On Internet Explorer and web standards
This blog is 100% standards compliant. If you don’t believe me, check it at http://validator.w3.org/. I know this for a fact since I wrote the whole website from scratch in Django. However, I can confirm for a fact that the browser I am using to write this post, IE7 on XP SP2 on a school computer, does not render it correctly. To be specific, it can’t handle the position: fixed; CSS attribute. This has been part of the CSS specification since at least 1998 (see http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-CSS2–19980512/).
Internet Explorer is famous for its non-compliance. Its rendering of the Acid3 test is dire, and many websites are written with special rules for when IE views them. On top of this, the French and German governments have recommended against using it due to security vulnerabilities. In short, it is a truly terrible browser. Given the choice, I’d rather use w3m.
It would be easy to code around IE. But what would that acheive? First off, this blog is written by someone who believes strongly in open standards and open source. I expect most of my readers to be using a non-IE browser (Google Analytics reports 42% Firefox, 28% Chrome and 16% IE) which can render this website properly. Secondly, and more importantly, this would become another one of those websites that is the cause of a 3.5 year old browser still being around. If all of the websites in the world dropped their IE-specific hacks, I should imagine it would smarten itself up or disappear pretty quickly.
This is a call to arms, will you stand beside me? OK, it may not be a massively violent protest, but they worked for Gandhi and Rosa Parks. Drop your IE compatibility hacks and code to the standard! It’s all for the best in the end.
Jo Shields
My blog has been proudly dying in IE6 for years. IE7 and above might work, I haven’t checked lately. You even get a smug “use something else” banner at the top.