19th February 2008, 06:50 pm
The CTO of Opera Software, Håkon Wium Lie, must be feeling the pressure. The Opera browsers are not taking over the market place. No, Microsoft’s IE browsers and Mozilla’s Firefox browsers are the big players here with Apple’s Safari increasing its presence, and Opera having a bit part.
But rather than emulate Firefox’s successes, Opera Software opts to complain to the EU about Microsoft in the same vein that Netscape tried many years ago. This is not the way to go. Opera need to improve their software. Their mobile versions are rubbish as it takes several keystrokes to get the browser and its Java environment running. And their desktop versions have given me such a lot of headache that I no longer test my pages for Opera behaviour…IE and Firefox are the kings here. So Opera Software, pull your finger out and don’t go crying to the EU. And it isn’t just me, but a lot of people think that Opera are wrong.
Now, Håkon Wium Lie recently published an article at The Register…the article is damming evidence of the pressures being felt by Opera as Håkon Wium Lie deliberately misleads on the current situation regarding Microsoft’s new IE8 standards-mode switching.
As detailed in my previous article, a proposal has been put forward to use meta-declarations for switching IE8 to full standards-mode rather than rely on DOCTYPE-switching. Håkon Wium Lie implies that because there was an uproar over this proposal that Microsoft should remove this feature and instead rely on DOCTYPE. Well, his suggestion totally ignores all the arguments that other respected web developers and web standards experts have made as to why meta-declaration standards-mode switching is probably the right thing to do. Just look at Jeffrey Zeldman’s article “Version Targeting: Threat or Menace?”, Eric Meyer’s article “From Switches to Targets: A Standardista’s Journey” and Aaron Gustafson’s article “Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8″. I agree the proposal is controversial but Håkon Wium Lie implies that everyone is against this idea. That is so false.
Håkon Wium Lie also implies that Microsoft isn’t keen on standards and are holding back web development. This doesn’t stack up with what the new IE team have been doing over the last couple of years or so. IE6 was in the doldrums for a long time, but the new IE team have produced a far superior standards-compliant version in IE7, and now they’ve developing IE8 (currently in beta) which probably puts the browser right up there at the cutting edge of standards-compliance. And this development wasn’t done at the behest of someone with a big stick from the EU! So don’t lie Lie!
Håkon Wium Lie is trying to use the well-known techniques of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) rather than use smarts to develop and market his company’s software. So, Håkon Wium Lie, what do you want to do? Rest on the laurels of your past achievements and act like a cry-baby, or get off your back-end and start producing software and a business model that can take on Microsoft’s IE browsers and Mozilla’s Firefox browsers? Well?
Copyright © 2008 Kulvinder Singh Matharu - All Rights Reserved
26th January 2008, 07:56 pm
I read a recent IEBlog entry and was quite interested in the problems that the IE team were facing with regards to the various rendering modes and standards compatibility with different IE engines and in particular the one being developed for IE8. Their greatest concern was to define a method of ensuring that IE8 users wouldn’t suddenly see “broken” websites due to that websites use of particular html/CSS/JavaScript hacks used to work around the various non-standard rendering modes of previous IE browsers (prior to IE8).
I also read the A List Apart article and this basically discussed the problem-solving decisions and recommendations made by the joint-working teams of The Web Standards Project and Microsoft. All very interesting stuff. But then something strange happened. A number of articles began appearing at various websites which were highly critical of the proposed use of meta tags for switching standards modes. But these articles were not persuasive in their arguments. No, these arguments were not arguments. They were vitriolic statements and without real logic or support. The fanaticism against the proposed meta tags for standards switching in IE8 was just amazing. The fanatics even went after the well respected CSS expert Eric Meyer regarding his article where he provided his perspective on the use of the proposed meta tags. It was quite sad actually. Eric Meyer has written follow-up articles on his website regarding the way he was treated.
I really have no idea why people behave this way but I’m sure someone has studied the parallels with religious fanatics! I think the proposed meta tags are a good idea and I’ll adjust my code accordingly. It must be emphasised that we do not live in a perfect world and people need to remember this. My own code is mostly xhtml 1.1 compatible but there are a few non-standard tags employed by my automated navigation html authoring software and it’s so useful that I decided to keep them, and I’m also aware that I’m not serving the pages as proper application/xhtml+xml and have used the default text/html MIME type (yes, it’s tag-soup!). In fact I’m not sure that I would do so even if all the code did validate.
The thing is…IE and Firefox all render the pages correctly (I don’t care much about Opera these days as they’re not particularly unique/useful these days, and I don’t have access to “proper” Safari yet). And this is important to me. I know that practically everyone out there will see the pages more or less the way I want them to see them. I’m not being lazy. There is a lot to do out there. When IE7 was in beta I used it to test my modified code so that correct rendering was achieved in IE6, IE7 and Firefox. And so I was prepared when IE7 was released formally into the wild. But just think of all that “legacy” code out there especially at the larger sites. It WILL take a long time to update code to take advantage of IE8 but, in the mean time, most rational people are aware of the critical need not to disrupt the user experience or cause loss of business to commercial websites. I think meta tags are the way to go. I’m no expert, but brains bigger than mine have looked at this and there does seem to be consensus forming that we need to go forward and that the use of meta tags is possibly the one with the least pain.
Copyright © 2008 Kulvinder Singh Matharu - All Rights Reserved
