Why web developers love Internet Explorer
At the heels of the latest and greatest CSS changes announced by the IE7 development team Tuesday; a flurry of positive discussions were circling the web from standards advocates. But I wonder; as the more compliant Internet Explorer becomes, are we truly going to be happy, are we going to miss our old non-complaint IE days?
Isn’t it the hacks and filters that make this all so much fun? Isn’t that what has really spawned the community based sites such as CSS Beauty? If everyone becomes compliant, are we going to have anything left to talk about (bitch about)? It seems in the past six years, a lot of the creativity (or beauty) in our sites is in the mark-up. Once you’re experienced and knowledgeable, it isn’t too difficult to build any combination of layouts – what is difficult, is to make it look right in all browsers!
Sure, we will all be happier the more IE becomes like Firefox; our work will become more consistent and productive. However, we will lose a lot of the love we had for the game. Creating hacks, finding hacks and even brilliantly discovering a work-around that required no hack is what was so exciting. I really feel for the future generation of web designers and developers – it will be extremely difficult for them to have the same excitement and passion we had for the industry; they just won’t be able to contribute as much.
- August 24th, 2006
- 37comments
- I am a proud member of the 9rules network
Hmmm, I disagree about the game of finding hacks.
Personally, I find the design aspect of creating a website the most engaging and interesting. Maybe I’m just approaching from more a design perspective than a development perspective (though I view the two as almost one and the same), but the reason that sites like CSS Beauty and CSS Mania cropped up was to champion great, standards-compliant design. Even if IE7 will be fully standards-compliant (which I’m still not fully believing), such showcases will still prosper becuase it is the quality of design that makes the featured sites special. Sure, there is also a considerable time investment in jamming in Holly hacks and kluging box models, but that isn’t what standards-based design is about.
In the end, it’s still about the artistic inspiration in terms of visual appeal, self-consistent detailed-oriented thematic layouts, and intuitive yet innovative interface implementation. I personally don’t consider IE hackery as a “good” component of current standards-compliant design. Rather, it’s a hassle that gets in the way of implementing design inspiration and creativity.
The sooner we can get rid of Javascript multi-stylesheet loading, the woes of position: absolute, and the appeal of Flash as a shortcut to cross-browser visual consistency, the more time we can spend on actually furthering the information framework and visual creativity of our websites.
Yes, it’s the design of websites that I find fun. What I can’t stand is when I test something in Firefox and Safari and everything looks great, but then I test it on IE and it’s completely wrong. That pisses me off. It’s not “fun” to find hacks to make IE do what it’s supposed to do.
Mmmm, depends on the client.
Usually, the bottom line I encounter is that the end product is what matters to the client, it usually doesn’t matter exactly how you accomplish your task as long as your website has a well-built CMS, distinctive visual style, intuitive navigation, and looks good in Internet Explorer (and usually Safari and Firefox).
It’s true that you can explain that because Microsoft is being a non-compliant b—-, you have to actually have either hack layer or multi-stylesheet functionality in your site, which is a good deal of extra work, but that doesn’t work all the work. Personally, I’d rather spend fewer hours on a project, get paid a bit less per project, but proportionalyl spend more of that time on actual user experience design. That’s just my take. IE hackery is a b—-.
I was actually talking as an employed web developer rather than a freelancer…
I honestly believe that if we only had to develop for one compliant browser, they’d justify paying us a little bit less lol
Ah, okay.
Yeah, I totally agree, then.
Still, you’d be getting paid for relatively mind-numbing busy work. Well, at least that’s my take. ;-)
just because our jobs get “easier”, that doesn’t mean that designing web sites will be “easy”. the average user will still not be able to sit down and make a fully compliant and accessible web site. they will still need to hire web designers to make sites for them.
I appreciate your positive, nostalgic perspective. We did learn some great tricks, thanks to IE 6 going stale. I for one, can’t wait for it to go.
I’d say there is a risk in us getting paid less. In every interview I’ve been in with a company or client — they’ve focused on my ability to handle different browsers. It is a skill that is very valuable — sure other skills could compensate, but the fact is that they will have to compensate!
I disagee that sites like CSS Beauty and CSS Mania will remain as popular “IF” all broswers were built equally. Web Design has been around for many many years. However, these types of sites are popular becuase it is the BEUATY behind the CSS that excites us. No longer are we impressed with JUST a well designed site, now we almost require it to validate before we consider it “beautiful” — these days the mark-up and code behind is just as elegent as the visuual design.
I have different galleries I go for “design inspiration”. I go to sites like CSS Beauty for the community, idea sharing and gallery of standards complient sites who happen to be well designed.
As the browsers start to impliment more CSS2/CSS3 specs - there will be plenty of tricks, new abilities, and features to keep us busy and increase the amount of time it takes to create a quality (and then better) website.
Ross,
Great point. I guess there is something to learning as the technology evolves vs. finding tricks and hacks to make the technology better (sort of being a rebel vs. conforming). I think a lot of us like being rebels — finding and creating those “hacks”. I just know most of my discussions with people in the industry are usually about that topic (something mutual to complain about).
I just wonder what we will talk (complain) about next.
My humble opinion:
1. you are crazy (or maybe you just haven’t spent enough hours debugging css)
2. hacks are not future-proof and should not be used in the first place
3. browser inconsistency is a source of headache and frustration, not excitement, but that’s just me..
4. IE 7 will not be standards-compliant, we will probably still have to work around it.
There will always be different levels of compliance in different browsers. Right now, there are differences between Firefox, Opera, and Safari…not to mentino IE, which is dead last amongst them. IE7 will be more compliant than IE6, but still not fully compliant (none are.) Now, when CSS3 gets finished/adopted, we get to play the game all over again. My bet is that Firefox, Opera, Safari, OmniWeb, etc. will adopt any new standars long before IE…
What many people don’t remember (probably because they’re too young) is there was a time when web designers *begged* people to use IE, and switch from the then-dominant Netscape. See, Netscape was the market leader, but hand’t had a major overhaul in a while. IE, at the time, had much better CSS support. Of course, IE then stagnated and the others leapfrogged it…
I’m not a web designer, but a web programmer. However, with most of the sites I’ve worked on, I’ve done the frontend as well as the backend. When working solo, I generally take a photoshop image created by a designer and turn it into a website. When doing this, the last thing I want is to open up the site in IE and find out that nothing works because it doesn’t support something Firefox or Opera implemented two years ago. I want to view my site in one browser and know it will work in all of them. Unfortunately, IE 7 still won’t have full support for CSS 2.1. The ride’s not over, Martin - in fact, as IE 7 will gain marketshare back from Firefox, I can’t see it ending for a long while.
I absolutely hate IE6 and hacks/filters. The worst part about it is, being on a mac, I can’t even test for it. So that means that I have to implement hacks that I find on the web, then ask one of my Windows buddies to check and see if it has worked.
Nine times out of ten, it doesn’t. That’s why I’ll be glad to see the back of IE6
That’s the other reason I dislike IE. My primary OS is Linux, and IE 6 is a bitch to work through Wine. To check my sites in Windows, I have to either reboot or sit there and hope.
That’s the beauty of the new Intel based Macs…I’m running Win XP in Parallels on a second VirtueDesktop. A simple key combo and *bam*, I’m testing in IE6/Win. Once I’m done viewing my changes, I get the @#$! out of dodge and back to OS X where I belong…
I actually do all my coding in vi and test it in Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Konquerer. I do examine it in IE, but I could care less if it works or not. I will not make any effort for it to work in IE.
You must have a very odd userbase (or a very annoyed one). The majority of users still use IE. That means your site may be broken for the majority of users.
Well, for those of us making money designing/developing websites, that’s not an option…Surprisingly, customers want their sites to work for the majority of their visitors…
Wow I wish I could design without IE in mind. That would be heaven. Unfortunately I know noone who is as lucky as you to design for every browser but IE. I have to wonder who your users are?
I totally disagree.
For one, sites like CSS Beauty came into life because of CSS, not some browser. It was the overall awesomeness of CSS that made it popular, not IE.
Also, most people by far consider hacking IE to be counter-intuitive, time-consuming, wasteful, headache-inducing and just plain wrong. Most people find it fun to build websites — testing is never fun to begin with, let alone testing against a buggy rendering engine.
You additionally seem to miss the fact that IE is nothing more than the most buggy browser. It is not the only browser that has CSS bugs — they all do, IE just has much more and much more severe ones. Since it’s extremely unlikely that we’ll have a bug-free browser environment for the coming 25 years (CSS2 might be properly supported, but CSS3 is an order of magnitude larger and 99% of it hasn’t been implemented in any browser yet) the “game” of working around browser differences will be played for quite a while longer. I doubt if many people are excited at that outlook.
I think it’s safe to say that a more level browser environment will make people happy, as it cuts down dramatically on time-waste and headaches, while at the same time opening up new possibilities — multiple backgrounds in CSS, rounded corners, PNG transparency… sites will be more fun to build and be cooler in features (design-wise). I can’t see anyone being sad about that.
Transparent PNG support is what I’m looking forward to the most. Means I don’t have to put awful lossy gifs on my site.
Everyone here is making great (similar) points. We all hate IE, just look at the comments. I mean, wow, look at the comments!! This is the most comments I’ve ever had on any post. We love talking (bitching) about IE and we love hating IE – there is a weird love-hate relationship going on and if the response to this post doesn’t hint at that, then I think you’re missing something.
Our industry is like anything else; we all have “heroes” and “enemies” – those we look to for inspiration and information and those we place blame on for delayed deadlines, headaches and late nights. We truly love having an “enemy”; right now that enemy is Internet Explorer. It gives us reasons to roll our eyes when senior vice presidents open up IE as their default browser, it gives us a base to help define what standards-compliant is not.
I know the world will be a better place if IE ever did become completely compliant – I also am confident we will find something new to complain about. I still hear the older guys in the office bring up obscure version of Netscape and AOL; the whole “I remember when…” conversations. We, the designers of today, are going to become those old guys talking about the days when IE was a pain in our ass. It could be 2, 5 or even 10 years from now – but we will “reminisce”.
When you work for an site development company that breathes down you neck to finish a page - but you gotta find IEs freegin’ problem - you accumulate a lot of “hate for the game”.
HA HA, I hear what you are saying.
And that makes me think my point is geared towards a specific type of developer. The type that is building and launching new sites about once a month if not once every three-months. The type were we deal with the challenges so often that the solutions become second nature.
lol Nah, there is only hate relationship with IE on my end. And everyone I know of. What makes you think this “game” you talk about is something anyone is really going to miss? I dream of a day when all the browsers will be the same. I mean how hard is it to just abide by some rules?
I am not an IE supporter, but you do have to give them some credit. They among others built a foundation for web browsers when there were no rules — not even a group established to create rules. Imagine trying to build a web browser before you knew what a web browser was? I can see logic in their thinking, why conform to “standards”, who made these standards and why are we conforming to them? It shouldn’t have taken this long to realize their many mis-steps.
Actually, the CSS standard* has been around since 1998. IE deliberately deviated from it to offer features that violated the standard so that they could win the browser wars from Netscape; this is also why Microsoft integrated IE into the OS, which so far is turning out to be their biggest mistake in history.
The W3C was already established and respected back then, it wasn’t a “what should we care about what these people say?” thing, it was a conscious choice not to follow the standard to win market share.
Then, when they won the war they basically pulled the IE dev team out. IE6 has only been changed in security-aspects ever since its release exactly 5 years and 2 days ago.
Case in point why I don’t agree with the sentiment of this article (I explained myself already above, but this is a new example as of today):
I spent the last 2 days trying to figure out a huge rendering bug in IE/win that seems to not be documented anywhere online. That’s a full waste of 2 days because of IE stupidity, cause for much frustration, anger and despondence. Seriously, the sooner I can ditch IE6 for support, the better!
Faruk, I definitly feel your pain. Work will without a doubt be much easier and headaches will decrease the sooner we can all stop supporting IE6. I guess I will just wait paitently to see how conversation changes — to see what our new topic of complaining will become (there has to be something to complain about, right?).
Not to mention, Microsoft is a *member* of the W3C and helped *write* the standard that they so willingly ignore.
New topic: browsers (IE7) not supporting CSS3 modules yet.
Three years, I give it.
I don’t know, I want to be optimistic this time around. I have been coming across as way to be pro-IE — i am not, i promise. LOL.
Well, CSS3 modules have been ready for “beta implementation” for a while already and it’s still only very scarsely happening. The IE7 team already said that they weren’t going to implement any CSS3 in this release, and god knows when they’ll start on IE8.
Meanwhile, Safari will eventually be fully supporting multiple backgrounds (and that part of CSS3 will be finalized), Gecko will be fully supporting rounded corners and CSS columns, and who knows what Opera is going to implement in O10.
Yeah, lately though, the IE7 has been coming out with pleasant surprises. They were supposed to be done with all things CSS months ago — but the latest changes had significant milestones for the community!
I found IE 8 more suitable against spam and viruses and good like Firefox
Great Share!!!!!!!!!!!!!!