How does Microsoft expect developers/designers to make stuff work for everyone?

[Nathan Sokalski]

Ever since I found out that they didn't give us a way to install both IE6
and IE7 on the same machine, I have been more frustrated and annoyed with
Microsoft than I ever have been with any company (and for someone who has
loved Microsoft as much as me, that takes something pretty bad!). I am a web
developer, and only have access to one computer, which makes it hard to test
for both IE6 and IE7. But even for people that have access to multiple
computers (at least one with IE6 and IE7), I doubt they would enjoy moving
between them every time they need to test a change in their code. Because my
boss is not currently requiring me to make the site function in all
browsers, I can survive as far as employment goes, but I don't think people
will want to optimize for IE7 if they are forced to switch at this point. I
feel this way because:

1. Many people (mostly the less technical people that don't want to learn
new software interfaces) won't be using IE7 yet anyway, so smaller
businesses and people creating personal sites will be less inclined to
change their code to make it work in IE7

2. People that develop personal websites and only have access to their home
computer will probably want to keep IE6 so that they can still view more
sites, as well as test on a browser that people as far back as Windows 98
(because believe it or not, some people haven't upgraded their OS) are
capable of using

I don't plan on upgrading to IE7 until I buy a new computer that comes with
Windows Vista or I find a way to have IE6 and IE7 on my machine at the same
time. Some people have told me to use VirtualPC 2004, but that is for
operating systems, and wouldn't help much when I want to see how a page
shows up in different browsers. If they could make something like that for
use with browsers, I would probably be happy. If Microsoft thinks everyone
is going to switch to IE7 because they want to, they are wrong. Many
universities have blocked the upgrade at the server level, so people in the
residence halls won't be getting it, and I don't think many other people do
it by choice anyway. Sorry, IE7, if you don't want to coexist, you're
waiting your turn with me!
--
Nathan Sokalski
nj********@hotm ail.com
http://www.nathansokalski.com/

[Mark Rae]

"Nathan Sokalski" <nj********@hot mail.comwrote in message
news:ut******** ******@TK2MSFTN GP04.phx.gbl...

IE7 completely changed the way it renders pages, because it now follows
the W3C standards so much more closely.

That's right - IE7 is a huge leap forward and very, very different - so much
so, that it can't co-exist with any previous version of IE... Why can you
not simply accept that...?

As happy as I am that they are now following more standards, it doesn't
change the fact that people will still be using IE6 for a while, so we
have to test in both.

Dear me - you really do want it both ways, don't you...! On the one hand,
you're happy that Microsoft have taken on board the very real criticism of
previous verions of IE - namely, that they are not standards compliant - and
produced a new version which is much, much better (though by no means
perfect), yet you're whinging because they've made so many modifications and
improvements that it is now incompatible with IE6 to the extent that both
can't be installed on the same instance of Windows... Maybe they shouldn't
have bothered...? Or maybe just done a couple of bug fixes - you know, just
for your benefit...?

However, Microsoft is supposed to want people to learn and like their
software.

No doubt about that.

Regardless of what universities and schools try to say, most learning is
done through experience.

I completely agree with that.

I don't think anyone's employer is going to let them spend the weekend in
the office practicing coding,

But what does that have to do with you...? You work from home, right? Same
as me.

and the people who really need to learn this stuff are the college
students and recent graduates majoring in it.

Utter rubbish! The people who really need to learn this stuff are
developers; whether they are recent graduates or seasoned developers with
upwards of 20 years programming experience behind them is totally
irrelevent. I'm really struggling to grasp what point you're trying to make
here...

I am a graduate from Fall 2006, and work from home.

Well there you go - no need to fret about not being allowed into the office
at weekends...:-)

If they want this generation of developers and designers to be good with
IE7, they better give us a way to practice without forcing us to get rid
of IE6!

They have - it's called Virtual PC. You can download it from their website -
it's in your price range... You can even download a free image of
WinXP+SP2+IE6 precisely so that developers in your situation can continue to
test on that platform:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

But even that isn't enough for you! What more do you want...?!!!

Neither the world in general nor Microsoft in particular owes you a living,
you know - the quicker you realise that, the sooner you'll get on...

[Gary Smith]

In microsoft.publi c.windows.inete xplorer.ie6.bro wser C A Upsdell <""cupsdell\"@n o****@upsdell.c om"wrote:

Leythos wrote:

With the above in mind, you need to test your app with the following:

Windows 2000 / IE6
Windows 2000 / IE7
Windows 2000 / AOL
Windows 2000 / FireFox 2

Windows XP / IE6
Windows XP / IE7
Windows XP / AOL
Windows XP / FireFox 2

Why do you feel it is necessary to test the identical browser on
multiple O/S's, e.g. IE6 on Win 2000 and Win XP, and Firefox 2 on Win
2000 and Win XP?

IE6 on Win 2000 and IE6 on Win XP are two different programs with the same
name. They behave differently in some respects, and need to tested
separately. So far as I know, IE7 can't be installed in Win 2000.
Firefox should be independent of the Windows version, since unlike IE, it
doesn't rely heavily on operating system components.

--
Gary L. Smith
Columbus, Ohio

[Mark Rae]

"Gary Smith" <bi*******@exam ple.comwrote in message
news:%2******** ********@TK2MSF TNGP04.phx.gbl. ..

IE6 on Win 2000 and IE6 on Win XP are two different programs with the same
name.

??? Are you sure about that...?

So far as I know, IE7 can't be installed in Win 2000.

Not easily - depending on how brave you're feeling, ahem, the Registry can
be hacked etc... :-)

[Paul Johnson]

Nathan Sokalski wrote:

Ever since I found out that they didn't give us a way to install both IE6
and IE7 on the same machine, I have been more frustrated and annoyed with
Microsoft than I ever have been with any company (and for someone who has
loved Microsoft as much as me, that takes something pretty bad!). I am a
web developer, and only have access to one computer, which makes it hard
to test for both IE6 and IE7.

I have a hard time believing you're really a web developer given you're
testing against IE instead of a standards compliant browser and
http://validator.w3.org/. Using IE as your testbed is going to result in
webpages that only look good in IE. That shows ignorance towards the
standards that are the bread and butter of your trade.

Now if you develop with a standard browser and use the standard validator
the W3 provides, your pages will look good in all browsers, with the
occasional IE glitch if you're unlucky. This would be a better strategy
all around: The official W3 standards are there to ensure everything works
in all browsers. If you can write a webpage that passes the validator but
fails in the browser, you've found a browser bug; don't break your code to
work around someone else's bug.

[Paul Johnson]

Leythos wrote:

In article <11************ **********@q2g2 000cwa.googlegr oups.com>,
co***********@g mail.com says...

>So it sounds like you are saying that if you code to the standards then
there is no need to test in the different browsers? Is that realistic?
I think we will always want to test in the different browsers. Even
with standards we could have slight variations in how those standards
are implemented - true?

In general there are two targets - the IE group and the Everyone else
group. There is no cost effective means to make all web apps work with
all browsers, customers just wont pay for that.

With the above in mind, you need to test your app with the following:

Windows 2000 / IE6
Windows 2000 / IE7
Windows 2000 / AOL
Windows 2000 / FireFox 2

Windows XP / IE6
Windows XP / IE7
Windows XP / AOL
Windows XP / FireFox 2

MAC OS/x (if you care)

Nix OS / FireFox (Fedora, Mandrake, Ubuntu...)

If you do the above, you will cover 99% of the people that visit a
public website.

A year and a half's webstats on my server indicate that that cross section
would cover more like 87-93% of users out there depending on the month.
BTW, you'll get the exact same number of users if you eliminate some of the
redundant tests: Operating system choice (especially something as trivial
as NT5.0 versus NT5.1) doesn't affect browser rendering ability (font
availability would, but the same fonts ship with NT5 and NT5.1, so even
that's moot), and MacOS qualifies as a unix. AOL is rebadged, outdated
Mozilla. I would try this list to save time with the best results...

OS / Rendering Engine

WinXP / Gecko
Unix / Gecko
Unix / KHTML
WinXP / IE6 *

KHTML is used in Konqueror and Safari, both are popular unix browsers.
Gecko is used in Mozilla and it's relatives.

(* Optional. It's designed to deliberately break the standards, a holdover
of the IE/Netscape battle of 12 years ago and just needs to die already)

[Paul Johnson]

Please do not quote backwards as this reduces readability.
http://wiki.ursine.ca/Best_Online_Quoting_Practices

Corey B wrote:

So it sounds like you are saying that if you code to the standards then
there is no need to test in the different browsers? Is that realistic?

I would say so. Code to the standard, not to someone else's bugs. If some
particular browser can't hack standard code, the bug is with the browser,
not with your code. Unless you're coding something specific for some
closed userbase that you know will all be using the same environment, you
can't guarantee that they'll be visiting your site using the browsers
you've tested against.

Never break your project's code to fix a completely unrelated project's
problems: You're simply shifting the blame from the actual problem to the
users who didn't experience that problem to start with. Let unrelated
project fix it's own code.

I think we will always want to test in the different browsers. Even
with standards we could have slight variations in how those standards
are implemented - true?

True, but usually not major enough to change the content significantly,
especially if you're being smart and using ratios instead of hard values.
Now on this tangent, percentages are your friend, pixels are your enemy
when it comes to sizes; coding for a particular resolution is inheirently
flawed: You don't know what hardware, OS or window manager your visitors
are using, window elements and user preferences will often make windows
much smaller on the user-end than you think. Therefor, the only sane width
you can gaurantee is *NOT* 1024, it's not even 800. Forget 480. Try 0.
Webpages should be able to compress into a razor thin strip of a window and
still be reasonably usable, yet still be able to spread out and fill a
potentially infinitely wide window. Not everybody browses from a graphical
environment, some people browse from 15-character-wide phone screens, and
sooner or later someone's going to have a massively beautiful Apple Cinema
display with insanely small dot pitch the size of a coffee table...and want
to read a maximized web browser all the way across all five feet of it
without four feet of whitespace to the right of the content. So far, the
only two well-known websites I can think of that get the size assumption
right are Wikipedia and Slashdot.

Point of this tangent is if you even think you need a "best viewed at
X00xY00 resolution" disclaimer, you're trying to think you know better than
the user for their own needs: Don't do that!

[Nathan Sokalski]

First of all, IE6 is what most of our users use, and it is the only one that
my boss is requiring me to make it work in. Second of all, you do know the
difference between designer and developer, right? http://validator.w3.org/
tells you if it is valid code, but it doesn't tell you how to do something
if it doesn't do it already, which is usually my problem. If the error is
server-side, or the page gets data passed to it from another page, than it
can't be tested with the Validator. Also, I do make every attempt I can to
follow the standards, but I am one person, graduated for less than a month,
using a technology they didn't even offer to teach where I went to college,
at least give me a break on what browser I test in! And with ASP.NET, which
is what I develop in, much of the CSS is determined by the controls, so I
sometimes don't even know the generated HTML & CSS until I test, sometimes
it takes extra code to UNDO generated code that doesn't follow standards.
But back to your original message, if the browser DOES have a bug, I have to
work around it if I want my pages to look the way I want. The question is
how you work around it. The best way is to detect the browser and generate
slightly different code based on that (which is what most of the built-in
ASP.NET controls do, but I don't believe they are updated for IE7). But
until I have enough time (and resources!) to test in all the browsers, I
think it's best to test in the one with the largest usage.
--
Nathan Sokalski
nj********@hotm ail.com
http://www.nathansokalski.com/

"Paul Johnson" <ba***@ursine.c awrote in message
news:2m******** ****@ursa-major.ursine.ca ...

Nathan Sokalski wrote:

>Ever since I found out that they didn't give us a way to install both IE6
and IE7 on the same machine, I have been more frustrated and annoyed with
Microsoft than I ever have been with any company (and for someone who has
loved Microsoft as much as me, that takes something pretty bad!). I am a
web developer, and only have access to one computer, which makes it hard
to test for both IE6 and IE7.

I have a hard time believing you're really a web developer given you're
testing against IE instead of a standards compliant browser and
http://validator.w3.org/. Using IE as your testbed is going to result in
webpages that only look good in IE. That shows ignorance towards the
standards that are the bread and butter of your trade.

Now if you develop with a standard browser and use the standard validator
the W3 provides, your pages will look good in all browsers, with the
occasional IE glitch if you're unlucky. This would be a better strategy
all around: The official W3 standards are there to ensure everything
works
in all browsers. If you can write a webpage that passes the validator but
fails in the browser, you've found a browser bug; don't break your code to
work around someone else's bug.

[Corey B]

Paul Johnson wrote:

I would say so. Code to the standard, not to someone else's bugs. If some
particular browser can't hack standard code, the bug is with the browser,
not with your code. Unless you're coding something specific for some
closed userbase that you know will all be using the same environment, you
can't guarantee that they'll be visiting your site using the browsers
you've tested against.

Never break your project's code to fix a completely unrelated project's
problems: You're simply shifting the blame from the actual problem to the
users who didn't experience that problem to start with. Let unrelated
project fix it's own code.

That sounds great in theory, however it's not very good in practice.
If I am a company, then my website is a reflection of that company.
The experience that people have on my website has a direct impact on
how they feel about my company and whether they will buy my products or
not. The vast majority of "regular" web users out there (non
technical) use Internet Explorer 6. I better make sure that my web
site looks nice on IE6 and runs without errors - regardless of
standards. If my web site breaks or looks really crappy, Joe Average
User will not think to himself "gee, Microsoft makes a crappy, non
standard browser", he will think "pretty amateur website, maybe an
amateur company". Because of its huge market share, we are stuck with
making sure our sites work well and look nice in whatever versions of
IE are out there.

Corey

[Corey B]

Mark Rae wrote:

LOL! I really think you're in the wrong business or, at least, haven't had
much exposure to business software.

I've been writing software for almost 15 years.

Not being able to run different versions of the same application on the same
operating system really is nothing new, especially if that operating system
is Windows.

I didn't say that it was something new. It's just something that we
don't question. However there is a difference between browsers and
other applications. Let's compare it to Microsoft Word. When a new
version of Word comes out, it is up to Microsoft to make sure that the
new version of Word can open up old Word documents. And they build in
that compatibility with varying degrees of success and they release
patches and so on. But as a creator of Word documents I don't need to
be able to run both versions of Word to see how my document looks. The
new version of Word will automatically upgrade the old Word document.

It's different for the web. It's up to me, the developer to make sure
that everything looks ok on the new browser. The new browser will not
detect that the page was written for an "older" version of IE and
upgrade it or anything. So there is a genuine need to run them side by
side.

Going back to the car analogy, would you have your car repaired by someone
who couldn't afford a decent set of tools to do the job properly...?

It's not really a matter of cost, it's more a matter of hassle. It's a
hassle for developers to have to install multiple operating systems on
a PC just to test browsers. What a waste of hard drive space and
system resources.

My point is simply that because Microsoft dominates the market, they
are a bit lazy when it comes to some of these issues. In my opinion,
this is just one small example of why it was a really, really bad idea
to tie Internet Explorer to the operating system.

Flame away!

Corey

[Mark Rae]

"Corey B" <co***********@ gmail.comwrote in message
news:11******** *************@3 8g2000cwa.googl egroups.com...

However there is a difference between browsers and other applications.

That's true.

Let's compare it to Microsoft Word.

Er, no... To quote you directly: "there is a difference between browsers and
other applications", so let's *not* compare it to Word, as you have already
correctly highlighted the difference between and web browsers and other
applications. Try comparing it to FireFox instead. Tell me how you can have
v1.5.x and v2.0.x installed on the same version of Windows and have them
both run reliably... Hint: you can't... You can try any number of "hacks"
with the Registry etc - none of them works properly...

It's different for the web. It's up to me, the developer to make sure
that everything looks ok on the new browser. The new browser will not
detect that the page was written for an "older" version of IE and
upgrade it or anything. So there is a genuine need to run them side by
side.

I couldn't agree more! Microsoft would also agree with you:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

It's not really a matter of cost, it's more a matter of hassle. It's a
hassle for developers to have to install multiple operating systems on
a PC just to test browsers. What a waste of hard drive space and
system resources.

Hassle? How long do you *honestly* think it would take you to download and
install Virtual PC, and then click the above link to download the guest
which Microsoft have made freely available for precisely this purpose....?
As for wasting hard drive space and system resources, is your development PC
*really* so underpowered... ? If so, I'd have to question your seriousness in
all of this...

My point is simply that because Microsoft dominates the market, they
are a bit lazy when it comes to some of these issues. In my opinion,
this is just one small example of why it was a really, really bad idea
to tie Internet Explorer to the operating system.

Try running two different versions of FireFox on the same installation of
Windows - you can't, for precisely the same reasons as you can't run IE6 and
IE7...