This link has been bookmarked by 102 people . It was first bookmarked on 18 Mar 2008, by Moultrie Creek.
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03 Jul 09
Graham PerrinJoel takes on the difficult issues of standards and vendor specific implementations. This is a classic!
ODF Browser-Wars document-wars HTML+ WebKit 2009 Office Open XML
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02 Jul 09
Gary EdwardsJoel takes on the difficult issues of standards and vendor specific implementations. This is a classic!
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30 Jun 09
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You’re about to see the mother of all flamewars on internet groups where web developers hang out. It’ll make the Battle of Stalingrad look like that time your sister-in-law stormed out of afternoon tea at your grandmother’s and wrapped the Mustang around a tree.
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The flame war will revolve around the issue of something called “web standards.”
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01 Jun 09
robert metaArticle by Joel on Software, about the complexity of browser standards.
site_articles web microsoft browser design software development article ie standards ie8
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01 May 09
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If you’ve ever visited the ultra-orthodox Jewish communities of Jerusalem, all of whom agree in complete and utter adherence to every iota of Jewish law, you will discover that despite general agreement on what constitutes kosher food, that you will not find a rabbi from one ultra-orthodox community who is willing to eat at the home of a rabbi from a different ultra-orthodox community. And the web designers are discovering what the Jews of Mea Shearim have known for decades: just because you all agree to follow one book doesn’t ensure compatibility, because the laws are so complex and complicated and convoluted that it’s almost impossible to understand them all well enough to avoid traps and landmines, and you’re safer just asking for the fruit plate.
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Standards are a great goal, of course, but before you become a standards fanatic you have to understand that due to the failings of human beings, standards are sometimes misinterpreted, sometimes confusing and even ambiguous.
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A mortal web designer who attaches a DOCTYPE tag to their web page saying, “this is standard HTML,” is committing an act of hubris. There is no way they know that. All they are really saying is that the page was meant to be standard HTML. All they really know is that they tested it with IE, Firefox, maybe Opera and Safari, and it seems to work. Or, they copied the DOCTYPE tag out of a book and don’t know what it means.
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And this is where Jon Postel caused a problem, back in 1981, when he coined the robustness principle: “Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.” What he was trying to say was that the best way to make the protocols work robustly would be if everyone was very, very careful to conform to the specification, but they should be also be extremely forgiving when talking to partners that don’t conform exactly to the specification, as long as you can kind of figure out what they meant.
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The victory of the idealists over the pragmatists at Microsoft, which I reported in 2004, directly explains why Vista is getting terrible reviews and selling poorly.
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And so if you’re a developer on the IE 8 team, your first inclination is going to be to do exactly what has always worked in these kinds of SEQUENCE-MANY markets. You’re going to do a little protocol negotiation, and continue to emulate the old behavior for every site that doesn’t explicitly tell you that they expect the new behavior, so that all existing web pages continue to work, and you’re only going to have the nice new behavior for sites that put a little flag on the page saying, “Yo! I grok IE 8! Give me all the new IE 8 Goodness Please!”
And indeed that was the first decision announced by the IE team on January 21st. The web browser would accommodate existing pages silently so that nobody had to change their web site by acting like the old, buggy IE7 that web developers hated.
A pragmatic engineer would have to come to the conclusion that the IE team’s first decision was right. But the young idealist “standards” people went nuclear.
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Almost every web site I visited with IE8 is broken in some way. Websites that use a lot of JavaScript are generally completely dead. A lot of pages simply have visual problems: things in the wrong place, popup menus that pop under, mysterious scrollbars in the middle. Some sites have more subtle problems: they look ok but as you go further you find that critical form won’t submit or leads to a blank page.
These are not web pages with errors. They are usually websites which were carefully constructed to conform to web standards. But IE 6 and IE 7 didn’t really conform to the specs, so these sites have little hacks in them that say, “on Internet Explorer… move this thing 17 pixels to the right to compensate for IE’s bug.”
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The consumer is not an idiot. She’s your wife. So stop laughing. 98% of the world will install IE8 and say, “It has bugs and I can’t see my sites.”
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The web standards camp seems kind of Trotskyist. You’d think they’re the left wing, but if you happened to make a website that claims to conform to web standards but doesn’t, the idealists turn into Joe Arpaio, America’s Toughest Sheriff. “YOU MADE A MISTAKE AND YOUR WEBSITE SHOULD BREAK. I don’t care if 80% of your websites stop working. I’ll put you all in jail, where you will wear pink pajamas and eat 15 cent sandwiches and work on a chain gang. And I don’t care if the whole county is in jail. The law is the law.”
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On the other hand, we have the pragmatic, touchy feely, warm and fuzzy engineering types. “Can’t we just default to IE7 mode? One line of code … Zip! Solved!”
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Secretly? Here’s what I think is going to happen. The IE8 team going to tell everyone that IE8 will use web standards by default, and run a nice long beta during which they beg people to test their pages with IE8 and get them to work. And when they get closer to shipping, and only 32% of the web pages in the world render properly, they’ll say, “look guys, we’re really sorry, we really wanted IE8 standards mode to be the default, but we can’t ship a browser that doesn’t work,” and they’ll revert to the pragmatic decision. Or maybe they won’t, because the pragmatists at Microsoft have been out of power for a long time. In which case, IE is going to lose a lot of market share, which would please the idealists to no end, and probably won’t decrease Dean Hachamovitch’s big year-end bonus by one cent.
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As usual, the idealists are 100% right in principle and, as usual, the pragmatists are right in practice. The flames will continue for years. This debate precisely splits the world in two. If you have a way to buy stock in Internet flame wars, now would be a good time to do that.
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09 Apr 08
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31 Mar 08
Owen Blacker"You’re about to see the mother of all flamewars. It’ll make the Battle of Stalingrad look like that time your sister-in-law stormed out of afternoon tea at your grandmother’s and wrapped the Mustang around a tree". As usual, Joel's right.
IE8 flamewar JoelOnSoftware work development web2.0 javascript culture geek InterfaceDesign philosophy reference standards tech usability browser microsoft for:fjordaan for:yoz for:plasticbag for:seldo from:delicious
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30 Mar 08
elle mThis upcoming battle will be presided over by Dean Hachamovitch, the Microsoft veteran currently running the team that’s going to bring you the next version of Internet Explorer, 8.0. The IE 8 team is in the process of making a decision that lies perfec
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28 Mar 08
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24 Mar 08
Alan DeanAnd of course this is the situation we find ourselves in with HTML. Dozens of common browsers, literally billions of web pages.
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23 Mar 08
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22 Mar 08
arcojediYou’re about to see the mother of all flamewars on internet groups where web developers hang out. It’ll make the Battle of Stalingrad look like that time your sister-in-law stormed out of afternoon tea at your grandmother’s and wrapped the Mustang a
web-developer reference community fiction funny history microsoft tips usability business articles imported
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21 Mar 08
Egon BianchetAbout realism and idealism on web standards — interesting info on backward compatibility, but a bit of confusion about document structure and rendering.
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DOCTYPE is a myth.
A mortal web designer who attaches a DOCTYPE tag to their web page saying, “this is standard HTML,” is committing an act of hubris. There is no way they know that. All they are really saying is that the page was meant to be standard HTML. All they really know is that they tested it with IE, Firefox, maybe Opera and Safari, and it seems to work. Or, they copied the DOCTYPE tag out of a book and don’t know what it means.
In the real world where people are imperfect, you can’t have a standard with just a spec–you must have a super-strict reference implementation, and everybody has to test against the reference implementation. Otherwise you get 17 different “standards” and you might as well not have one at all.
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20 Mar 08
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19 Mar 08
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If you’ve ever visited the ultra-orthodox Jewish communities of Jerusalem, all of whom agree in complete and utter adherence to every iota of Jewish law, you will discover that despite general agreement on what constitutes kosher food, that you will not find a rabbi from one ultra-orthodox community who is willing to eat at the home of a rabbi from a different ultra-orthodox community. And the web designers are discovering what the Jews of Mea Shearim have known for decades: just because you all agree to follow one book doesn’t ensure compatibility, because the laws are so complex and complicated and convoluted that it’s almost impossible to understand them all well enough to avoid traps and landmines, and you’re safer just asking for the fruit plate.
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18 Mar 08
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Jarrod Trainquerequired reading onthe implementation of web standards, and the current state of cross-browser compatibility
standards ie8 web microsoft webstandards browser toread design for:suecfoley for:oldsmellyugly
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17 Mar 08
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Joaquim Rendeiro«The flames will continue for years. This debate precisely splits the world in two. If you have a way to buy stock in Internet flame wars, now would be a good time to do that.»
standards webstandards ie8 browsers to_headlines for:phcrva for:tymps for:jpcosta for:imkira for:banaslee imported-delicious
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Dave WinfieldWhy, no matter what people try, the idea and implementation of web standards is finished even before it started.
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Marc Ordinas i Llopis"every working software developer should understand, at least, how standards work, how standards should work, how we got into this mess" Joel on web standards.
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Jonathan Key"Almost every web site I visited with IE8 is broken in some way." Why there are no real web standards.
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