The joy of being me
So, we're having a fun thread on the HTML WG. I'm explaining what Microsoft must do, given the half-billion or so users that rely on us to not break their web experience. A certain contingent disagrees with me (okay) and seems to want to beat it out of me (not okay).
I'm reading through email. My wife leans over my shoulder at a random one - sent privately to me, even, and honestly, it didn't even wiggle my annoyance meter. (We have a new out-of-office system on the server, I'd accidentally mis-configured it and it was sending external messages. This person was letting me know, in a moderately polite way.)
My wife says, "wow, people are really rude. You don't need that. Why are you still doing this?"
Hmm.
Comments
Anonymous
April 14, 2007
Ok, I'm replying in entirely the wrong forum, because this is a reply to the linked message from the mailing list, but one of the joys of having one's primary email be webmail is that mailto: links in web pages don't work any more. (Ironic, huh?) But your post said "If they'd just sent us the content they sent to firefox, we'd have done a better job" and then later on "Show me another way to Not Break The Web". Well, how about sending a firefox-ish UA string then? Implement the standards at least as well as Firefox does (still got a long way to go there, but I hope you're planning to be a lot closer by IE8) and then send a Firefox-like UA string (take out "MSIE", stick in "like Gecko" like Safari or Opera or whoever it is does). Presto, you're getting served standards-compliant content. It's not like this is a new idea. You were ON the team that decided IE's UA string should start with "Mozilla/"...Anonymous
April 14, 2007
re:"We have a new out-of-office system on the server, I'd accidentally mis-configured it and it was sending external messages" You're not the first person to have done that :o) Back in January another softie committed the same faux pax, leading to his cell phone and office number being sent to anybody who sent an email to an MS competition email alias.Anonymous
April 14, 2007
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April 14, 2007
My wife asks me the same thing.Anonymous
April 14, 2007
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April 15, 2007
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April 15, 2007
Chris, what exactly is the big technical disruption of starting fresh with a newly labeled browser? It would only require a few technical changes to make the browser not respond to the IE sniffs. Leak the newly labeled browser slowly to the public with beta release numbers below 1.0 so you can fix up the important bugs that have cause people problems with IE. Then when you hit 1.0 you don't support the pre 1.0 versions. People using IE can continue without any pain until all the computers using IE are dead and gone. Developers should not have to do something extra to a validating HTML 4.01 document that has a DOCTYPE clearly saying that to get into standards mode on any browser. The DOCTYPE already says they want standards mode.Anonymous
April 15, 2007
Your assertion that you'd have to send EXACTLY Firefox's UA for some particular version is contradicted by one simple fact: Firefox is able to release new versions without "breaking the web"... Point is, web developers expect Firefox to be releasing new versions on a regular basis, because they always have. They (understandably) got out of the habit of expecting IE to do so. Send something that looks vaguely like a plausible future version of Firefox, implement standards as well or better than current Firefox versions, and you'll render the web as well as Firefox does.Anonymous
April 15, 2007
Stuart, I think that changing the UA string would be a good move but that is only one of the several common sniffs that people use in JavaScript program specifically for IE. The other sniffs (document.all, conditional comments etc) would need to be removed also which would also be good moves. I don't know any developers that lament these missing features in other browsers. Perhaps some intranet developers but they can continue using IE6 if they want to.Anonymous
April 15, 2007
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April 15, 2007
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April 15, 2007
Why IE v.next? Why not IE2 v.1Anonymous
April 16, 2007
I think that whatever you do you're going to get hosed. If you don't fix the bugs and adhere to standards (and IE7 is a vast improvement) then you'll be accused (even more) of monopoly and not caring. If you fix the bugs and break existing sites, then you'll be accused of not caring about customers (and yes, I agree, the web is already broken, but stopping existing sites working isn't a good solution). If you create a new browser (my choice), then you'll be accused of confusing the market place. It's a matter of which you consider the lesser evil. Personally I'm in favour of a new browser; yes it'll be a lot of work, but the long term benefits will be worth it - how far ahead do you want to look? Do you still want to be maintaining the IE code base in 5 years, modifying it for HTML 5 and CSS 3? At what stage do you consider the cost effectiveness of bolting on features when you know that it would be better to start again. I believe that we - Microsoft, web developers, educators, authors - have to educate the entire web world about the problems and why standards are good. We know that many developers don't produce compliant code, but that's partly a matter of education, partly toolset. Users don't care, but if they understood the reasonings behind a new browser, they'd be more forgiving.Anonymous
April 16, 2007
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April 17, 2007
Chris, can you explain why Peter's idea of discontinuing the Internet Explorer brand would be "majorly disruptive"? Disruptive to whom?Anonymous
April 17, 2007
users. Users who visit their bank sites and expect them to work.Anonymous
April 17, 2007
Personally, I'm still waiting to hear why my baby was shut down after I left Microsoft (the bug database). It was a huge uphill slog both internally and externally getting that thing going and then it goes away. That might not be a public discussion though. :-)Anonymous
April 17, 2007
Al, see Pete LePage's post about that: http://blogs.msdn.com/petel/archive/2007/04/09/ie-public-bug-database-connect.aspxAnonymous
April 17, 2007
After reading this, my innate reaction is: "Well, duh." Since I was one of the people (the only one for a while) buried in the triage of these bugs, I can certainly speak to the number that were basically "You SUX0R!!!". That being said, it seemed like it didn't get as much support as I would have liked. This was probably a factor of it starting very late in the product cycle. I dunno. It was a shame to see the IE Blog go to running a lot less posts with bigger time periods in between after I left combined with that happening to the bug DB. It seemed like a lot of outward facing community efforts got effectively defunded to some degree.Anonymous
April 18, 2007
"users. Users who visit their bank sites and expect them to work. " If that was the answer to my question then I won't bother to ask another one.Anonymous
April 18, 2007
"users. Users who visit their bank sites and expect them to work." Chris, this is not a very fulfilling answer. It answers the whom but not the why. Such a short answer is difficult to interpret. The terseness appears to be intended to shut down conversation without a discussion or at least educating the developers that are disappointed with many previous IE design decisions but willing to actually spend time commenting here. Unfortunately my initial interpretation is "look here peons, we know best, we don't want to do that and we aren't going to tell you why so just accept it."Anonymous
April 18, 2007
The point that Chris has made over and over again is that IE won't break backwards compatibility, period. Neither users nor developers give Microsoft and the IE team any slack if they go to their site and it doesn't work, regardless of why. Other browsers seem more inclined to just update things and figure that users will come along. Given IE's browser share, that isn't really an option.Anonymous
April 18, 2007
Yeah. What Al said. Dean and Peter - I'm not trying to rudely shut down discussion of this topic. I'm burned out discussing it right, now, actually - go take a look at the HTML WG thread and see how many posts I've made on it explaining why we believe in this. No, I can't give you every piece of data we have. Some of it, we don't have rights to give to the public (e.g. contracted studies) and some of it paints a negative picture of web developers that I'd rather not explain in the news. In short, the "why" is that there are a tremendous number of ignorant web developers out there, for whom DOCTYPE is cargo-cult boilerplate. (Ian Hickson's term, btw.) They copy-and-paste with abandon, then they tweak it until it works in IE. They're annoyed, today, because we have bugs they have to work around. Then, we ship a new version that fixes those bugs, and their tweaks break - and they scream at us. This is how the IE7 cycle went. It doesn't make our browser share or our market perception go up, despite being the "right" thing to do.Anonymous
April 18, 2007
Forgot to point - the HTML WG thread on versioning is at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Apr/thread.html, look for the "Versioning and html[5]" thread started by me.Anonymous
April 19, 2007
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April 20, 2007
my ie7.0 worked good yesterday. but today it always appears a error message and then it asked me if i wanted to send an error report. i used to have this problem, after i reinstall windows XP SP2, the problem seemed disappear, but now it comes out again. if you could help me, could you email me at "voicesay@hotmail.com"Anonymous
April 21, 2007
But Craig, if MS put out IE8 that claimed not to be IE - and announced they'd soon be auto-updating everyone, banks would be falling over themselves to fix their broken sites. (And who knows, they might even start just allowing all browsers.) Despite understanding the whole "not wanting to break websites" idea, I can't help but to see this as a very positive outcome; this is a case where the entire world would applaud Microsoft strong-arming some utterly broken websites into the modern age like that.Anonymous
April 21, 2007
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April 23, 2007
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April 23, 2007
This isn't about users but about forcing your way into the specs in such way that it will be more difficult for other vendors to compete. Proclaiming IE.current's behavior as 'the standard' and requiring authors to specify something in addition (specced or not) to get 'the other' (W3C) standard's behavior is preposterous and will only lead to users continuing to cater to IE's bugs and shortcomings and thus even more broken websites for non-IE users. I thought the browser-wars were over, but it seems that only the battleground has shifted...Anonymous
April 23, 2007
Tino, I don't believe you've actually considered it from the other side of the fence for a minute. I'm not trying to "force my way into specs" - I'm trying to not break the web for a half a billion users, the bulk of whom don't understand the difference between IE's current behavior and the W3C standard, in my opinion shouldn't be forced to pay the price for that ignorance.Anonymous
April 23, 2007
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April 24, 2007
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April 25, 2007
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April 29, 2007
@ Dean Edwards If Chris W really wants to make a difference then Microsoft is where he needs to be, as that's the place that needs to start being different. For my day job, I keep sites in quirks mode, as there's less chance a new version of IE is going to come out and break it. If IE fixed certain parts of its renderer to a current version of HTML, it would encourage larger companies to adopt modern standards.Anonymous
May 04, 2007
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May 05, 2007
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July 20, 2007
The funny thing about people being rude in emails, its very similar to when you phone the local department store with a complaint - very rude... when you trot down to said store standing in front of you is some little guy in a suit usually... its that feeling of anonymity (I'm safe in my little room so can say anything). Its really hard not to take it personally and not let it bring your day down, especially when you read that at 6am on the way between bed and work.Anonymous
July 30, 2007
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August 01, 2007
Just read the linked msg on WG. Wow!, that cleared up so much stuff for me. I've been one of those "kinda have it in for Microsoft" folks, but I started to see exactly what battles you are up against. I like (no, scratch that....) LOVE the idea of being able to set something (doctype) or otherwise, that indicates my desire for stricter rendering. haroldAnonymous
August 23, 2007
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October 03, 2007
Again, thank you for explaining this position, in Australia this year. It was teh awesomeness.Anonymous
January 10, 2008
That said, I do think what you said in that "fun thread" is true. The only way to sort out the current mess is to use an "opt in" approach to standards compliance.Anonymous
January 20, 2008
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January 20, 2008
There's also "how many websites might seem to break now (ie. how many break if I tell Opera or Firefox to identify itself as IE6), but could and would be fixed almost by flicking a switch so they use the Firefox/Opera/Standards-rendering path they already have, for IE as well?Anonymous
November 01, 2008
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April 22, 2009
If you must implement a new quirks mode system, here is how I would do it: HTML 4.01 gets a snapshot of the current layout engine. This would be quirks mode 2 or whatever you want to call it. XHTML 1.x served as text/html would also get quirks mode 2. HTML 5 and anything run through the XML parser (including application/xhtml+xml once it's supported) would get the new standards mode. Preferably, there should also be a way to get standards mode in HTML before HTML 5 is ready. I suppose some kind of IE-specific comment thing could do the job. Maybe a doctype comment?Anonymous
April 22, 2009
The IE team and the re-direction of Microsoft in its Web development strategy, including Word 2007 abandoning the IE engine, has shown a lot of guts and courage.Anonymous
May 16, 2009
Your assertion that you'd have to send EXACTLY Firefox's UA for some particular version is contradicted by one simple fact: Firefox is able to release new versions without "breaking the web"... Point is, web developers expect Firefox to be releasing new versions on a regular basis, because they always have. They (understandably) got out of the habit of expecting IE to do so. Send something that looks vaguely like a plausible future version of Firefox, implement standards as well or better than current Firefox versions, and you'll render the web as well as Firefox does.Anonymous
June 19, 2009
Personally, I'm still waiting to hear why my baby was shut down after I left Microsoft (the bug database). It was a huge uphill slog both internally and externally getting that thing going and then it goes away. That might not be a public discussion though. :-)Anonymous
June 30, 2009
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July 07, 2009
Stuart, I think that changing the UA string would be a good move but that is only one of the several common sniffs that people use in JavaScript program specifically for IE. The other sniffs (document.all, conditional comments etc) would need to be removed also which would also be good moves. I don't know any developers that lament these missing features in other browsers. Perhaps some intranet developers but they can continue using IE6 if they want to.Anonymous
July 15, 2009
Again, thank you for explaining this position, in Australia this year. It was teh awesomeness.Anonymous
July 15, 2009
The IE team and the re-direction of Microsoft in its Web development strategy, including Word 2007 abandoning the IE engine, has shown a lot of guts and courage.Anonymous
July 16, 2009
There's also "how many websites might seem to break now (ie. how many break if I tell Opera or Firefox to identify itself as IE6), but could and would be fixed almost by flicking a switch so they use the Firefox/Opera/Standards-rendering path they already have, for IE as well?Anonymous
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July 23, 2009
The IE team and the re-direction of Microsoft in its Web development strategy, including Word 2007 abandoning the IE engine, has shown a lot of guts and courage.Anonymous
July 24, 2009
Again, thank you for explaining this position, in Australia this year. It was teh awesomenessAnonymous
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September 10, 2011
If you must implement a new quirks mode system, here is how I would do it: HTML 4.01 gets a snapshot of the current layout engine. This would be quirks mode 2 or whatever you want to call it. XHTML 1.x served as text/html would also get quirks mode 2. HTML 5 and anything run through the XML parser (including application/xhtml+xml once it's supported) would get the new standards mode. Preferably, there should also be a way to get standards mode in HTML before HTML 5 is ready. I suppose some kind of IE-specific comment thing could do the job. Maybe a doctype comment? http://www.medyumoguz.netAnonymous
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