Off topic: IE7 was Re: [sdiy] Digital noise source project (replacing MN5837 in Prophet 5and Monopoly)

[Donald Tillman]

(Way, way, way off topic warning!  Although you could argue that since
many of us maintain web pages, its relevant, but that's tenuous at
best.  To make up for it, I'll try to be entertaining.)

   > Date: Fri, 23 May 2008 00:00:40 +0200 (CEST)
   > From: Rainer Buchty <rainer at buchty.net>
   > 
   > On Thu, 22 May 2008, Donald Tillman wrote:
   > 
   > > Yes, it completely sucks, but that's what you have to do.
   > 
   > Why? I mean, obviously, the MSIEs seem to be broken, so why work
   > around their defects?

Speaking as someone who does this for a living...  :-)

If you want to do a nice presentation you have to work around the
limitations of your customer's browsers, whatever those limitations
might be.  Some web applications have a consumer audience and
therefore need to work correctly on just about any browser, including
your grandmother's browser, while other application exist inside an
organization with a more select audience.

   > Yes, I know -- they come preinstalled with Windows, but if everyone 
   > works around their defects, where's the incentive for Microsoft to 
   > fix them?

I agree that incentive is a powerful force.  

And there is some incentive.  It's not a good thing for Microsoft if
web developers all over the world are swearing at them every time one
of these browser bugs needs to be hacked around.  And that's exactly
what's been happening for a while.

And Microsoft needs to fix these things anyway in order to implement
the more advanced stuff that's going to be necessary soon.

But since the web developer looks bad if their page doesn't display
well on MSIE, and a bigger incentive for the web developer to make
pages that work around Microsoft's bugs.

   > It's not like you would tweak your hardware to fulfill the needs
   > of let's say a broken VCA where you would have to attenuate the
   > signal to some nanovolts level to not get distorted, having to
   > re-amplify it after the VCA.
   > 
   > You'd rather repair the VCA.

I understand your point, but that's not the best example.  Many of us
have hacked around broken hardware, and none of us are going to be
fixing MSIE7.  :-)

Sure, I would rather that Microsoft fixed their browser, but that
hasn't happened, and since we live in the real world and not an
abstract theoretical pretend world, web developers just have to deal
with it.

  -- Don

-- 
Don Tillman
Palo Alto, California
don at till.com
http://www.till.com