On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 9:56 AM, William Sanders / EFG <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > What are yer thoughts? >
Well, like most things MS that come out of the trenches, I'm sure their intent was good, but their implementation failed to consider how things work in the real world. Here's how I think it played out: Microsoft released IE7 and many, many clients who had written IE6 specific code found their web pages look lousy in the new browser. IE 6 is one of the least standards compatible browser out there and has its own quirk mode. Given the choice between supporting "backwards-compatible stupid mode" and web standards, they made the right choice with IE7 of supporting the latter. (Didn't some wit once write that SET COMPATIBLE ON [dBASE-compatibility, breaks things like fsize()] should be renamed SET STUPID ON? Oh, wait, that's was me :) ) So, to avoid a repeat, they decided to release IE8 in "backwards-compatible, forwards-disabled" mode. (And if you wanted to use the new features, you had to recode your web page to say "Don't break on me.") I seem to recall a couple VFP releases that struggled with this too (Just so we can stay on topic here on the fox forums.) A lot of people whose opinion might actually matter (like Jeremy Keith [1] and Eric Meyer [2] over at A List Apart), voiced some pretty clear and well-reasoned objections. I like to think that in this case MS may have listened to reason and chosen to fix things before release. But I'm a hopeless optimist. But my concern is that MS still has a tin ear for this stuff. This isn't coming out of the DOS-and-Windows generation, nor the Win NT generation, nor the "Wait, this is the about the Internet" generation, but the fourth major generation, the post-DotNet GenX, at MS. They _still_ don't get it. And don't even get me started about Microsoft's (Not) Open Office XML, and their attempts to call their multi-thousand-page monstrosity a "standard" when it's not even a spec. [1] http://www.alistapart.com/articles/theyshootbrowsers [2] http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fromswitchestotargets -- Ted "Ok, back into lurker mode" Roche Ted Roche & Associates, LLC http://www.tedroche.com _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
