Re: legacy of incompetence? [was: a compromise to the versioning debate]

2007/4/17, Dão Gottwald <dao@design-noir.de>:
>
> Now I fear that MS actually wants more switches
> because their initial implementation for the new HTML5 rendering mode
> (that includes CSS and DOM at least) could be screwed up again. I don't
> think that's acceptable.
>

The problem that MS has is that all the current deployed pages that
are in Strict mode are indeed relying on IE bugs, sometimes people
have fixed with Conditional comments, some CSS selector hack, or any
other kind of browser detection and so the users get the page to work
as it was designed, and it's based on the current IE bugs.

If they just fix those bugs, it's clear that those pages will break.
Probably the fix would be as easy as to remove the browser detection
and serve all the browsers the same pages, but there are just too many
pages out there and too many people that didn't know anything about
Quirks vs Standard, they just did put the DOCTYPE to validate the page
and then moved along.

Thinking that MS can fix all the current bugs in IE in just one
release is really naive. They could fix the major ones, but I still
don't know of any browser that is error free in any single technology,
so the next IE will have bugs, they can be in JS, DOM, CSS or
whatever, but there will be bugs that will be fixed later (hopefully).

So how can MS release a new version of IE that provides the web
developers the new fixes, without breaking the old content (that is
specifically targeted at those older IE versions) that is rendered in
Standars mode?

Received on Tuesday, 17 April 2007 16:42:46 UTC