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

2007/4/17, Dão Gottwald <dao@design-noir.de>:
> Alfonso Martínez de Lizarrondo schrieb:
> > 2007/4/17, Dão Gottwald <dao@design-noir.de>:
>
> Chris Wilson wrote, "Microsoft's problem is not what Trident can
> support." So all it needs is 1) the decision to actually do it and 2)
> time. Others did that before.

Who did fix all the problems in just one release?
I don't wanna wait 10 years until MS fixes all the bugs and can
release a perfectly HTML5 compliant browser, I want a new browser as
soon as possible that does fix some bugs, then after a little while
more bug fixes and so on.


Another different question, not related to the reply above:

What happens while users upgrade their browsers?
If the web author sets up his page so it works nicely with IE next
using the opt-in to trigger Really Standards mode, and there was a
problem if the page is rendered in IE next in Standards mode, that
means that ALL the current users of IE that haven't upgrade will have
to face the problematic rendering or whatever bug that was fixed in
the Really Standards mode.
Seems like web authors will need a way to say to IE "if you have fixed
this bug use this code, but if you don't understand this then please,
use this".

There are things that web authors must take into account today if they
want to support any browser besides IE, like dealing with whitespace
nodes in DOM or the fact that getElementById does just that, so I
think that if the page works now in other browser then it will work
when IE fixes those problems, but in other cases, there are bugs that
are worked around by providing different code to IE and the rest of
the browsers, and those cases are the ones that can bring problems to
MS when they fix it, the web developers in that case must be able to
address the new IE but still leave the old code until everyone
upgrades and the old version dies.

I think that one of the problems with IE7 was that while fixing bugs
MS did also fix most (I'm not sure if most or all) of the CSS
selectors hacks, so the problem web authors had was that they couldn't
easily provide code just to IE7 to workaround the remaining bugs in an
easy way that didn't mean putting Conditional comments in the HTML
page instead of putting the fix right with the rest of the CSS code.

Received on Tuesday, 17 April 2007 17:47:56 UTC