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Posted by Andy Dingley on 11/18/01 11:29
Toby Inkster wrote:
> Andy Dingley wrote:
>
> > Mac IE is one of the least reliable browsers around for rendering CSS.
> > It's completely obsolete and no-one should still bother using it.
>
> When it first came out, it was the most standards-compliant CSS engine on
> the block;
It was certainly taking a more standards-aware viewpoint than the
competition. However the _quality_ of the implementation is where it
falls down. It makes an attempt to support all sorts of features, but
the bug count means that they're effectively useless.
And the standards standard of the day wasn't exactly high either.
It's the implied scope of the test design that grates the most. Did
they not _test_ this thing? I'm sure they did - I can imagine this
huge test suite of single <div> individual pages, all testing one
feature of the spec one-by-one and nothing that tested combinations,
nesting or real world examples of typical complexity. A feature in Mac
IE typically "works" (it can be demonstrated working in at least one
trivial example), you just can't _use_ it (no borders on Tuesdays, or
no combining milk and meat on the same page)
> it was the first mainstream browser to support alpha-blended
> PNGs (but not on background images for some reason).
And how many times have you actually used such a PNG? I'm sure it's a
great feature if you need it, but it's not exactly mainstream, even
now. A couple of weeks ago I had a serious question raised by our
dezyner as to whether PNGs were an adequate substitute for GIFs, in
terms of extant browser support.
> There are one or two fairly major bugs, but they're usually fairly trivial
> to work around once you've spotted them.
Like hell they are! If you think that, you're welcome to sort out my
particular barrel of monkeys.
Take two text strings and float them opposite each other right and
left, inside an overall <div>. How much simpler do you need?
I have some other code with a thumbnail image in a list, and some text
alongside it. The image floats so the caption can sit alongside it. To
get it to work on Mac IE I have to throw away the list markup and use a
plain sequence of divs, because Mac IE can't handle floats inside <li>
> Most solidly written CSS-based designs shouldn't cause too much trouble
> with Mac IE.
Absolute rubbish. My last couple of weeks have been hell, simply
because of a need to support Mac IE. The obvious answer (and what the
dezyner desperately wants to do) is to throw away the pretty good CSS
design that works on Windows IE and do it all with tables. That would
admittedly work, but it's a pretty poor pass for "the most
standards-compliant CSS engine on the block".
CSS has had a raw deal. _Eight_ years on and it's still not being used
as fully as it ought. Some of this is due to inertia and Frontplague,
most due to inadequate training materials on good CSS (who else found
this a nightmare?), but a lot of it has to be due to the unusably poor
quality of the "early adopter" CSS browsers like Mac IE. Those
developers who did try to use CSS early on got burned badly and aren't
in a hurry to go back.
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