Tuesday, August 29, 2006

IE's Documentation Sucks

Okay, so I've known this for a while. I've always hated the docs on MSDN. However, for the most part, I hated them out of personal preference. They always seemed like they needed to sell the technology of the company rather than document it.

At any rate, I just ran across this gem while researching just how badly IE completely fucks up any hope of resembling an implementation of a W3C standard:
"Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 gives you a rich set of properties and methods to dynamically construct and alter Web pages on the fly. For example, a script can insert a list of section titles at the beginning of the document, or replace that list with a list of links to the actual sections in the document."
They have this as the description of the first topic under HTML and Dynamic HTML. Now. As in, after they've released IE7's first release candidate. As in, eight fucking years and ten months after IE4 got released on us all. I don't mean that IE4 didn't move web applications forward - it certainly did. Netscape 4, even in comparison to IE, gave me my first real heart-felt bouts with explosions of profanity over something so trivial as a web browser.

Ah...memories.

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5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Saw your comment on the IEBlog "Developer Center Refresh" post. I like your writing style and love your stance on IE. But tell us how you really feel... jk. If you don't mind, I'm adding you to my blogroll.

4:20 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Mr. Senior Web Application Developer, yes writing like that, it seems.

4:42 PM  
Blogger The Hater said...

Thanks, Brett! Always welcome. I write to vent, but also so others may read.

Mr. Anonymous, yes, Senior Web Application Developers can get fucking pissed. In fact, I have yet to meet one who doesn't.

12:55 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Venting's cool, I just like that you have intelligent things to say inbetween flagrant bouts of profanity ;->.

So Opera for Devices is out, can you believe a Nintendo can be more standards compliant (and run AJAX better) than the average windows machine now?

2:08 PM  
Blogger The Hater said...

And likewise, I appreciate those who notice the things interspersed with the profanity. I could have simply created a "Why Everything Sucks" site and just spouted nothing but profanity. While fun, it wouldn't have achieved quite the same thing.

And yes, I can definitely believe that. I get constant reminders as to just how much IE blows by comparison to Opera... I don't care if you run Opera on your five-year-old b/w Nokia, you'll still have a better rendering engine behind it than any version of IE.

I've always had a secret fantasy of contributing to the elinks project, coding an AA-lib plugin for image support (if nobody has already beaten me to it) and getting it to support more CSS than IE does. It already has a better feature list and runs seemingly infinitely faster.

9:13 PM  

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