Loisintheforest commended me on my restraint at only calling Microsoft “cheeky buggers” in my last post. This is because I think MS have a legitimate case for building non-standard products. If they have an idea they consider to be better than the standard, they are ideally placed to simply implement and roll out their software and, hey presto, it’s the defacto standard. For example, if I want to write a bit of Javascript to move a paragraph 10 pixels to the left, this is how I do it by the standards:
document.getElementById("myelement").style.left= ((substr(0,document.defaultView.getComputedStyle(document.getElementById("myelement"), "").getPropertyValue("height").length-2) + 10) + 'px';
Whereas in Internet explorer I would go:
document['myelement'].pixelLeft -= 10;
Are you starting to see it Microsoft’s way? (Note: neither of these is tested, but for the purposes of illustration they are close enough) .
You’re Microsoft. 80% of the world browses the web with your browser, which admittedly is a bit shonky, but it had to be out there on time and fit with dozens of different teams’ technical and strategic goals. Your customer service, marketing, business relations, product sales, internal procedures and development projects are all supported by internet technologies including browser scripting. Then some bunch of academics start declaring standards, working with no deadline and no financial risk if they get it wrong. Are you going to rip out all your infrastructure and threaten the stability of a world-dominating piece of technology in order to play by their rules? Or are you going to continue to play by your rules… I know what I’d do.
5 comments so far...
Oooh. For your last few posts I’ve been reading your blog at work, where I only have IE6. I just looked at your site back at home and am gobsmaked… now it all makes sense!
MS rule the world. Until everybody abandons the internet and grows their own cabbages etc. The whole point of what MS has done is to virtually eliminate programming from most people’s agenda.
I think my comment was born from a perception of MS through the use of programs other than IE, notably Word, which I use a lot. I know I can set Preferences (can I, though?) but Bill Gates assumes that…. well, the bushbaby just assumes what I want to do and I object to an American assuming that! I can see what you are saying, though, but security-oriented advice from various sources will continue to persuade me to use Firefox. Oh, and I still resent Bill Gates! I know that might be be contrary but, hell, I’m entitled to be contrary at 56!
The strange thing is that even though the site all goes wrong in IE at least I am able to reach all of the links in the left hand side under all window resolutions by scrolling down to the bottom. In Firefox the site looks better, but the vertical scroll bar only moves the main text and any links in the bar that are off the bottom of the screen are unretrievable.
The irretrievable links are my fault: I slapped up a half-finished stylesheet and haven’t been able to get time on the intermerweb to improve it since.
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