Joel on Software, OK. Joel on Web Standards? Meh.
Filed under Intertubes, Software, Spotted on March 18th, 2008
I am a fan of Joel (of Joel on Software fame). Hell, I even bought two of his books.
Still, his latest post regarding IE8 standards support is, to put it succinctly, lame, what with the contrived examples about martian headphones et al.
I just don’t understand what the whole problem about some pages being broken on IE8 is. Here’s what he has to say:
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.”
And IE 8 is IE, but it no longer has the IE 7 bug where it moved that thing 17 pixels left of where it was supposed to be according to web standards. So now code that was written that was completely reasonable no longer works.
IE 8 can’t display most web pages correctly until you give up and press the “ACT LIKE IE7″ button. The idealists don’t care: they want those pages changed.
Some of those pages can’t be changed. They might be burned onto CD-ROMs. Some of them were created by people who are now dead. Most of them created by people who have no frigging idea what’s going on and why their web page, which they paid a designer to create 4 years ago, is now not working properly.
Pages burned on CD-ROM? How more of a contrived example can you give? Who cares about those pages? You can have a seperate installation of IE7 or IE6. Why doesn’t MS make one available? They could even add a “Switch Rendering Engine” button -hell, their customers are used to even worse abuse. But, honestly, I visit the web with Safari and Camino and I very, very, very seldom (like one in a couple thousand) meet a page that does not render well in them. Most of the time the culprit is some abused Javascript code.
For the other cases, like Google Maps, bank sites, portals et al, they will have plenty of time to adapt. In the long run, things will be better, since all rendering engines with have to conform to stuff like the Acid Tests and all.
The fact that most, if not all, of these pages now work with IE7, even though they initially broke, kind of refutes his argument altogether. Yes, for a while some pages will be broken, some people will complain, IE8 adoption might be lower than it could, they all will be OK.
Where by all I mean “every web page that matters”. Maybe Jack’s Chipmunk worship page, with it’s garish javascript animations and ActiveX chipmunk clock will suffer. So be it. Does every old DOS program run on Windows Vista? Not, really. Get on with the program.
He also says:
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.
Emm, no. Vista being too little, too late has far more to do with it. Very few of the features promised where there on launch, plus the thing is slow and buggy. While people complain, they do adapt to change. On the other hand they don’t react all that well to crap.
98% of the world will install IE8 and say, “It has bugs and I can’t see my sites.” They don’t give a flicking flick about your stupid religious enthusiasm for making web browsers which conform to some mythical, platonic “standard” that is not actually implemented anywhere. They don’t want to hear your stories about messy hacks. They want web browsers that work with actual web sites.
Really, they are gonna say “It has bugs and I can’t see my sites”? Strange, since, all this 98% of the world will, at large, visit sites that already work fine on Firefox. If a 10% of the US or nearly 20-30% of web surfers in Europe can get by with Firefox then so can those 98% of naive windows users installing IE8.
Will they really care if some obscure site or some “pages burned on CD-ROM” no longer render correctly? Hardly. At large, no. And even if they do, who cares? It’s not like they can do anything about it, except delay switching to IE8. Firefox is also standards compliant, so they won’t get anything by switching to it. So what are the adverse effects on MS? Some complaining?
What Joel calls “pragmatic thinking” is probably what got MS in such as mess. And all this talk about “backward compatibility” with older Windows versions and special modes etc, is what made the computing world so fragmented. Like, how it’s so difficult to provide .doc compatibility, read/write NTFS support, properly support IE html et al.
Now, if what he talks about is “customer lock-in”, yeah, he is probably right. But that is another story.
