Internet Exploiter
Nov. 21st, 2003 02:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsI hate Internet Explorer.
One of the requirements where I work is that the next major rev of the product be "Section 508 Compatible." What this means shorthand is that the pages rendered by the user iinterfact must scale well when fonts are altered, and must not contain clutter that would detract from the useability of the site when rendered by a text-to-voice system.
One of the things that makes 508 compliance easy is cascading style sheets, which (in theory) allow you to make the page pretty without detracting from the overall structural composition of the information. This would be nice, if it were true.
But IE doesn't make it nice. A simple example: the CSS2 standard states that the "hover" attribute applies to any block-level element. The example provided by the CSS2 standards team shows the usual "links turn different colors when you hover the mouse over them" effects. Mozilla correctly allows hover to work for any block-level element. IE only allows it to work for links. Mozilla correctly resizes containing elements if the hover defines a different type style. IE doesn't.
Another example is margins. The margin is the whitespace inside the border of an object, between its content and the border. (Padding is outside the border. The "border" is not necessarily a visible object.) Mozilla correctly spaces objects that use this attribute; IE does not. It's frustrating to read the freaking standard only to learn that the most common browser in the world often ignores what it says.
Why the Hell does anyone still use IE?
One of the requirements where I work is that the next major rev of the product be "Section 508 Compatible." What this means shorthand is that the pages rendered by the user iinterfact must scale well when fonts are altered, and must not contain clutter that would detract from the useability of the site when rendered by a text-to-voice system.
One of the things that makes 508 compliance easy is cascading style sheets, which (in theory) allow you to make the page pretty without detracting from the overall structural composition of the information. This would be nice, if it were true.
But IE doesn't make it nice. A simple example: the CSS2 standard states that the "hover" attribute applies to any block-level element. The example provided by the CSS2 standards team shows the usual "links turn different colors when you hover the mouse over them" effects. Mozilla correctly allows hover to work for any block-level element. IE only allows it to work for links. Mozilla correctly resizes containing elements if the hover defines a different type style. IE doesn't.
Another example is margins. The margin is the whitespace inside the border of an object, between its content and the border. (Padding is outside the border. The "border" is not necessarily a visible object.) Mozilla correctly spaces objects that use this attribute; IE does not. It's frustrating to read the freaking standard only to learn that the most common browser in the world often ignores what it says.
Why the Hell does anyone still use IE?
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no subject
Date: 2003-11-21 10:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-11-21 11:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-11-21 10:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-11-21 11:03 pm (UTC)why people still use IE
Date: 2003-11-21 11:53 pm (UTC)That was probably rhetorical, but... they use it because they already have it, they're used to it, and they don't even know what a web standard is, let alone care about them. It's also considerably faster to start than Mozilla (at least normal Mozilla - Firebird competes), and "uses less RAM" - because it's always in RAM, but the fact remains that less memory is used on most systems. It's possible to make IE not be memory-resident all the time, but it's not for normal users.
no subject
Date: 2003-11-22 12:14 am (UTC)Perhaps one could simply require a truly standards-compliant browser (and maybe mirror mozilla.org into the bargain)? After all, it's not like they cost anything, or are huge security holes, or are inextricable from the OS or anything like that... *sigh* I say use it as leverage to pry your clients out of the "MS only on the desktop" mentality that's killing the internet with virus traffic these days....
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Date: 2003-11-22 03:54 am (UTC)I hate the frequent "page has no content" errors I get from Mozilla. If Mozilla worked better, I'd use it and ditch IE.
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Date: 2003-11-22 03:29 pm (UTC)oh and dose the new version of mozilla finaly support inframes
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Date: 2003-11-22 04:12 pm (UTC)Then again, if standards and efficiency were what was important to most people, they wouldn't use Windows, would they?
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Date: 2003-11-26 07:46 am (UTC)...and Windows tries to act like a web browser. Didja ever see Win98's "web view" for displaying the disk drive contents or control panel? It looks like a web browser because it is. They re-implemented Windows Explorer as an ActiveX control.
no subject
Date: 2003-11-22 09:29 pm (UTC)The problem is that some of the crap comes from those operations which provide adverts. So a lot of sites will suddenly start breaking, and when you look again, an hour or so later, it's all working.
Which is hell for tech support to deal with.
no subject
Date: 2003-11-25 08:02 pm (UTC)Cutting the adverts speeds up the web no end...
Browser
Date: 2003-11-24 02:40 pm (UTC)Because it's there.