Termites and the art of necromancy...
You know, it's funny. Every time there is a debate over some Microsoft release all of the usual termites crawl out of the woodwork to extol the virtues of the omnipotent fox and/or and his penguin friend...
So far, the comments to this article have been quite amusing (well, some made me laugh anyway!). OK, so there are a few well balanced commentators, for example, Ed in '@Daniel - On the nature of the Acid tests', but for the most part it's the usual evangelical tune that's played at the termite disco every Friday night... 'Firefox will save your soul! IE(n) is the path of the Devil!'. Yada, yada.. *Yawn* To use the beloved Reg terminology, I say to you, 'Tw*tdanglers!' :)
I'll be the first to admit, Microsoft have made a mess of IE from the very beginning (I have had the misfortune of having had to code for IE since the release of IE3), but with the release of IE8 Microsoft have, at the very least, demonstrated that the black art of necromancy may not in fact be total hokum. If they have achieved their stated goal, however belatedly, fair play. kudos to them!
Personally, do i give a flying fig if IE8 'passes' or 'fails' Acid3? Nope. It's a non-argument. Acid3 was, to the best of my knowledge, never a stated goal of the IE team, nor should it have been. Do I care if IE8 does not support CSS3 and HTML5? Nope. Nor should I. I have code to standards, not to drafts. What I would like to see is complete support for CSS2.1 first. As Ed has pointed out above, no major browser is 100% compliant with CSS 2.1 yet. Let's finish with 2.1 before we start throwing mud about lack of support for draft standards eh people?
Whether you and I like it or not we, as developers, have to contend with IE. It's easy to sit here and knock the efforts of the IE team. It takes no degree of intelligence or technical expertise to lambast the efforts of others. As I have already said, if the IE team have achieved their stated goal and moved IE forward, however belatedly, fair play to them!
I get the feeling that the author of the original article wore an evil smile whilst writing :)
Finally, I would like to congratulate certain posters on demonstrating their obvious technical prowess with their abstractions of the words sh*t, w*nkers and f*ucked. That's what I like to see... A rational, adult and technical debate. :)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
