Business Website

[Addanc]

I'm trying to put together a simple business website working to the XHTML 1.0 standard. Everything renders OK in Firefox, Opera, Safari, Explorer8; unfortunately the site don't render correctly in the steaming piles of tulipe known as explorer6 and explorer7, despite explorer6 being released a good 18 months after the XHTML 1.0 standard.

With this web stuff is there a simple mechanism for serving up browser dependent pages or is it a case of lowest common denominator for all? Just in case it's relevant I'm using the 1and1 linux hosting.

[xoggoth]

There's Litmus. Expensive for non pros but the the basic free version checks IE7, not sure what it's like.

http://litmusapp.com/

Think there's a couple of other similar things out there too.

[NickFitz]

Internet Explorer has never supported XHTML; even now, Microsoft have made no commitment to supporting it in IE 9. Instead, it treats those parts of the markup that make it XHTML (e.g. the slash in self-closing tags such as <br /> as an invalid attribute name, which it regards as an ignorable markup error.

I assume you've followed the guidelines in XHTML 1.0 Appendix C. The most important one for IE 6 is to omit the XML declaration (<?xml version="1.0"?>) as that will confuse the parser and throw it into quirks mode; you want to keep it in "standards" rendering mode.

After that there are a number of IE CSS bugs to be taken care of. The vast majority of these can be fixed by triggering the proprietary hasLayout property; the easiest way is to add the rule zoom: 1; to the offending elements.

Use conditional comments to serve any tweaks to IE; it's far and away the easiest way to avoid causing problems for any other browsers while trying to knock IE into shape.

Feel free to post any specific questions, or PM me if you wish: I can't guarantee an instant response, but in practice most problems are actually quite straightforward to fix, in the sense of it taking "one second to hit it, ten years to know where to hit it"

[xoggoth]

Wondered what the closing slashes were in some bits pasted off the net but not found they cause any problem in IE8.

[Addanc]

Cheers Nick, the conditional comments mechanism should allow me to provide some sort of fall back display for the older explorer products. A trivial task turned into a pain in the

Is this an example of how MS use their large market share to subvert open standards designed to improve interoperability?

[DimPrawn]

Is this an example of how MS use their large market share to subvert open standards designed to improve interoperability?

Open standards are for communists.

At one stage MS had an internal memo on how they wanted to turn the internet into a pay-per-view system over time, via lock in using closed source and proprietary standards to replace the current ones.

[d000hg]

Cheers Nick, the conditional comments mechanism should allow me to provide some sort of fall back display for the older explorer products. A trivial task turned into a pain in the

Is this an example of how MS use their large market share to subvert open standards designed to improve interoperability?

I'll get the tin-foil

[NickFitz]

Is this an example of how MS use their large market share to subvert open standards designed to improve interoperability?

It's more of an example of how they used to do that. At least some bits of MS are getting better, to give them their due. They've actually done a pretty reasonable job with IE 8 (meaning they're now only a couple of years behind everybody else), and a number of their tools can be coerced into abiding by standards to some extent.

This email from Bill Gates [PDF alert] in 1996 is quite illuminating though

[Addanc]

It's more of an example of how they used to do that. At least some bits of MS are getting better, to give them their due. They've actually done a pretty reasonable job with IE 8 (meaning they're now only a couple of years behind everybody else), and a number of their tools can be coerced into abiding by standards to some extent.

I'll bet it has got something to do with several US states and various Governments mandating the use open standards in tenders. The open doc standard as used by open office springs to mind as a high profile example.

[NickFitz]

I'll bet it has got something to do with several US states and various Governments mandating the use open standards in tenders. The open doc standard as used by open office springs to mind as a high profile example.

As far as I understand it from people within Microsoft (who of course aren't allowed to say too much), the company adopted a WGIS policy once they thought they'd won the browser wars with IE 6. The IE team was stripped back to a tiny crew who just dealt with security issues; there were nil resources for improving the browser.

Then they suddenly realised that the web landscape beyond the tiny world of corporate intranets had changed, and other browsers were about to eat their lunch: the IE team was bolstered, and we got IE 7 and eventually IE 8.

There was a lot of messy politics within MS relating to all this. Without betraying any confidences, I can say that a certain female Web Standards advocate who was brought in as a consultant for a while now says that she was glad to get out of there, because every time they tried to do what was right (from both a business and technical perspective) they had to fight off an almighty assault based on internal politics: MS is now so big that almost any technical decision threatens some manager's personal fiefdom. (This is one of the main reasons that MS will ultimately fail, BTW.)

I'm not betraying any confidences when I point out that Chris Wilson, who has been the voice crying out in the wilderness of MS about standards for many years, has now moved away from his involvement with the IE Team for the purpose of providing greater advocacy of open web standards within MS. He originally joined from Mosaic back in the 90s, and has a chance to make a difference if he can cut a way through the politics.

At @media back in June, Molly Holzschlag and Bruce Lawson were giving a presentation about HTML 5, immediately after Chris's presentation which should probably have been entitled "How And Why I'm Going To Ensure That Microsoft Aren't Evil Bastards Anymore When It Comes To The Web"; Chris had sat in the front row after leaving the stage, to watch them.

At one point, Molly called down to him: "Hey Chris, are the IE Team planning on implementing <canvas>?" Chris shouted back, "How the fsck should I know what those bastards are up to?"

We can at least conclude that there is now some healthy push'n'shove going on within MS about supporting open standards - may the good guys (i.e. Chris Wilson and those he gathers about him) prevail