MSIE vs. The World (was Re: [Sigia-l] Integrated online thesauri

[Andrew B]

Hi,

someone correct me if I'm wrong, but what Microsoft did was to 
organically create their own version of HTML/CSS (basically, encourage 
the code that worked with their browser), and through popularity, 
enforce this onto the web at large. Basically, what worked with various 
incarnations of MSIE was glorified into becoming the defacto standard 
through years of "that's not a bug, it's a feature" marketing :) 
Sometimes this worked in reverse - I remember that there was a lot of 
javascript that would work with MSIE but no other browser, through their 
abominating of inheritance (referencing form objects was a hassle in a 
cross-browser environment because MS had so thoroughly 'broken' the 
javascript language standard that example code couldn't be found that 
would work with Netscape Navigator 4.7 - a long time ago in a place far, 
far away). Am I bitter because I have an XP machine with MSIE loaded for 
just such occassions as this? Hell, no, it is just the way the world 
'works' :)

I think that the only real choice we have is whether, like Hamlet, we 
decide to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or take up 
arms against the sea of troubles. For myself, the railing against the 
dark night ended when I stopped having to write cross-compatible code.

Cheers, Andrew

Benjamin Kahn wrote:

><snip>
>Microsoft spent a lot of time, effort, and money running this type of
>script against Internet Explorer and fixing the problems they found.
>All this effort has paid off for Microsoft, and they should be
>congratulated for finding and fixing these glaring security problems in
>their browser.  However, they have a number of other large security
>problems including the concepts of zones, ActiveX, and tying IE to the
>OS.
><snip>
>  
>


-- 
_________________________________________
Andrew Boyd   andrew at pcug.org.au
"Do not ask me why I follow my heart, 
... ask your self why you do not... "
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