A Virus the World Needs : How to Topple the Reign of Internet Explorer
Posted by Luke Ludwig Sat, 20 Oct 2007 22:39:00 GMT
For my first project at my new job, a Ruby on Rails position with Team Sport Technologies, I implemented a table builder, which allows a user to create simple tables using their browser without writing HTML or any other special markup. My JavaScript was a bit rusty, so it took a few days before I had the table builder complete. I was working with a brand new Mac Pro without Parallels installed, and so I had yet to try the table builder in Internet Explorer, but it worked perfectly in Firefox, Safari, and Opera. I soon found out that it failed miserably in Internet Explorer. I was assuming it would be a quick fix, but it turned out that Microsoft's implementation of the DOM Event model is so messed up that I had to redo the entire implementation using a different approach.
Internet Explorer is a source of constant frustration and wasted hours of web developers across the world. All other web browsers follow standards set by the W3C World Wide Web Consortium describing how web browsers should interpret Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript, and the Document Object Model. Books on these subjects dedicate dozens of pages to detailing the crazy hacks that programmers need to use to get their web sites to operate in Internet Explorer. Microsoft breaks many of these standards intentionally, and can get away with it simply due to having a majority of the browser market.
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