Posted by dorayme on 12/21/05 23:26

In article <jp1jq1tc4igsd8cd6gmsop07cm2rn1hc5h@4ax.com>,
Andy Dingley <dingbat@codesmiths.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 21 Dec 2005 15:54:12 +0000, "Alan J. Flavell"
> <flavell@ph.gla.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> >the lead developer for MacIE put considerable emphasis
> >on conforming to published specifications, instead of riding roughshod
> >over them in the way that WinIE has repeatedly been exposed for doing.
>
> So why does Mac/IE suck so badly then?
>

One thing can be a great improvement on another but still not be
better than some third thing. Your reasoning commits the fallacy
of Lingum Perfectio Comparisiona, a well know Italian fault of
reasoning.

It never sucked. I used it for years and it worked well enough.
It started super quick and there are other things besides
rendering web pages to consider in a browser that it was very
good at.

> Maybe the specification for mac/IE was to support standards. This would
> be laudable. However the reality is that its basic parser is so broken
> that it collapses entirely under trivial syntactic errors, and even
> several valid constructs that are just trivially different from the
> minimal case. This makes it a poor browser for practical use on the web.

If you were really right, then users would have (had) very much
more trouble than they in fact had. Now, of course, the situation
is rather different with css becoming more prevalent.

What so many IE critics miss is the strength of its flexibilty.
It mostly did not throw a tantrum (like, say, Safari) when it
came across invalid mark up.

> I suspect that the implementation and _particularly_ the test case
> design for it were distinctly poor in comparison to these lofty design
> goals.
>
> Maybe Mac/IE was intended to be wonderful, but the simple fact is that
> it isn't. Nor have M$oft shown any interest in fixing minor but damaging
> bugs over several years.

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