@morbiuswilters said:
If you are writing pages in XHTML you are almost certainly serving up broken HTML. Way to follow the standards there. Also, all of the browsers have flaws. IE has the largest install base so it is a defacto standard and if I had to choose only one browser to support, it would definitely be IE. People who endlessly appeal to "the standards" without realizing most standards are hopelessly flawed and no software follows them properly annoy the hell out of me. Seriously, get over it and write the goddamn code. This is what we are paid for. If it was so easy any idiot could do it then most of us wouldn't have jobs. Also, Opera sucks and needs to die. It's bad enough we have 3 mediocre browsers (IE, FF and Safari) but there is no reason for Opera to exist.
Well given that im serving xhtml, yes it's true, it wouldn't be valid html... and how is following the xhtml standard not following "the standards", it's just a different standard. One that works fine (for me, YMMV) in all the browsers listed, its css thats broken in IE. In my experience, css is also to blame for most of the minor problems with the other browsers.
Yes I know I have to write the hacks, but it's a far stretch to say that removing them would cause us to lose jobs, quite the opposite, it would allow us to focus more on our actual job, delivering good software. As Vgr said: "If your idea of a standard is "try to get it to work with IE," you don't know what a standard is." Undocumented proprietary code does not count as a standard. I have the same issue with OOXML.
As far as the strange vitriol directed at Opera itself, what does it matter if when I code for the 2nd most popular browser, it also magically works almost identically in Opera and Safari and in fact any mostly standards compliant browser*. Why shouldn't there be a choice? Are you anti-choice? Does it personally cause you problems? Do you have to invest any time in it?
*(functionally if it supports or at least vaguely understands xhtml, visually if it supports at least css2 properly, and extra-functionality with javascript / css3.)
@MasterPlanSoftware said:
And I am sure that VisualD can sit down and read through the standards and write a perfect working browser too...
Ridiculous argument, of course not, certainly not on my own in a reasonable time. Nor did I claim or imply that I could. Clearly no-one is going to be creating the perfect browser anytime soon. But FireFox and the rest make a decent stab at it. IE is good in many ways, but very weak in important ones, and this is from a company that clearly have the resources to do this at least as well as the others. So why drag their feet?. Its all about control.