[vox] More IE exploits

[Micah J. Cowan]

On Fri, Jun 25, 2004 at 12:17:18PM -0700, Richard Crawford wrote:
> Michael J Wenk said:
> 
> > I never thought Id see the day where I defend IE, but I
> > don't see your statement as being fair.  The biggest problem
> > with IE is not its buggyness, but its market weight.  I did
> > some quick googling for stats on this, and found that 95% of
> > the web uses IE.  So given that if you're attempting to do any
> > broadmarket web development, you're kinda stuck developing for
> > IE(unless of course you want to ignore the majority of your
> > market)  Even narrowing down your markets, you really cannot
> > afford to ignore IE, cuz if you do, some customer(or potential
> > customer) will suddenly report a problem with it, and then what
> > will you do? Say: Sorry sir/ma'am, we do not support IE, the
> > browser that comes standard on the most prevalent OS out there?
> >
> > I would argue that you would have to be certifiably insane to
> > ignore IE if you do web development.
> 
> There is no reason in the world -- none at all -- why you can't build
> websites that are compatible with all browsers.  If you do otherwise,
> you're building on design flaws built into IE, in my opinion, and you'd
> better revamp your business practices.

That's not what he's saying. But you have to /test/ on all browsers to
be sure that your website is compatible with all browsers.

Also, IE supports just enough standardized technologies to lull you
into a sense of "just develop to the standards, everything will work
okay," and supports them in a just-broken-enough way that that
attitude doesn't work. Writing "proper HTML" simply isn't enough: you
also have to know all of the quirks of the browsers you wish to
support--it's just a fact of life. Mozilla has its own quirks
too--last I checked, it has some brokenness with how it handles
spacing in table cells.

> In my office, we do not develop exclusively for any web browser (sometimes
> I have to enforce this rule pretty harshly when the other developers tell
> me something like, "Well it works on IE, so what else do we need to do?").
>  Instead, we try to make sure that our pages work with IE and Mozilla on
> both Mac and Windows.  Building websites that are compatible with only one
> kind of browser is kind of like making a type of gasoline that only works
> with one brand of automobile.

But you do at least have to ensure that it runs properly on IE. You
need IE to do this, or have memorized every bit of quirkiness in the
IE browser.

-- 
Micah J. Cowan
micah at cowan.name