Wednesday, January 23, 2008

How can I resist such an easy target: the IE version switch

I have had a lot of shit going on, and haven't really posted anywhere near as much as I would like. But seeing the IE team blow away their own record on pure fucking stupidity, with the help of people who know better... Fuck, Chris Wilson even wrote:
With this painful and unexpected lesson under our belt, we worked together with The Web Standards Project (in the WaSP-Microsoft Task Force) on this problem. I can’t give them enough credit for this work; it’s tough to step into the shoes of a browser vendor that ships to half a billion users to figure out what the best thing to do is, when you really just want to sit down and write code to the standards.
That seems painfully close to We really want to write a standards-compliant browser, if only those meanies in the Web Standards Project would let us!

This proves to me that not only did Microsoft come up with a phenomenally badly designed proposal for IE8, but they fucking know it and try to push the blame onto the very people trying to get them to stop this shit in the first place!

For those who haven't seen this latest round of the "how can we fuck developers and users even more" game, go read the A List Apart article that started it all. I don't want to have to explain that shit to you before I continue ranting about it, so seriously: read it.

Jeremy Keith put it quite well when he found himself writing Unless you explicitly declare that you want IE8 to behave as IE8, it will behave as IE7. This proposal for the meta tag version switch flies in the face of common sense and then cock-slaps it for good measure. With it, Microsoft fucking requires that you programatically declare your site compatible with a specific IE version. This brings back the "Best viewed in IE4" fuckery remembered not very fondly by developers from the Netscape/IE wars years ago, but fucking enforces it. If you don't want to add the meta tag, you will never see IE support web standards any better than IE7. EVER.

If Microsoft gets away with this, they will get away with shitting all over web standards efforts and pissing in the face of the W3C. IE will require its own doctype, in a sense, in order to allow sites to use web standards.

One of the saddest aspects of this bullshit: otherwise intelligent people like Jeffery Zeldman end up supporting this, seeming to reverse their stance on web standards. In his post, Jeffery has proven to me that he will now live on his knees, forever drinking from the dripping cock of the beast.

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