Lea de Groot wrote:
Joel Spolsky has published an ... interesting article
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html
Ok, I actually sat down and read Joel's convoluted prose...
"DOCTYPE is a myth.
A mortal web designer who attaches a DOCTYPE tag to their web page
saying, “this is standard HTML,” is committing an act of hubris. There
is no way they know that."
Joel seems to be confusing HTML - which is quite strictly standardised -
with CSS/DOM.
"In the real world where people are imperfect, you can’t have a standard
with just a spec–you must have a super-strict reference implementation,
and everybody has to test against the reference implementation."
Reference implementation for content marked up in HTML is the W3C
validator...again, confused about CSS/DOM?
"Enough ugly hacks. 8 billion existing web pages be damned."
The fact that those 8 billion pages actually work fine in all other
browsers, who all seem to have managed to agree on an interpretation of
CSS/DOM by working together, ironing out test cases, etc, doesn't
matter? Are MS joining the party?
"They are usually websites which were carefully constructed to conform
to web standards. But IE 6 and IE 7 didn’t really conform to the specs,
so these sites have little hacks in them that say, “on Internet
Explorer… move this thing 17 pixels to the right to compensate for IE’s
bug.”"
So they're standard, plus some crap thrown in for non-standard IE. And
they do browser-sniffing or take advantage of CSS hacks, rather than
progressive enhancement, conditional comments, and any other modern
practices.
"Mmhmm. All you smug idealists are laughing at this newbie/idjit. The
consumer is not an idiot. She’s your wife. So stop laughing. 98% of the
world will install IE8 and say, “It has bugs and I can’t see my sites.”"
If my wife installed an early developer-release beta on her machine, I'd
laugh at her, yes. Same as running a nightly release of something like
Firefox and then complaining about breakages.
It's also worth remembering that the MS releases these early betas
EXACTLY because currently sites break badly with its new rendering
engine. Partly, that's due to new bugs and unfinished parts of the
rendering engine, but also so that the development teams for those sites
can test early, remove the IE-specific cruft that now compensate for
bugs from 6 and 7 that simply aren't there anymore, and do some proper
version testing rather than simply sniffing for "IE or not".
Will there still be sites that, once IE8 is *actually* released to the
public, still break? Yes, just as there were sites that broke when IE7
came out. Mom&pop websites will break quite spectacularly. Sites on
CD-ROM? I have quite a few old Amiga games that only run in emulation...
I still say the article is extremely long, confused and confusing.
P
--
Patrick H. Lauke
______________________________________________________________
re·dux (adj.): brought back; returned. used postpositively
[latin : re-, re- + dux, leader; see duke.]
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Co-lead, Web Standards Project (WaSP) Accessibility Task Force
http://webstandards.org/
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