I can see how that would be very annoying. I think the main change has to occur to companies though, I use firefox at home, but at work, and for some people at libraries, I have no choice, it is locked from installing other things and IE is the only browser. Thankfully at many government offices netscape is the standard, I don't know why netscape, but its not IE. But anyway, if you inform consumers the ones you really need to get to are the lazy heads of IT at places like this that wont even unlock permissions to install other browsers so we can do it ourselves, probably concerned that it would let us around blocked sites or something. It does sound like this is going to be as hard to get rid of as leaded gasolene, it was worse, but as long as the big car companies were making leaded only cars, many stations only sold leaded. From what you guys are saying it sounds more like if they purposly made a car that needed amonia in its gas just to specialize it. Anyway, I suppose I agree with your cause then, but unless the legal system changes to be able to handle corporate corruption in general, which it currently cant but needs to for many reasons, i dont see this going anywhere. Speaking of gasolene and corporate corruption, did you hear that they wanted to pass a tax on the oil companies to make them help pay for roads, but they were too afriad of getting sued by them if they stop them from passing that tax on to consumers?

You need to put this into perspective - the so called 'standard' doesn't prevent IE from working - it's just one sad individual who has deliberately written his website so as not to work with IE, whilst remaining within that standard.

I used to serve on a standards committee. Standards absolutely cannot, repeat cannot, be ramed down the throats of unwilling participants. They are not standards in a practical sense unless the participants buy in. You can howl at the moon all you want about why certain people think your baby (the standard) is ugly, and it won't make the slightest bit of difference.

Originally Posted by Triode

I'm not about to make a site with hundreds of pages about why it sucks and a bunch of little icons declaring it evil and all who use it retarded.

Lol, that is sad, he must have a lot of time on his hands.

Originally Posted by Torben

Plus, they keep making boneheaded decisions such as rendering Outlook 07's HTML email using the *shudder* Word engine. (WTF?!?!) Here's a blog post from a co-worker outlining this particular brilliant idea: Smallbox Software | Outlook '07 : Lowering Standards Everywhere

I'm not defending them but may be they're using Word's engine because they need it for email editing.

MSIE's HTML engine is purely view only; it doesn't support editing.

Of course the reasonable solution would be to fix the broken Word engine but MS wouldn't do a sensible thing like that, would they?

I've never tried IE 8, I didn't even know it was out.

Does it work on XP or is it just a Pista thing?

Originally Posted by David James

I just tried that and the W3C validator tells me "Sorry! This document can not be checked."

It complains: "No Character encoding declared at document level" ad "Sorry, I am unable to validate this document because on line 174 it contained one or more bytes that I cannot interpret as utf-8 (in other words, the bytes found are not valid values in the specified Character Encoding). Please check both the content of the file and the character encoding indication.

The error was: utf8 "\xAA" does not map to Unicode".

I've tried looking at your website in Opera and Mozilla Firefox, both fail to display it - what browsers does it work with?

It's the original XHTML page as compressed data. The site owner has tried to enable gzip compression but the server is not sending the correct headers to identify the content as a compressed stream--so instead of your browser recognizing it as a compressed stream and decompressing it into XHTML, it just tries to display the compressed data. This (somewhat obviously) fails, in a rather ugly fashion.


Torben

I tried his site a few days ago using Firefox and it worked. It's not working now though, for whatever reason.

Hopefully the owner has grown a brain and it reforming it to work with all browsers. On second thoughts I doubt a Linux zealot would do such a thing.

Originally Posted by Hero999

I tried his site a few days ago using Firefox and it worked. It's not working now though, for whatever reason.

Hopefully the owner has grown a brain and it reforming it to work with all browsers. On second thoughts I doubt a Linux zealot would do such a thing.

Hey, I resemble that remark!

Actually, you're confusing Linux zealots and W3C compliance zealots. Get us straight!

OK, so I prefer Linux. But XP wasn't too bad--interface sucked though.

I'll argue pro-Linux until the cows come home. W3C compliance, on the other hand, is a good idea but not the only idea.


Torben