Why can't microsoft follow web standards?

[Red Squirrel]

IE just pisses me off. I design a website, only to find out it looks like puke in IE but works in every possible browser I try it with. I just tried IE 7 in a VM and horrified to see it's only gotten worse.

IE sucks with CSS intensive sites, especially, and it STILL wont render PNGs properly even after 7 versions! Do they just not care because they already got the market anyway? You'd think that by version 7, they would of got their act together. I have not tried 8 but I'm not really hopeful.

For example look at these sites in any real browser: http://www.uovalor.com/forums http://www.uogateway.com.

Now look a them in IE. The borders are all wrong, the text sizes are not even the same (and actually there are differences between 6 and 7). The shoutbox at the bottom totally does not render properly, in fact, 6 screws it up, 7 screws it up even more (stops rendering anything after it).

What gives? Sad part is the majority of people are still using that POS browser so it forces me to have to design two sites or use complicated workarounds.

 

[Ken g6]

It's an evil plot by Microsoft.

No, really!

 

[Red Squirrel]

Hmmm interesting. Does not surprise me tbh. Now if all web developers got together to fight this and purposely make all sites not work at all in IE. Just need to add <input type crash> in the code. It crashes IE.

 

[MrChad]

To be fair, until Mozilla really started to grab a hold of market share, there really weren't many browsers out there at all that followed W3C standards (which, as "standards" go, leave a lot up to interpretation).

Microsoft has found itself in an odd position now. The IE development team would love to embrace web standards, but at the same time they don't want to break thousands of websites built to non-standard versions of IE (this blog post is a good read). This is an even bigger issue in the corporate world, where intranet applications rely on IE 6 quirks to operate properly. In order to move away from IE (or even upgrade), these companies would need to invest large sums of money to refactor their web-based apps. It's really a shame, because IE8 is a great browser and performs a lot better than previous versions.

Make sure you're using the correct DOCTYPE declarations in your HTML. IE will render things different based on its value. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-u...y/cc288325(VS.85).aspx

 

[GaryJohnson]

http://www.uovalor.com/forums gives me a 404 error at the moment

http://www.uogateway.com/ validation at W3.ORG: 21 errors, so the page isn't exactly standards compliant either.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Oops the uovalor one is http://www.uovalor.com/forum

I should alias /forums for consistency though. All my other sites are that for the forums.

And those errors are because of the dynamic urls, mostly. The standards don't like urls with & = etc since the real way is to use .htaccess and use - or something instead but I rarely bother (probably should).

I'd have to run my sites through the validator some day though, as I'm sure there are some more legit errors I could fix. IE tends to not follow W3C at all though, in fact lot of the work arounds are non W3C compliant.

Actually, is there a way to validate a web page on a local server? Is there perhaps a program I can download to scan pages? I do all my web development on a local server, before it goes to production, so it would make it easier to do the fixes.

 

[GaryJohnson]

The W3 validator can handle uploaded files and source text, so you can check local files that way. You could automate this by including a link in your pages that posts the content to the validator.

 

[Lorthreth]

HTML VALIDATOR (based on Tidy and OpenSP) for Mozilla Firefox. This is very nice to use, a simple Firefox plugin that does the same that W3C does and also Tiny.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Cool thanks that seems to work nice. I'll try to fix those errors and see if it helps IE or not. Maybe it craps out due to one of those errors then leads to other bad renders, like the border spacing being all wrong. IE has always had trouble with borders though.

 

[Crusty]

Unless your document validates against the standard the browser won't render in that standard. Therefore your page needs to have 0 errors.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Originally posted by: Crusty
Unless your document validates against the standard the browser won't render in that standard. Therefore your page needs to have 0 errors.

Hmm I did not know this, I thought it still rendered whatever it can, good to know.

 

[Modelworks]

IE does pretty poorly for a browser in testing.
I like to use the Acid test, and I think IE8 got a 68 or something.
I'm using the newest beta of firefox , 3.1 beta 3 and it gets a 93.
So far only browser I have tested that got a perfect score was apple safari.

 

[Gooberlx2]

IE8 passes acid2, but sucks on acid3...though most everything fails acid3 (does anything not?).

I'm pretty sure IE8 incorporated a big philosophy change to moved to web standards compliance, however it retains the ie7 compatibility mode.

 

[Modelworks]

Originally posted by: Gooberlx2
IE8 passes acid2, but sucks on acid3...though most everything fails acid3 (does anything not?).

I'm pretty sure IE8 incorporated a big philosophy change to moved to web standards compliance, however it retains the ie7 compatibility mode.

Safari passes acid3 with 100%
Firefox 3.1 beta 3 scores a 93