Though I gave IE 8 Beta a pretty glowing review after it first came out, I came to my senses and deleted the post after playing around with the browser a bit more. (Notice I never learn anything by learning it but always by playing with it - there must be something to that.)
So tonight I decided to play with IE 8 Beta once again. Rather than oohing, aahing, and slobbering over it like I did the last time, this time I could not stop laughing.
Microsoft plugs IE 8 Beta as a perfect playground for "web developers and designers". Since a picture is worth a thousand words, and since I've almost bashed my monitor in a thousand times to get my layouts - hybridized versions of grrliz's templates (1|2|3) - working in Internet Explorer, let's look at how well Internet Explorer 8 renders CSS.
This is my blog in IE 8.
Why won't Internet Exploder just die?
Are you seeing my blog's name in lights? 18 of them? I am, too! No, it's not an optical illusion, nor is it a strange background image you can't see in other browsers. I couldn't design a marquee like that if I tried. As it turns out, IE 8 renders two 10-pixel borders that I nested to the left and right of my blog's name as 18 tiny circles. Incidentally, IE7 won't render those borders at all.
Firefox, Safari, and Opera render those two borders exactly the same...and none of those browsers misalign my header-name background (the blue part) like IE 8 does (even IE 6 and IE 7 got that much right, after I spent hours recoding it). Yet Microsoft has the nerve to proclaim that IE 8 meets the W3C's CSS 2.1 standards?
IE 8 Beta makes a number of other errors rendering CSS on Everything Else and on Anti-AOL. It incorrectly aligns user-pictures, tiny icons, forms and text boxes on LiveJournal.com. IE 8 also positions every element on Digg.com incorrectly so that Digg's pages look too "tight".
My verdict? None of us stand a chance once IE 8 comes out unless we ignore it altogether. We'll have to either refuse to code for it or to learn all of the new hacks for it that don't even exist yet - for a browser that few of us use and none of us like.
Just Call Me "The Sphinx"
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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
skellorg : (no subject) [+3] - (Anonymous) : IE8 is not code complete yet [+7]
Comments
The point is, the way I had the user-icon and date looking last week worked perfectly well in Firefox, Opera, and Safari, but IE - all versions of it - spit that same code back up like day-old Chinese, so I had no choice but to rearrange everything - and that's what caused hours of extra work and more problems stemming from it.
If not for IE, my style sheets would include about 1/3 the amount of code they do now. Almost everything I add is to get them to work in IE.
I would design more style sheets and give them away to the masses a la Liz, but I don't, simply because coding for IE is a nightmare. It takes me about six months to get the average style sheet the way I have it in other browsers working in IE, too.
And neither style sheet I'm using works in IE 6 right now - this style sheet features beheaded user-icons and wonky positioning throughout, and the other one uses a .png transparency that IE 6 can't render so it looks hideous, just puke-worthy.
I get to the point where I have no choice but to throw my hands in the air and give up. IE - any version of it - is beyond frustrating.
Edited at 2008-08-03 07:44 pm (UTC)
Edited at 2008-08-20 05:54 am (UTC)
My worry is that M$ will spend more time on their gimmicks (web slices, etc) than the core rendering engine. I really have no faith in their pledge to make IE8 standards compliant (why would they, it goes against everything they believe in) - my guess is that they'll bodge things together to mostly work, add loads of new proprietary stuff to make the rest of our lives even more miserable and then proclaim that the only way to get consistent cross-browser rendering is to use Silverlight.
*sigh*
Oh, and as for your PNG woes, I found this out recently that might help:
https://www.adaptavist.com/display/~gfra
Guy
"My worry is that M$ will spend more time on their gimmicks (web slices, etc) than the core rendering engine."
That's a good thing to worry about. No one will ever switch from Firefox or Opera to IE just to use Web Slices. And to compromise rendering quality to focus on a silly gimmick that converts no new users to them seems like a huge waste of time and resources.
"I really have no faith in their pledge to make IE8 standards compliant (why would they, it goes against everything they believe in)[...]"
Ha! That's how I see it, too. Not like MS to start playing by the rules all of a sudden...
"[...] my guess is that they'll bodge things together to mostly work, add loads of new proprietary stuff to make the rest of our lives even more miserable and then proclaim that the only way to get consistent cross-browser rendering is to use Silverlight."
Exactly. I'm not sure how big a role Silverlight will play in web page rendering, but there was an outcry when people thought Silverlight was required to watch the Olympics. MS might want to think about that really, really hard before they go shoving Silverlight down everyone's throat.
Personally, I like Silverlight. I've had it installed since the first Beta was out. It's one of the few things MS ever got right, and it makes the search engine interface look unbelievably rich and sophisticated.
"Oh, and as for your PNG woes, I found this out recently that might help:
https://www.adaptavist.com/display/~gfr
Thanks. I'm trying it out right now.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/29/h
For some reason non-standards complaint Beta 2 is rendering my blog perfectly (or nearly perfectly- haven't had time to check all the way through), while the last version (which had standards compliance on by default) did not.
The thing I did with the two boxes around my blog name was just me fooling around one night and deciding I liked the result in Firefox and Opera. But I tested that same trick in Safari a few weeks ago and it threw the same error that IEb1 did - the 10px borders became the 18 circles, my name in lights bullshit. So maybe Firefox and Opera aren't fully standards compliant, allowing me to play more games with the code than I should be able to in a truly compliant browser. Does anyone know if that is the case?