What is Digg?219 Comments
- webgeek147, on 10/12/2007, -9/+242In theory this is a wonderful idea, but unfortunately, the web design world is a little too complex for this solution. We'd put our clients out of business if we force all the IE users to download a new browser, because their web customers would get ticked off and go to another site. I see things from both the programming and marketing points of view (I'm some strange hybrid, believe me it's weird...) and although, I would, as much as you, love to smack IE down, we can't. Standards and compliance are meant to be a tool to help us, but not the end goal. If we have to tweak here and there, or break a few rules, we do it. I strive for excellent code structure, but I don't get hung up on "compliance". The whole point of web design is user-friendliness and to help the client (the site owner) communicate their message to, and connect with, their customers. I would say that forcing people to download and install a new browser could be classified as user-UNfriendly. It's easy for you or I to install a browser, but that scares a lot of people, your average Joes. People will just leave, and in LARGE numbers, and go to another site that doesn't make them download anew browser. It's anti-marketing. Yeah it means extra work for us, but hey, we're pros right? That's why we get to charge the big bucks. :)
You're not the first to have thought of it...back in college, I had a JavaScript alert popup on my sites if people were using IE saying, "You're using Internet Explorer, that's well below average. Download Netscape." and I wouldn't let them view the content without having Netscape. I know, way back in the day. What was I thinking? :) - jsd8cc, on 10/12/2007, -17/+88Google will pay you to switch people from IE. http://explorerdestroyer.com/
- crgnetworks, on 10/12/2007, -12/+64Wait... shouldn't the myspace 9/11 spammers post be right about here by now?
- Quix, on 10/12/2007, -9/+51"We'd put our clients out of business if we force all the IE users to download a new browser"
What would it take to pressure the Dells/HPs/Toshibas of the world to include Firefox pre-installed on all new machines?
IE is a blight upon the Internet that must be eliminated. - jsd8cc, on 10/12/2007, -2/+37...in 2018.
- strictnein, on 10/12/2007, -2/+34From the source: (edited slightly so it actually shows up on digg)
META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="OpenOffice.org 2.0 (Win32)"
P ALIGN=CENTER STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in"
FONT SIZE=4 STYLE="font-size: 16pt"
It makes my eyes bleed! - GrahamStw, on 10/12/2007, -3/+32I think the fact that the author can't even produce a simple text-only web page that validates (W3C reports 12 errors at the moment) indicates that he probably isn't the best person to lead up this campaign!
- camvet, on 10/12/2007, -12/+38Totally agree, how does punishing our clients / employers help solve this problem? This will only serve to make the web developer look bad, if I was a nontechnical manager and saw the web site didn't work in IE6/7, I would consider this a failure of the web developer. Like it or not IE is the main target when you design a web site....
- pyalot, on 10/12/2007, -1/+25I know it's an impractical proposition. And no, standards are not an end in themselves. But standards are so much more helping (us and our customers too) when they're adhered to by the other side more.
We get to charge big bucks for webdesign because we need a long time to make sure sites simply work. I would gladly charge less bucks, spending less time doing all the IE compatibility hacks and give the full benefit of that reduced efford back to my customer. Somehow I have the feeling they would like it.
IE is a bug, and web-developers are paid to fix that bug all the time everytime over. So customers pay for continually fixing something that's broken because Microsoft couldn't get the finger out of their arse for a change. I simply cannot disagree more that supporting IE is in any way good for the customer. - mikesbaker, on 10/12/2007, -13/+35the funniest glitch - in hot mail you cannot upload an attachment using IE7 - its tells you that you have to upgrade to IE 5. HAHAHA thats just stupid.
- 16x9, on 10/12/2007, -1/+22> geronimo wrote: "Microsoft has billion and billions of seemingly limitless resources. And they can't produce a standards-compliant browser?"
It's not that they can't but that they choose not to. Microsoft likes to "set the standard." It isn't as fond of "following the standard." - DoctaStooge, on 10/12/2007, -8/+28@ webgeek147
I understand your point of view. However, if everyone goes for compliance instead of using hacks, then IE will have to adapt. If all web developers change their practices, then customers will have no where to turn to complain except to Microsoft and tell them to fix their browser. I think the point of this was not to kill IE, but force Microsoft to fix it and start to comply with the standards. - smhill, on 10/12/2007, -8/+27@roosterjm2k2
"If you stop supporting IE, your customers come to me. And I'll gladly take them. The object of our business model is to satisfy the client, thats it. "
Couldn't have said it better myself.
As a developer I am paid to provide solutions. I am not paid to espouse my own personal opinions. I develop enterprise level web applications for a living. This kind of stuff is just nonsense. Clients at this level want their products to work, end of story. Most are very aware of the type of problems that exist, but that is precisely why they hire firms like mine, to solve these problems.
While I certainly agree that there are problems with IE6/7 (and other browsers as well), I cannot simply not develop to them because in my opinion, they do not work correctly. Which is really what it comes down to. If 90% of users are using a particular browser, it is the standard, end of story.
And while it is an annoyance, it is also billable time. QA, testing, making a site fully compliant and cross platform/browser is part of the development process. I certainly don't feel dirty or anything, I am providing a solution to my client (and their visitors).
Don't get me wrong, I fully endorse standards and best practices and strive to use them to the degree that is practical, but as a professional I am provide a service to those 90% and must deliver. Most clients and end-users don't give a pair of fetid dingo's kidneys about standards or for any of the underling issues of development. Either the site works or it does not, and it is a fair bet that my client's competitor site works fine.
Also as rooster said, if you are using a ton of hacks to get a site to work in a particular browser, you are doing something wrong. If you develop correctly and to standards, minimal (if any) hacks are required.
Seriously, I hear bitching like this all the time about how "broken" IE6/7 is and how many hacks are required to get it to look right. And in the end, it is usually because they are not developing to standards in the first place. Developing to standards, doesn't mean having a rudimentary grasp of CSS. Proper document structure, proper use of tags, etc... all affect things. When done correctly, you will hit 99% across all browsers.
The article is lame. The concept is nice, but no mass crippling of sites is going to happen, and even if some did, users most likely wouldn't change their browser, they would just change sites. - roosterjm2k2, on 10/12/2007, -11/+29Um, no.
If you stop supporting IE, your customers come to me. And I'll gladly take them. The object of our business model is to satisfy the client, thats it.
Also, keep in mind, they built IE7 to be easily upgraded (the rendering engine that is) where IE6 was a pain.
Lastly, if you develop a truly compliant site, there wont be a lot of hacks to deal with. For the few problems that you find, are generally easy fixes. Part of the blame should rest on the shoulders of the w3c, for taking years to approve even trivial changes to the rules.
Lastly, firefox and safari as both a little out of whack too.
None of the browsers are perfect, and a good part of that is the fact that browser developers are left with the decision to release and update often, or wait for the w3c to get their act together and finalize a set of changes. - geronimo, on 10/12/2007, -2/+20Microsoft has billion and billions of seemingly limitless resources. And they can't produce a standards-compliant browser?
- Evic, on 10/12/2007, -5/+21In theory it's a great idea - unfortunately, I like money, and therefore I will hack away to make my sites appear correctly to all users.
- ZachPruckowski, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16Nope, you've got it wrong. You're too pessimistic. The point is that if Firefox suddenly stopped existing, we'd have not only FF's source code, but Opera and KHTML and half a dozen other standards compliant browsers. Even if those completely disappeared, we'd still have the actual written standards against which anyone could write a browser. That's the point.
- darcasey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+14standards evangelism eh?
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nomoreiehacks.org%2F - CaptShmo, on 10/12/2007, -2/+15The client is paying me to make their website work, my personal browser choice should have nothing to do with that.
Hack away! - pyalot, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12Also because inevitably somebody is going to cry foul Netscape at us. Today there's a key difference. Say Mozilla corp ceases to exist today, tomorrow there'll be a community site continuing the FF project under a different name.
Opensource is a good idea partly because it makes the customer invulnerable to some degree against big company bullying tactics, if all is said and done he still has the source to go on. - panic, on 10/12/2007, -4/+14In all fairness, Microsoft DID improve IE7's standards compliance, it's just still not perfect... A lot better than IE6's though.
- strictnein, on 10/12/2007, -10/+19The idea that Thunderbird is a real, business ready client is a joke.
- Archer1980, on 10/12/2007, -21/+31Ok, serious, i am starting to get fed up with this kind of useless article appearing on Digg. And there are several reasons why:
1) there is no such thing as standard compliance - The simple fact is, no browser can be 100% standard compliant because there are lots of standards written that just are NOT clear enough, and thus are open to minor interpretations that could drastically effect the site. Thus, who are we to say which browsers have and have no enterpreted these standards correctly? I mean, we could just as easily say that it's not IE we are writting the hacks for, but for FF and Opera instead.
2) IE is so old and over used in the world that it can't simple flip a switch and increase it's standard compliance. Fact is a lot of the things in IE were written before the standards were even created, which means if they change it to match the standards, how many websites will crash because of it, cost the IT industry billions to go back over millions of websites to make sure all those hacks are removed and code is changed. So IE is stuck in the point that it has to write 2 procedures to run 1 type of funtion, 1 for the old way, and one for the new way, and this is not always as easy as it sounds.
3) Realistically, how many hacks do you need for a website? The company i work for does websites all the time, and i think in the past year and a half i've worked here, i had to write 3 hacks, all minor. If you have the time and money to spend writtin big feature intense websites, then you also have the time and money and probably past experience to do these hacks in minutes rather then days, so production time difference is minimal.
Now before all you fan boys get your panties in a knot, I use several browsers, IE, FF, Netscape and Opera, and occasionally test on Safari. They all have there good sides and bad sides. Personally it's not my place to recommend what browser someone should or should not be using. IE 7 for instance brough in some nice visual updates that i am finding my clients love, and i'm going to say that that's pretty much all IE 7 was designed for. The true test will come with IE 8. If they can't get things in order then, then there is a serious problem. - posure, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11lol @ WYSIWYG standards compliant advocates
- strictnein, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10Actually, IE 7 can add lots of issues. It fixes lots of the issues, but still reads the IE hacks that many CSS coders used. So, it's a slight improvement, but still causes more work.
- gotamd, on 10/12/2007, -4/+12I agree. This is not the solution. If you think about what kind of user makes up that 86%, it basically consists of business users who are not as flexible as home users and then you have the home users who don't really care what web browser they use and are too lazy to use anything other than IE or can't figure out what a web browser is because they've always used IE. Letting your website appear broken to them probably won't help you or them.
- arizonagroove, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10About conditional comments: http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/overview/ccomment_ovw.asp
Check them out, much better than hacks.
I also like to enclose a 'get firefox' icon linking to getfirefox.com in conditional comments so only IE users see it :) - topcat5, on 10/12/2007, -7/+14I don't know why anyone and any business still uses IE. After years of getting burnt from hacks, viruses, trojans and OS crashes because the thing is so bound to the OS one would think they would have learnt their lesson by now. The day that I move people off IE and Outllook over to Firefox and Thunderbird is the day when the vast majority of their problems go away.
- tbeseda, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8the idea behind digg and the community only works if you read the "article"
- gotamd, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Don't digg the guy down. He's right. IE7 is *better* than IE6. However, it obviously isn't perfect. Need I remind you that the current release of Firefox doesn't pass the Acid2 test? I'm not trying to defend IE, I just think that it's stupid to digg this comment down.
- daltonvoss, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8Of course they can. They just choose not to. There is a method behind their madness.
- halik, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9Thunderbird? I take it you've never actually used outlook before. Ya know, it does do a little more than just email...
- WetSplatter, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8yeah, the fact that the mail store is a single file and when someone sends you a virus via email Norton and many other anti-virus FREEZE the mail file and move it to the archive..... deleting all of your email.
Try supporting this in a business enviroment, talk about a IT DISASTER!
How about business that deploy Exchange for email, should they just switch to another email solution and hack it together? - strictnein, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6As one of my CompSci teachers used to say: "There's a reason history majors aren't programmers"
- CanceledCzech, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8Me: LOL
There will always be hacks. Always. - voidchild, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Shouldn't this article link to the alternative browsers? Evangelism only works when you provide the alternative. Otherwise you're preaching to the choir.
- smitting, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6You gotta pick your battles. IE will continue to lose market share for as long as it continues to suck, and it's not our responsibility as programmers to tell the user what browser to use, just like it's not our responsibility as programmers to force users to switch to Apple. My responsibilities include making clients money, having them pay me money for making them money, and giving my programmers work to earn money to make a living and feed their families. I don't see how telling my clients that we will not support the most popular browser is going to help me meet any of my real-life goals, even if it would give me a nerdy-hard-on to kill off IE.
p.s. as long as we stay out of quirks-mode in IE7, getting our sites to work has been a lot easier than IE6. - philippbock, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Well … I don’t think it’s Geocities’ fault:
[META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="OpenOffice.org 2.0 (Win32)"] (Digg wouldn’t let me use less than/greater than signs)
That explains it. Still better than Word for generating websites though (they’re about ten times the size they’d need to be) but still … - strictnein, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Yeah, that's what I've started doing.
- vramdal, on 10/12/2007, -6/+11@Archer1980
You certainly make some valid points. However:
"there is no such thing as standard compliance" - I disagree. Granted, you must ask which standards, and it is true that IE existed before many of the standards where formalized by the W3C. But IE makes a lousy job of implementing even its own standards. The documentation for web standards in IE (at msdn.microsoft.com) is actually quite accurate, but it is ridden with contradictions and completely idiotic limitations. Ever tried writing an "onchange" event handler for an input field? Works fine as long as the IE user does not have an autocomplete value for the given field - in which case the event doesn't fire. This is not mentioned in the documentation for the onchange event, but rather in the section for Autocomplete (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/forms/autocomplete_ovr.asp). Idiocy like this requires loads of code to work around.
"Realistically, how many hacks do you need for a website?"
Lots. If you want a Google-friendly website (that is, low code to text ratio), and using CSS as it is supposed to, IE is a nightmare. This increases development time, thus increasing cost for the client.
Granted, IE7 is a slight improvement, but there's still a long way to go. If Microsoft gradually continues to improve standards support (which is expected, and is a good thing), web developers need to test and adapt their sites to a whole load of different IE versions with their different inabilities.
Now, for what Microsoft *could* have done: Adopted Gecko or KHTML as their rendering engine, wrapped it in a nice interface, and given Firefox a run for its users by competing on features. - andy206uk, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8@smhill
"Also as rooster said, if you are using a ton of hacks to get a site to work in a particular browser, you are doing something wrong. If you develop correctly and to standards, minimal (if any) hacks are required."
You are spot on - if you write your (X)HTML using a strict doctype IE even gets the box model right! Those people not using a doctype or writing invalid code just use the browsers as a scapegoat to hide their own lack of knowledge! The current generation(s) of browsers are the best we've ever had - we should consider ourselves lucky that we have such good CSS2 support - it has been a lot worse in the past! - Adalric, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6I'll sign your petition when you remove those deprecated <center> and <font> tags in your code.
- jav1231, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Frankly, when I visit a site that only supports IE, I leave. I think when a developer is forced to do this, their browser check page should display "This page only supports IE. Email john.doe@thiscompany.com to complain."
- sremick, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5The IE Tab extension for Firefox doesn't do a non-Windows user any good.
- NanoStuff, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6My philosophy is simplify, don't hack. If a particular visual feature does not work properly in IE, don't fuss over IE, just remove the feature conditionally for that browser, as long as functionality is intact. If it doesn't want to display alpha PNGs, don't run to photoshop and hack up a compromised gif, just don't show it the PNG. If an element background slips under a thick border and ruins the visual effect, don't show it the background... and so on.
I find it to be an ideal compromise between keeping the site intact for all/most visitors but not causing yourself too much of a headache because of an incompetent browser. If a client asks why a certain effect doesn't show in IE, I simply let them know IE does not support it, even though it might be able to using a workaround. - halik, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7That's the most idiotic thing I've ever heard... people that use ie make up 70+% of your target market, which also means 70% of your revenue (no adblock, ha ha). Only a complete fool of a webmaster would take efford to eliminate 70% of his customers.
- ostracize, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6@webgeek147
Similarly, for us who manage small, un-important websites, I'm not looking forward to all the requests/complaints from the average joe users who don't understand how to download or install a web browser (or even know what a web browser is for that matter). - smedrick, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Um...I've been using IE7 since before it went beta, and I haven't had to use a single hack to make a site look like it would in Firefox.
- PopcornDave, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4@strictnein
Why is Thunderbird so bad in a business environment? I've been using it ever since I dumped Eudora here at work and never had a problem. What's your problem with it? I'm curious. -
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