps, not browser based asscessibility you dumbass.
- hardy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Know that they are working on this. From a couple of the actual developers.
Shawn Burke: http://blogs.msdn.com/sburke/archive/2006/04/17/577817.aspx and
Bertrand Le Roy's explanation: http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/archive/2006/04/13/442815.aspx - hchaudh1, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3We are talking a framework here. Frameworks should be transparent. The developer should not have to worry about how the framework works as long as it does what it says it will do.
Its really bad that if I am using Atlas, I still have to worry about how it works internally. -
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