Posts Tagged → internet explorer

Ever Heard of Web Standards?

Remember back not too long ago when many web sites you visited had a disclaimer somewhere on their main page declaring their site worked best with Internet Explorer (or Netscape)?

Or you got a generic, text-only page informing you that the site would only function with IE?

The IT department here in the overly-large school district certainly feels the nostalgia for those olden days.

Case in point, today I sent a note to the “service” desk to let them know that the server hosting their intranet pages was down, and included a shot of the error message from Firefox.

It’s working fine, they told me a few minutes later*, and that our “resources are compatible with Internet Explorer, and not guaranteed to work at all times with any other browser (Firefox, Opera, Safari)”.

Welcome to 1999.

* It wasn’t, BTW.

Fixing Those Minor Glitches

Since I almost never look at my site using any flavor of Internet Explorer, I was clueless to the fact that this rantfest was not working in that browser.

The problem turned out to be a little piece of code that links back to Site Meter, a free service that’s supposed to keep track whose visiting the pages.

I have no idea what changed to break things but removing the lines from the WP template seems to have fixed the problem.

It really doesn’t matter anyway since Site Meter wasn’t all that accurate and I haven’t checked their stats in months. Another little piece that I can do without.

Ah, the oddities of running your own site with only half a clue.

Fixing a Broken Web

The Big Monopoly in Redmond is working on the next iteration of their Internet Explorer web browser and actually seems to be trying to make it follow web standards.

However, if tests using the beta version are any indication, IE 8 may just break the web. Or at least large numbers of sites.

Microsoft was initially concerned that defaulting to standards compliance mode would “break the web”–that is, make a significant proportion of web pages render so badly as to be unusable–and experiences with beta 1 have provided some justification for the company’s concerns. Microsoft is appealing to web developers to fix their web pages, but the unfortunate reality is that the owners of many websites will be unwilling to foot the bill for those fixes to be made.

The problem, of course, is that web developers have had to build into their code compensation for the quirks in the way that IE insists on rendering the pages.

That’s what happens when 90% of web users are viewing your pages using a defective piece of software.

Of course, that 90% has dropped to something like 70% and is likely to drop further since Firefox 3 will be released on Tuesday, giving web users one more great reason to abandon IE.

Now, if I could just convince the folks in our IT department to approve Firefox for use in our district. And certain people in other departments to dump Netscape!