Internet Explorer 8 not fully retarded after all

Hooray! The IE dev team has buckled under the delighted backlash of web developers world wide and announced that IE8 will render in standards mode by default. As they cheerfully note themselves, this is a blatant retraction of their earlier announcement, which essentially required developers to explicitly force IE8 to not render like it's retarded siblings.

This is pretty heartwarming, especially since Microsoft has a pretty terrible track record for listening to web developers. Backpedaling on this extremely stupid decision is a welcome change to the typical "well, we're the guys eating paint chips for lunch, so it defintely makes sense to us!" stance.

I do secretly wonder what the catch is. Given their track record, They'll probably break something. Like ACID2 compliance :(

My urge to kill is like a cake in the oven...

Rising, to be precise. I'm reading up on some seriously dumb suggestions regarding rendering compatibility introduced in IE8, which fortunately is met with furious disdain. However, some people seem to advocate using this approach to "fix" bad web development for no reason other than that it makes sense in Bizarro World.

Once I've calmed down I'll try to express my feelings about this crazy idea in words.

PWNED!!11!1 :)

So yeah, this is a day to remember: I screwed up a practice for the trainees :)


A stupid, innocent little mistake, really: In order to make them play with CSS filter hacks, I made a practice XHTML file that they needed to style in certain ways in certain browsers. I mixed up the conditions a little to get a fresh test case for them, and made the following mistake:

"I want my text to blink in Internet Explorer 6 and Opera. In the rest of the browsers it will be nice and quiet"

…and that's not possible. IE6 doesn't support text-decoration: blink;. I should have noticed that slip-up while rearranging the conditions in the page, but I didn't. The trainees found it staring at them like a bleeding carcass.

That was a damning moment right there :)

All your base are belong to Firefox

One of the more beautiful early consequences of bad planning in CSS is that trainees make beginners' mistakes. Like trying to amend for default margins with absolute positioning and negative margins for child elements of those that cause the margin to begin with.

However, one of the guys managed to present me with a wonderful challenge I've yet to replicate: he managed to use the following element:

<base href="/" />

Yet he managed to make this work on a mini-site while navigating on his local filesystem and only found out he was in trouble when he looked in IE6. It's nice to be subjected to insanity like this. Trainers really should be more fallible :)

My ticket for hell is booked

This morning, I started out with giving the trainees a practice lesson in unusual box shapes. People familiar with Eric Meyer would probably recognize the experiment, except I didn't give them one example layout -I gave them three.

This is the "intermediate" box they have to deal with:



Right now, the over-courageous trainees easily finished the first and are now in one hell of a quagmire. One of them is almost done, but only pulling in by the skin of his teeth.

I am such a jerk.