Okay, I know there are countless IE bashing blog posts out there on the interwebs, I will try to keep my hatred of if to a minimum and infact have a suggestion for the IE Dev team that may help.
We all know, or at least those of us who have coded a single line of CSS in the past 4 years knows, that the level of support that Microsoft has provided web developers is drastically lower than most of it’s competitors. With that being said however, it has also been able to provide to us greater capabilities in other areas. There are quite a few web based applications that were developed back when IE4 and IE5 were called ‘recent’ that were considered innovative. The technology and feature rich content that was available to IE users was something that was because they had hard coded the commands and extra extensions into the browser without opening up the API. The result however, was IT departments making the drastic decision to ensure that IE was not only the only browser installed but also, in many large corporations with security issues, the only browser a user could have on their machine. This brought on what is now considered a monopoly over the Internet browsers.
Although considerable years have passed since the initial benefit of having IE be the prominent application, IT departments for whatever reason; budget, lazyness, inane infatuation with Microsoft products, have a hard time understanding that the common user, infact most users want to be able to view pages and content the way they were meant to be seen. This means allowing designers and programmers the ability to use what has become actual standards across the platform which the content sits. For most of the approximately 70% of users that are still on IE, I blame I blame these IT departments not for locking the system down (because we all know that there are those idiots that click on giant red buttons that says ‘click here’ still) but for not allowing their users the option of switching to another browser. Having other browsers like Firefox, Safari, and/or Opera on the system would take less than 100MB and would take little to know resources on the machine unless actually running. There is a support issue, I know but for the most part, the support questions from users are either about the site content or problems with rendering in IE to begin with.
While CSS3 and HTML5 are new and still shiny, many people have been trying to use some of their features for quite some time. Between Webkit and Mozilla testing and implementing many of the features for a couple of years now, many of the considered ‘new’ features are already in common use. This doesn’t however mean that they have been implemented properly in the browsers like Safari/Webkit and Mozilla. Consider the face that in order to get rounded corners you must put lines with both”-webkit-” and“-moz-” infront of the “border-radius” command. This by no means is a full solution to the problem as both institutions have admitted however, it has allowed designers to implement what was a future technology and ensure that the conversion to the standard would be easily done once the standard had been officially rolled out. A simple find and replace in the code would remove any extra unnecessary tags.
IE has brought none of these techniques to the table. In reality, they have gone so far as to take for instance the CSS transparency and convert it to something that is completely different from the up-and-coming terminology:
Webkit & CSS3 = opacity: 1;
Mozilla = -moz-opacity:1;
Internet Explorer = filter:alpha(opacity=100);
A you can see, the effect is available in IE but clearly the dev team has taken the command and written it in a non-compliant way. This to me is the big problem. IE is trying to implement all these features that should be very simple (to somebody who writes application code, not me) to implement something that is at least similar to others.
My solution? Simple: IE dev team, you need to sit down with the list of standards that have been set in the actual release and ship an update to IE 7 and IE 8 (IE 8 at least) to ensure that it meets these. If that means playing the same trick that Mozilla and Webkit have done by creating a third “-ie-” tag for all those fancy effects that people continue screaming for that do it and say what you’ve done. As a web developer who has spent nights throwing my mouse and keyboard at my screen because of you, let me be the first (that I know of) to say that I will not mind adding 1 line of code for things like drop shadows, rounded corners, gradients, text shadows, columns, proper typography, etc… 1 line of code is a lot less expensive in load times and development time than creating an image to use as a background to a div which I must write a hack around simply to place it in the appropriate location for your lack of good positioning coding, and then get frustrated with it so much that I break down and build 3 tables that contain everything but get upset because you put Microsoft Word web engine inside UK outlook GAH! … pant … pant … phew, sorry about that… where was I? Oh yes, Having to add “-ie-border-radius: 4px;” takes up 1 second of my time to add to a css file, you roll out full CSS3 support when you have the bugs all worked out in IE9, I do a find and replace “-ie-”, “-webkit-” & “-moz-” and I’m in businesses. Great.
All in all, you have made some strides towards making IE more compliant but please don’t take your recent rollout as a sign of stopping. There is still a lot of work you have yet to do to make it up to the original programmers who previously made you what you are today.
Oh, and you may want to think about implementing this or something like it before this becomes more widespread and for your more recent versions
