Somebody a little while ago mentioned that IE 6 was better than previous version of Internet Explorer in its adherence to standards. We were talking at the time about XSL.
In my experience the browser is quite poor at implementing other standards (e.g. CSS [Cascading Style Sheets]). Has this been other users' experience? It is particularly noticeable now that most other browsers are pretty good. It seems to be an odd version of the 80:20 rule, except in this case that 80 percent of users use the browser that is least standards compliant while 80% of browsers probably are.
-dan
Hi there,
IE is certainly well behind Mozilla in implementing CSS, but its XSL parser is better than Mozilla's (by which I mean it's significantly faster, and appears to implement the standard at least as well). Doing client-side XSL transformations of large documents, you notice the difference in the wait time on Mozilla. However, Moz has been closing the gap with its last two versions, and when Mozilla's SVG implementation finally makes it into the standard build, it'll be a giant-killer. XML + XSLT -> XHTML + JavaScript + CSS + SVG is a killer combination for creating cool documents and GUIs. Not to mention the fact that Moz does MathML as well.
Opera and Safari lack XSLT engines, which is a shame, and only Moz seems to have serious intentions about SVG.
My 2 cents, Martin
At 04:18 PM 24/06/2004, you wrote:
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Somebody a little while ago mentioned that IE 6 was better than previous version of Internet Explorer in its adherence to standards. We were talking at the time about XSL.
In my experience the browser is quite poor at implementing other standards (e.g. CSS [Cascading Style Sheets]). Has this been other users' experience? It is particularly noticeable now that most other browsers are pretty good. It seems to be an odd version of the 80:20 rule, except in this case that 80 percent of users use the browser that is least standards compliant while 80% of browsers probably are.
-dan
-- Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD Associate Professor of English University of Lethbridge Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4 Tel. (403) 329-2377 Fax. (403) 382-7191 E-mail daniel.odonnell@uleth.ca Home Page http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/
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______________________________________ Martin Holmes University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre mholmes@uvic.ca martin@mholmes.com mholmes@halfbakedsoftware.com http://www.mholmes.com http://web.uvic.ca/hcmc/ http://www.halfbakedsoftware.com
On Thursday, June 24, 2004, at 06:18 PM, Daniel O'Donnell wrote:
Somebody a little while ago mentioned that IE 6 was better than previous version of Internet Explorer in its adherence to standards. We were talking at the time about XSL.
In my experience the browser is quite poor at implementing other standards (e.g. CSS [Cascading Style Sheets]). Has this been other users' experience? It is particularly noticeable now that most other browsers are pretty good. It seems to be an odd version of the 80:20 rule, except in this case that 80 percent of users use the browser that is least standards compliant while 80% of browsers probably are.
-dan
in short, yes. MSIE is the regular target of complaints from the web standards community. a colleague of mine with whom i work regularly on web development always complains about non-IE browsers, and particularly mac versions, but he knows that the real problem is that IE does its own thing.
i like your twist, dan, on the 80/20 rule, and would add that many web developers (like my colleague) develop for IE, which is to say that they develop *specifically* for IE. i'm doing some web-work with said colleague, now, and i can't properly use the pages i'm working on except in IE. those developers ultimately reinforce microsoft's bad standards behavior along with that of surfers who must use IE to properly access those sites.
it's a bad cycle: i can (or even should) design/develop for IE since that's what most people use, which then drives ever more people to IE.
this crew probably know most of the usual suspects on standards, but see, among many possibilities: http://www.webstandards.org/
and on IE and microsoft specifically, an essay recently posted there: http://www.designbyfire.com/000099.html
perhaps the response among this group should be the converse of many web developers: develop standards-based texts and applications and require your users to use standards-based browsers. iirc, that's what http://www.alistapart.com/ does. as dan notes, it's not like there aren't plenty of those browsers out there. and as martin points out, even if IE is parsing XSL better right now, other browsers, particularly mozilla-based browsers, are sure to catch up. that's the thing, in the end: if you develop documents to standards, you can be sure that browsers developing to standards will render your documents.
not to preach to the choir, or anything.
j
-- jeffrey fisher assistant professor dept of religious studies and philosophy bethany college bethany, wv jfisher@bethanywv.edu
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Daniel O'Donnell -
Jeffrey Fisher -
Martin Holmes