Internet Explorer Is To Web Standards What Ebonics Is To Standard English
Every time I embark on a new web design project, I am reminded of the negative impact of Microsoft Internet Explorer. As I’ve said in the past, I’m not a typical Microsoft basher, and I credit the universality of their operating systems and Office software with a large portion of the steady rise in productivity over the past two decades. Anyone who remembers the days before MS-DOS and Microsoft Office will recall the total lack of standards that made it virtually impossible to share documents with anyone who wasn’t on the same system. I maintain that their monopoly position in these areas has produced beneficial results for all of us.
On the other hand, their dominance in the web browser market has had a markedly negative impact. Bill Gates freely admits that one of his biggest strategic errors was his failure to foresee the rapid rise of the internet in the early 1990’s. To make up for their relatively late entry into the game, the company used its monopoly position in the operating system market to impose its corporate will on the evolution of the internet. Since there were no universally accepted web standards in the early days, Microsoft created a browser that attempted to force the web to behave like any other Microsoft product. Nearly 15 years later, in spite of the development of widely accepted web standards, Microsoft has still not entirely abandoned this approach. Even today, Internet Explorer is to web standards what Ebonics is to standard English.
By bundling the early versions of Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system, Microsoft was able to gain nearly universal acceptance of their product, in spite of its obvious shortcomings. Depending on whose statistics you believe, between 2002 and 2004, Internet Explorer accounted for between 85% and 95% of all web browsing activity. As a result, web designers had no choice but to adapt their sites to accommodate this Microsoft specific behavior.
Since 1994, the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) has been working to establish a set of universally accepted web standards, and to prevent the further implementation of proprietary systems. According to their website:
“In order for the Web to reach its full potential, the most fundamental Web technologies must be compatible with one another and allow any hardware and software used to access the Web to work together. W3C refers to this goal as “Web interoperability.” By publishing open (non-proprietary) standards for Web languages and protocols, W3C seeks to avoid market fragmentation and thus Web fragmentation.”
Even though Microsoft is a member of the W3C, they have continued to introduce products that do not fully comply with this fundamental objective.
Thankfully, the domination of Internet Explorer in the browser market has waned considerably in recent years, and standards compliant browsers such as Mozilla Firefox are gaining rapid and widespread acceptance. Again, there is considerable variation in statistics, but according to the W3C Schools data, Firefox now accounts for 46.5% of all web browsing activity, compared to 43.5% combined for IE6, IE7, and the newly released IE8. Savvy web users now have a variety of standards compliant browsers to choose from, and the combination of Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, and Safari now account for 56.1% of all web browsing activity. This is a giant step in the right direction.
Unfortunately, roughly 17% of web users still rely on Internet Explorer 6, which was first released all the way back in 2001. How many of us are still wearing the same clothes, or watching the same TV shows that we did eight years ago? That was the year that brought us Grounded for Life and The Bernie Mac Show. Those shows have come and gone, but IE6 is still with us today. In terms of useful life expectancy, software years are even shorter than dog years, but for some reason IE6 refuses to die.
With the exception of web designers and security experts, most folks aren’t aware of the severe shortcomings of IE6, or the more recent IE7. They don’t understand the wasted time and resources that go into making a site that renders perfectly in a standards compliant browser also work in Internet Explorer. Until recently, accommodating the shortcomings of these browsers was considered to be a necessary evil, and few if any designers were willing to publish a site that did not behave properly when viewed with these flawed and outdated browsers.
Given the rapidly growing market share of standards compliant browsers, a few brave designers are beginning to change their practices. It simply no longer makes sense to spend countless hours devising inelegant hacks and clumsy workarounds to accommodate web users who stubbornly cling to antiquated technology. From a business standpoint, it can be hard to stand up to a client who insists that their site be backwards compatible with Stone Age technology, but at the very least they should be made aware of the substantial extra cost associated with their demands.
By some accounts, designers spend as much time forcing a site to render correctly in Internet Explorer as they do on the original design. This is clearly a monumental waste of time and energy, and represents a tremendous cost burden that clients are often unaware of. At the very least they should be told upfront that ensuring backwards compatibility with outdated browsers will cost substantially more than a standards compliant site. As long as clients are unaware that their demands carry a very high price, IE users will remain oblivious to the problems they cause.
As nice as it would be if we could simply refuse to support any non-compliant browser, this is not a practical solution. What we can do is work to make less savvy web users more aware of the nature and extent of the problems they cause. After creating this new theme for my personal site, I have decided not to make any accommodations for Internet Explorer users. If you are viewing this site in a standards compliant browser, it will display exactly as I intended. If you are using Internet Explorer, it won’t. Among other things, IE7 users will notice that the background colors do not match the background images, and that the comments boxes do not line up correctly with the left margin. If you hover over the page numbers at the bottom of the screen in IE, you will probably see them jump out of position by 15 or 20 pixels. If you look at the main page, or any of the archives pages, you will notice extra blank space between each of the post excerpts. These are just a few of the problems I’ve discovered so far with IE7, and I haven’t even bothered to look at the site in IE6. I assume it looks much worse.
If you want to do your part to rid the world of non-standards compliant browsers, you can display the Bring Down IE6 badge on your site. Get yours today at Bring Down IE6.com
Well said! The idea of charging more for IE compatibility is great because it really is a second job. While you’re at it, please bring down IE7 and IE8 too. :) I remember the whole Flash/media embedding problem that came up with IE7. An update to IE had rendered thousands of sites useless until their developers could find a solution. Adobe even came out with an update to their Dreamweaver software to accommodate the “Here’s an update – if it messes up websites, you deal with it” attitude of the IE department at Microsoft. It is no different with IE8 – tons of holes to patch in perfectly compliant CSS so far. If history is any indicator, they will release an update that presents even more problems very soon.
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Absolutely right!
IE basically degrades my quality of living as a developer and trying to debug pages for it is like talking to an oracle. I would say Microsoft to Software engineering is What Technology is to religion.
You might like http://www.strictlyuntyped.com/2009/03/5-new-css-features-you-can-use-if-you_18.html
Your stats on browsers is inaccurate in regards to a more real life scenario and W3 Schools is not the W3C.
W3 Schools serves a niche audience that is active within the web development community, hence the high Firefox statistics. You’re looking at a market penetration that is more along the lines of ~22% for FF. And while Firefox is the first browser to beat any version of IE in the last decade (IE 6 fell to ~18%), you can’t look at it from a percentage standpoint. 18% is still a significant amount of users.
While I hate IE personally, at the end of the day, if you code well and use IE conditionals (not hacks), you’re not adding a significant labor cost to ensure that a site works well and looks close to the intended design. I have clients who still require IE 5.5 to be part of their technical baseline.
Forgot my browser stat source: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0
Great article. I might reference it in the future. It pretty much covers every talking point and issue I’ve had on the subject. I especially appreciate how you noted your stance on the anti-MS sentiment that seems to cloud many people’s judgment. IE6 is really keeping the web from moving forward and I’ll be very happy when it’s no longer relevant.
Depending on the demographic for the website, I adhere to different rules. On a modern tech/gaming site, I make sure the site is compatible with only the latest automatically updated browser versions. Pretty soon that will be IE8, but has been IE7 since its creation in January 2008. For non-tech sites, I gave up IE6 compatibility at the end of last year, but avoided almost all inelegant hacks prior to that (potentially at the cost of graphical design elegance). All I do now is spend a few seconds to add the following site’s script to the end of the template: stopie6.org. I’m tired of developers discriminating against Opera, giving notices of incompatibility if it isn’t the two or three major ones. IE6 users are the ones who should be getting those notices.
I think I’ll add that badge to my tech/gaming site.
I’d be happy enough to let IE8 stay if it just killed IE6. Someone please, just exploit some vulnerability in IE6 that wipes it out on the user’s computer, and make the only fix possible is to install IE8 (or some other non-IE browser) :)
But seriously, this is going to do nothing for most of the users stuck in this state, except force them to switch between browsers regularly. Those users are of course, the ones on corporate-managed computers, either because they’re managed by some guy who couldn’t care less as long as Google.com rendered, or because some line of business app depends on it.
Those line of business apps don’t have to be ancient either – they can be brand-spanking new and still have the same problem; I work in the managed services industry, and none of the management/business platforms we’ve used/experimented with worked 100% in any browser other than IE6/7. (Haven’t tried IE8 though.)
The developers behind such software are the main culprits in perpetuating this mess, but Microsoft will never cut them out because of their importance in the Windows ecosystem. The push has to come from the customers. Microsoft has already offered the first step by providing a browser with vastly improved standards compliance (even if it isn’t 100% compliant).
And yet I have to view this website in compatibility mode for IE8, which is supposedly more css2.1 compliant than its predecessors. What is failing here?
Chris, if you want your work to be taken seriously then you should probably learn the difference between “it’s” and “its”.
Unfortunately, nothing in the article addresses a certain question I’ve always had ever since I started using Firefox and Opera: as everyone here already knows, sometimes a web page will render completely differently when viewed in anything other than IE (this is slowly becoming a thing of the past, thank God, but it still happens). Various browsers such as Opera (or Firefox, with the help of an extension) can change their UI string, basically lying to the server by telling it, “yes, I really am IE so give me the correct stylesheet instead of the borked one you give to the everyone else”. I could *easily* cite some examples of this but it’s already such a well-documented issue that you could do a quick Google search for yourselves and come up with all sorts of data.
There are plenty of times when doing something like that is necessary for a non-IE browser to render a web page correctly, but there is an unfortunate side-effect: when developers start looking at the stats for their web pages it looks as if 9 out of 10 people are still using IE, thanks to all those non-IE browsers deliberately misidentifying themselves to get the server to send them a regular (not effed-up) webpage to render. So I guess my question is: out of that alleged 40% of users surfing with IE, how many of those really *are* using IE (rather than using browsers configured to identify them as using IE)?
You shouldn’t group all IE together, because IE8 is a dramatic improvement from a standards point of view.
IE8 is available now. It seems to be doing very well on standards, anyone running Windows XP onwards would support web standards by upgrading to it.
Yes, IE6 got overtaken by the web because of Longhorn delays. I’m not sure it’s fair to say that is an imposition of corporate will, or just being too slow to update Mosaic.
You seem overly negative about MS and IE overall, IMHO.
Chad,
I’m normally a real stickler for precision in my writing, but this one slipped by me.
Chris
@eric The problem you refer to, when a Microsoft browser update broke embedding, was the fault of the broken US patent system. M$ lost a court case and were forced to make a change to embedding, or risk huge continuing damages. Yes it was a huge pain for everyone, but not M$’s fault that time. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eolas
@chris 100% agree. Also IE6 runs Javascript about 50x slower than modern browsers.
Having to do hours of extra work for each web project is reason enough to dislike IE, and Chris is making an extremely fair judgment call here – the guy even went so far as to say why he appreciates Microsoft as a whole (possibly in hopes of allowing everyone to read the article with an open mind). IE8 is a dramatic improvement over previous versions – unfortunately, it is still not a standards compliant browser (so they belong in the same group). If Firefox was not standards-compliant then it would be the same story for them – except that it would die out very quickly and never be seen again. MS has the advantage of bundling IE with windows, and of course, people use it. Seems irresponsible to release this to the masses, knowing full well that they’ll use it. It’s like issuing a cop a gun that fires bullets in random directions, and then saying it’s up to the bullet manufacturers to adapt their product.
Wow, thanks Pete. I stand corrected.
Speaking of compliance with standards:
“impose it’s corporate will” should be
“impose its corporate will”.
“in spite of it’s obvious shortcomings” should be
“in spite of its obvious shortcomings”.
Oddly, “the company used its monopoly position” is correct.
If you’re still reading, and not offended by The Grammer Nazi:
“it’s” is a contraction of “it is”
“its” is the possessive form of “it”.
This may be confusing because the possessive form of most nouns uses the apostrophe.
Patrick,
I am normally something of a grammar Nazi myself. This must have been written on a bad day.
Chris
Patrick,
“Grammer Nazi” should be “Grammar Nazi” ;-)
Don’t mean to intrude on something that really isn’t my business but what does Ebonics have to do with this? I know you used it as an analogy but I think it’s fail here. Please just leave us and our Ebonics alone sir..we have not done anything to you have we? Please sir, leave us and our Ebonics alone.
BTW, I used to work at Microsoft (a couple of years ago) doing software testing. I agree with you 100% on IE and its legacy.
I code to comply to W3C standards, and refuse to use any hack or proprietary crap like IE conditionals whatsoever.
If everybody did this, we wouldn’t have this problem.
Oh, and on the grammar nazi thing, if you think of ‘its’ being the same kind of word as ‘his’ and ‘hers’ it all becomes obvious.
http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/2009/02/20/the-end-of-ie6/
I wrote this back in February and it covers the same issues and presents a few options, like using the Pushup notifier to help users of any old browser (IE6, FF2) to realize there is a modern browser available and they really should upgrade.
I also created my own warning mechanism which is not as forgiving at Pushup.
http://www.smallsharptools.com/downloads/JavaScript/ie6upgrade.html
By using “it’s” when he should have used “its,” I’d say that he was in grammar quirks mode. :-)
Kelvo,
I was going for the most absurd analogy I could think of, and in this case I think it works pretty well. Maybe I should have borrowed a line from Lyle Lovett and used “what Hank Williams is to Neil Armstrong” instead.
Chris
Hi Chris,
I understand your intentions and all but why do you have to drag us and our vernacular into this? I’m sure there are many things that are more relevant to you and folks like you who read this blog that could make better analogies. I’m just saying that we and our vernacular didn’t do anything to you and so don’t you think we ought not be dragged into your excellent article. It’s not a big deal or anything but I hope you understand where I’m getting at with this.
I think Conway Twitty > Neil Armstrong
Firefox FTW!!.
Thanks Chris
Chris,
Ebonics is bad. I understand this is how many people talk, but that does not make it right. The analogy to IE6 usage is appropriate.
I was talking with a guy the other day and he used “axe” in place of “ask” in a question. This is something I said as a kid and my parents corrected me. When I hear an adult talking like this I get a negative impression of them.
I think this is a solid comparison. When I hear someone is using IE6, and does not want to upgrade, I get a very similar feeling to someone butchering our language.
Well check out Opera if you really want standards compliancy.
Keep in mind that many using IE6 to browse don’t have a choice. I’m an in-house intranet content developer for a fortune 100 company, and our standard PC load still includes IE6 as the only web browswer on a locked-down PC. The powers that be don’t know or care about web standards. Fortunatly (?), the company will be ugrading to IE8 sometine this year. My concern now is that some of my less standards-aware co-workers have been developing sites that display “correctly” on IE6 that will be broken in IE8.
Chris,
The main focus of this article is a good one. I used to use internet explorer and boy am I glad I switched. Aside from being hard to use, it also was very aesthetically unpleasing, which is something I’m very interested in as an artist.
However, the fact that you dragged Ebonics into this is extremely troubling. It’s heavily racist, and the fact that you didn’t realize how offensive this is to black Americans is ridiculous. Bashing a lousy web server is one thing; bashing a key part of the identity of one of the biggest minorities in the country is a completely different story. Then calling the comparison absurd— well, it’s not absurd, it’s unkind and thoughtless.
I hope you can realize you were at fault and do something about it, for the sake of people like Kelvo who felt he needed to start talking like an idiot in order to get his point across to you.
@ Brennan & Chris
I understand you may not like Ebonics but its use as a dialect is an integral part of my identity as a black person in the US. For most of us (Black folks) who are in the corporate world, we have a dual identify which we carry around that you may not be familiar with. In my case, I speak proper English (Queen’s English to be exact) when I am with co-workers and friends and I also use very limited English derived dialects (such as Creole, Ebonics, pigeon etc etc) when I am with friends and family in an informal setting. These dialects (Ebonics is just one of many) are part of our culture communication. These dialects aren’t meant to supplant the English language but act as a compliment to it. I hate to hijack this thread but I just couldn’t let that perceived slight go unanswered. I politely disagree with Becca Gin on the accusation of Racism. We all learn new things everyday. No education or learning opportunity is wasted in mu opinion. Hope that makes things a little but clearer guys.
@ Becca Gin,
You nailed me on the idiot part. I normally steer clear of discussing Race related topics on the internet because the discussions normally get overheated and nasty. My apologies if I sounded like a gayfish with my earlier posts. My first time on the blog (I got to this article via Digg).
Read the first paragraph that describes Ebonics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebonics
“it has been largely used to refer to African American Vernacular English (distinctively nonstandard Black United States English),”
It explains that while those who speak in Ebonics are speaking in English, they are speaking a non-standard version of it. This is just like how IE6 uses a non-standard box model implementation that varies from the standard that is implemented in IE7, IE8 and FF.
And as Kelvo points out, when he works in the office he uses standard (Queen’s) English but when outside the office he speaks differently and he is frustrated by having to switch based on his environment. I do the same with my friends to a lesser degree. I do not use profanity at the office, and with some of my friends I avoid using big words. :)
Consider the movie Juno. Many characters used terms which were very foreign to most of the people saw the movie. This review explains that you may need an Urban Dictionary to understand some parts of the movie.
http://truthoncinema.com/review/juno/
Watching the movie was like reading Huckleberry Finn or Shakespeare which used dialects that we do not use now. In the case of Juno and these other examples they add color and depth to the characters, but when I am on the phone with Dell tech support and I cannot understand the person on the other end because they have a thick Indian accent, it is a problem. I am frustrated by my computer not talking to my printer, and I do not need yet another communication problem with the call center.
I read that people working call centers in India were offended that they had to learn to speak English an accent that matches the people on the other end of the phone. They seemed to think that their inflection, tone and pronunciation somehow identified them. I thought this was strange because they are being paid to help people and their only means of communicating with with speech. It seems reasonable that they should do their best to be understood.
I have a friend who is from Thailand. I met her several months ago and she has been shy because she speaks broken English. I encouraged her to talk more and spend time with me and my friends. In a few months she is speaking more often, is less shy and her English has improved a lot. The other night when we had dinner we had a great conversation. She can now make more friends on her own because language is no longer the barrier it was months ago. This is a good thing and a benefit to speaking like others.
Becca Gins, do not boil everything down to racism. Much of the time it just comes down to cultural differences which cause undue friction. This past year I started to hear the talking heads on MSNBC use the term “dis” regularly. I winced every time I heard it. That was a term which was popular when I was in high school and I have not used it since. I am watching a national news show, not Juno. Can you imagine if the anchor man on the national news started injecting urban terms into the newscast?
Still, the analogy stands up. If you choose to use a non-standard form of English people will have trouble understanding you. Either you do talk a certain way intentionally or not, others will have difficulty. In the case of IE6, the browser does not understand the box model and implements it incorrectly. It also fails to handle many features that we expect today, like semi-tranparent PNGs and modern CSS selectors. The situation sucks with IE6 because I understand the need to keep a certain browser version in place because certain corporate applications still require it, but that is no reason not to use FF3 for use generally. IE6 for those internal corporate applications and FF3 for browsing public web sites. I do not understand why this is not an option in most places. Oh well.
@tech re: browsers identifying themselves as other browsers
There is no way on gods green earth that you actually think that any decent number of people even know that they can mask their browser as another let alone use it enough to skew the results of a website’s browser statistics. Were talking about the general public here. The ones who don’t know you can type an address in the address bar and type google into a google search bar to get to google so they can type in “new york times.com” in order to be told they meant nyt.com, which they don’t actually see that it says, but do proceed to click on the sponsored link for new york times home delivery because it’s the first thing they saw. No way they’re changing their browser agent, and no way any decent number of people could if they wanted to.
I totally agree. And how hard is it for a user to download and install a different/newer web browser? I’ve never really understood why some people don’t want to bother with such a simple task as upgrading their web browser.
It’s great that there are more browsers these days that are good competition for IE. IE is just one among many browsers, and with the continued rise of open-source (and open-standard) technologies like Linux, if Microsoft doesn’t change their ways, I imagine they will lose their dominance in the industry.
@Brenna,
I only tried to convey the cultural significance to you and why the analogy wasn’t valid in the first place. You don’t get it and I understand why you can’t get it. It was a fun back and forth. Cheers!
It is all very well for some to criticize IE – but after 15 years Internet experience – surfing actively since 1994 – there are many reasons to avoid Safari, Firefox and Chrome like the plague – and not for want of trying.
It is not a question of wearing the same set of clothes but not only is firefox less convivial than IE6 (pre migration IE8] it also comes with default ‘add ons’ that are intellectually unacceptable.
One questions the motives of some of those who rail against IE despite having participated in the elimination of Netscape which at one time was preferable.
*boggles* Exactly which default add-ons do you deem to be ‘intellectually unacceptable’ (whatever that actually means) and why?
Bunz,
I was wondering the same thing. I’m even more curious about what makes IE convivial?
Chris
My attention was called to this article recently by a classmate in my American Dialects class. She asked me to clarify a few points about Ebonics.
We spent some time studying African American Vernacular English (AAVE), sometimes called Ebonics. Our professor, who is a linguist, noted some of the linguistic structures in AAVE. It turns out that AAVE, just like standard English, has an internal structure and is highly rule governed.
There are some linguistic processes that have taken place to produce AAVE as a non-standard dialect of American English because African American communities have been historically separate in the in the urban North. Separation causes independent linguistic evolution. Other communities that have been separated or isolated have developed their own dialects since the beginning of language. Not only does this apply to the American Southern dialect, Appalachian dialect, and other American dialects, but this same process describes how all languages were formed. They first start out as dialects of a particular language, and with separation and time, they become distinct languages. Indeed, this is how British English was differentiated from its parent languages.
It is true that AAVE is different from standard English, but it is completely false that it is “broken English”, “bad English”, or only spoken by people who are uneducated. Interestingly, it is not even true that it is only spoken by people who are Black.
The comparison that Chris Berry makes to prove the point of his otherwise entirely valid article is faulty not because it points out a difference, which it does, but because it serves to point out a deficiency. Microsoft’s Browser is indeed different and may well be inferior to other browsers (personally I believe this is the case). However, although AAVE and standard English are different, AAVE is not inferior in any way as a language, a tool to express thought and communicate, to standard English.
The problems that other commentators have mentioned is the lack of understanding between speakers of different dialects. This will happen between speakers of different languages as well. Does that mean that one language is inferior? Of course not, it simply means that there are two different cultures and languages at play.
Rebecca, I hope this satisfies your request.
wow, this article is not about ebonics.
Interesting primary & secondary discussions here. I’m not much of a web developer, but I know I’m stuck on IE-6 at work due to compatibility with corporate platforms that are mission-critical. I use Firefox at home almost exclusively, and certain add-ons are part of its charm for me.
As for Ebonics, I am Caucasian, but grew up speaking it in addition to standard American English because of the demographics of my home town. It was nice to be able to fit in with all my friends. It’s also nice to know what the language variant is called, thanks to this discussion.
It’s too bad browsers aren’t identified as either corporate or personal to the web sites they visit. It’s also too bad they can’t use compatibility modes to be backward-compatible with legacy corporate apps.
Radonesque,
I had absolutely no intention of starting a debate on the relative virtues of Ebonics with this post, and I’ve done my best to keep my mouth shut when a few commenters insisted that I am somehow a racist for the use of a perfectly valid analogy. After reading your comment, I can’t keep quiet any longer. While it may be true that Ebonics has a rule governed internal structure, the idea that it is not inferior to standard English is pure nonsense. Standard English is the universally accepted language of business and commerce throughout the world. Can you say the same for Ebonics? The Oxford English Dictionary lists 600,000 English words. Can you say the same for Ebonics? Can you point out great works of literature written in Ebonics to prove your point? Politically correct nonsense expressed in academic terms is still nonsense.
Chris,
I’m not sure I have much business on your website, so I’ll make this my last post. I can’t speak for the other commentators, but I am in no way calling you a racist. AAVE is not linguistically inferior to standard English, in the same way that French, Tagalog, American Sign Language, and the many Native American languages, are not linguistically inferior or superior to standard English. Linguistically speaking, there are no primitive languages–all are equally robust and sophisticated. Socially, certain languages have more prestige than others, and there is no denying that AAVE is not valued in mainstream society. There are many worthwhile cultural artifacts that have come from these languages. American Sign Language has no written form, but there is a rich community of Deaf poets who use ASL as their medium to create beautiful and artistic works. In the same way, there is a vibrant rap and hip-hop community that playfully and artistically creates rhythmic sung and spoken poetry using AAVE (on this point you may want to do some research before considering only the most stereotypical types of rap songs). The value that languages and cultures have in their own communities is valid and cannot be derided or said to be inferior to the value of any other language or culture. Standard English has gained popularity not because it is a more pure and perfect form of language, but because of social and cultural reasons having to do with majority, race, and history.
I’m not an expert in web browsers, but as far as I understand Microsoft’s browser is inferior to other browsers because it lacks functionality–a point you explain well in your article. That there is something intrinsically wrong with Internet Explorer is probably true, but there is nothing intrinsically or linguistically wrong with AAVE, so no basis for the comparison.
ANYWAYS, I wonder if Microsoft’s IE wing is willing to reimburse me for lost work hours…. I would never sue unless there was no other choice, but I’m just curious – has there ever been a court case over that?
My company’s main site is for B2B so it must be geared up for lots of ie6ers. Looking at the analytics, the ie6 views are dropping quickly still over 50% that’s way down from 6 months ago. Even ie7 is not that great and I’m seeing less than a handful of ie8ers viewing the site. Being in the travel industry I’m seeing more hand-helds and that could be a problem if i wanted to be code specific.
Because of forward compatibility can code the newer browsers and if ie6 doesn’t pick it up I’m ok with that as long as they get the information.
Jack,
What you want to do is gracefully degrade for older browsers. This has been the intention of the web standards as they are updated over time. Older browsers (Even Firefox 3 will be considered outdated in a few years) can still render a page to a degree if you do it with degrading in mind. I wrote about how this technique is used.
http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/2006/09/05/preparing-your-website-for-ie7/
Jeffrey Zeldman is a well-known author who covers this technique extensively.
http://www.zeldman.com/dwws/
It is quite okay to do hackjob fixes when wrestling with IE’s malfunctions. Just last week, I was allowed to throw an innerHTML div in a table because IE was displaying some mystery text.
Before arriving at that solution, I downloaded a whole application just to compare the website in multiple IE versions. This download, at a whopping 200+ megs, was useless, like comparing crap-to-crap. The free application is called Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview. I installed it after downgrading to IE7 from IE8.
Fun!
re from above regarding ebonics: Separation causes independent linguistic evolution.
I’d say it in the case of ebonics de-evolution took place.
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