pennypacker.net: On motivation and IE7

On motivation and IE7

Despite my apathy towards IE7, I was intrigued after recently reading an article on positioniseverything about its planned CSS upgrades. I couldn't help but wonder what it is that the IE developers are trying to do. Their motivation interests me, if not their browser.

An end to hackery

Among the updates that IE will reportedly sport is a contemporary set of CSS selectors. IE will understand the child selector (>), the adjacent sibling selector (+), and it will no longer identify the * html selector which is something of a wonderment as to how it ever came to be in the first place. And this is generally a good thing. I suppose. It's a step closer to standards compliance, and I probably shouldn't complain. Yet, I don't know if it's any good at all. Let's face it, those selectors are only so useful in the real world. To date, I believe their most substantial usage is in hiding styles from IE. I mean, it's not often that I want to style every link directly inside a paragraph differently than a link that's just somewhere inside of a paragraph, but I digress.

So now, CSS designers will have a powerful tool stripped from their belts. No longer can we write declarations and then overwrite them using advanced CSS for modern browsers.

Shooting oneself in the foot

I've said before that a move like this would be suicide for IE. If Microsoft fixes only some of IE's problems they'll end up with a browser that mangles page after page after page with no recourse for CSS designers. The result would be a frustrated user base, and ultimately a severe drop in its popularity. And at this point, popularity is really all IE still has.

If Microsoft takes away all of our lovely standards-compliant hacks then we'll have to either give up on IE support or craft pages specifically to work in IE ? and given IE's popularity and the current wake of standards neither are likely to happen.

Bruised pride

Now that I've [over]explained the back story, the question is why? What is Microsoft's motive? They're certainly not on a tight budget. Surely they could fix any number of other bugs before going after the ones that are so useful to web designers? I think the IE developer team is suffering from a battered ego. Sure, they've got their popularity. IE is in use by over 80% of web surfers; but IE just isn't "cool". It just can't render a lot of the fun effects that today's designers are exploring and enjoying.

Many of the cutting edge web designers like to take pot shots at IE and its misbehavior. Some do it for kicks, others to further an agenda, and some just like to stick it to the man. I think that Microsoft has taken this to heart, and they're tired of reading about how some smug web designer has discovered that by using contemporary CSS selectors, designers can fool IE into behaving properly.

It must surely be embarrassing after a while. And that's why I think IE is fixing a few select bugs that are particularly glaring. Apart from it being a presumably simple fix, that is. It's not that Microsoft plans to fix all of the bugs that IE has, they just plan on fixing the ones that web developers poke fun at and/or groan about most like the fancy CSS selectors and alpha transparency support for png files.

Hubris

Perhaps it's also just a little bit of hubris. My my my, how nice is it to have your brand permanently seared into the minds of developers. Wouldn't it be satisfying if there were a way for Microsoft to use IE's popularity to accomplish this? Well, wonder no longer because there is! Microsoft has left designers with an out in the form on fancy comments that can be flagged so IE can parse them. The short of it is that if you write a comment like so:

<!--[if IE]>
... stuff ...
<![endif] -- >

IE will not simply ignore the comment, rather it will pay attention to the stuff in the middle. The article I linked to has the skinny on conditional comments if you're interested in learning more about them and how to make the syntax truly xml-friendly. The promise is that designers can keep all of their hacks in a separate style sheet that only IE will load. Any port in a storm, I guess. So that's all well and good, designers still have a way to pander to IE -- though it will cost us an extra file or so, which all in all isn't terrible.

So Microsoft is handed has handed themselves lemons, and they make lemonade. They might not have a modern browser, but they have a brand. A brand that will be built into the mark-up of nearly every page on the internet. Welcome back, browser-sniffing. A blaze of glory, as it would seem. Well, I have but one thing left in this article, and that's to test IE's conditional comments:

If you see nothing, that's probably because you're not using IE.

under:

Web Development

Posted on

2005-11-08