IE8 and Web Standards, Pt. 2
Jonas already expressed his opinions about IE8 in general and Joel Spolksky’s article “Martian Headsets” in particular. Mark Pilgrim answers Spolsky by translating parts of his article “from MS-Speak into English“.
I have some more things to add, so here it goes.
“There is no solution. Each solution is terribly wrong. Eric Bangeman at ars technica writes, ‘The IE team has to walk a fine line between tight support for W3C standards and making sure sites coded for earlier versions of IE still display correctly.’ This is incorrect. It’s not a fine line. It’s a line of negative width. There is no place to walk. They are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.”
So why even bother?
“Those documents are super confusing. The specs are full of statements like ‘If a sibling block box (that does not float and is not absolutely positioned) follows the run-in box, the run-in box becomes the first inline box of the block box. A run-in cannot run in to a block that already starts with a run-in or that itself is a run-in.’ Whenever I read things like that, I wonder how anyone correctly conforms to the spec.”
Funny fact: “This document was produced by the CSS Working Group“, and “The following is the complete list of W3C member organizations that participate in the CSS working group with one or more people: [..] Microsoft Corporation [..]“.
The only thing that is confusing to me here is that apparently Microsoft Corporation, who is participating in the CSS Working Group and produced the document containing the quoted snippet doesn’t understand their own work.
Software developers who don’t understand what a “sibling block box”, “run-in box” or “inline box” is, shouldn’t even think about starting to write a web browser.
“The precise problem here is that you’re pretending that there’s one standard, but since nobody has a way to test against the standard, it’s not a real standard.”
Uhm.. Test Suites? Or even.. gasp.. Acid 3? Hint hint?
“They were sick of special tags. Every frigging web page has to have thirty seven ugly hacks in it to make it work with five or six popular browsers. Enough ugly hacks. 8 billion existing web pages be damned.”
Small correction: ‘Every frigging web page has to have thirty seven ugly hacks in it to make it work with Internet Explorer‘
