IE Observation
 

I was "fixing" my site so that it works better in quirky IE and I noticed that when you view the source of a page using IE you see the exact code that was downloaded (which is fine and dandy), BUT, if you save that page locally and then view the source, it's totally reprocessed, stripped and modified by IE.

I dont really know why i started this thread, i think maybe it was my frustration at yet another small megalomaniacal afterthought displayed by the microsoft IE team. I've said it before and i'll say it again - IE isnt good for web developers.

Do i have a point? Good question, maybe i'm just grouchy because i haven't slept for a while. But does this sort of thing strike anyone else as annoying? Do any other browsers do this? I know that FF doesnt.

IE is the de facto industry standard.

The fact that it doesn't behave as it should, or directly follow the published IETF HTML standards is irrelevant. If you want to support most users, unfortunately then you have to code your page such that it is interpreted correctly by IE.

Bummer. But so are death and taxes...

Mr Mephisto

Doesn't really bother me since I'm not a web developer, but I do hate the security holes in IE, plus the fact that it's got a pop-up program in it that I can't get rid of.

Mr. Mephisto, sure it's the de facto standard, but the fact remains that almost every *good* web developer despises it for a reason. If people made a habit of going "ho hum, it's the de facto standard so I guess I can't complain," then various places in the world would still be under British rule ;) Sadly, the people most affected by IE are the ones with the least amount of power to force change.

http://www.stopdesign.com/log/2004/01/26/ie_factor.html

LOL, yeah I guess I can see your point.

Mr Mephisto

Thanks for the link, SecretMethod70, i'm reading it now. Its good to know someone has exactly the same perception of the situation as i have.

May i add that it also bugs me when large, popular, well established and respected websites only do their testing on IE. I know its the "industry standard" but still...

For example, i was changing some information in my profile on friendsreunited.co.uk using firefox and the form wasnt processed properly (if i remember correctly, a simple apostrophe made the processing script think that the piece of text i entered had finished so it was cut short) so i looked on their help section... where i found that firefox was displaying all the nonbreaking space character entities where they omitted the semicolon at the end. Obviously IE catches this and displays it perfectly, tricking web developers into thinking that they can leave stuff out wherever they feel like. Anyway, i emailed the helpdesk and told them about this, and what did they do? They advised me to switch browsers to IE. :eek:

I'm ranting, sorry...