Comments on: The innovation balance

By: AlexW

AlexW — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 00:40:14 +0000

Ralph hated IE.

By: Therin Irwin

Therin Irwin — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 23:29:23 +0000

There’s a pretty reasonable argument that the answer to that question is: never. Don’t do FF-only things. Waving the banner of “standards compliance” and saying “well, it’s the IE development team’s fault for not bothering to implement all of CSS” is pure sophistry, and you know it.

Well, yes, but a well known Ralph Waldo Emerson seems to think otherwise:

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

(Self-Reliance 1841).

We should be ourselves, our own body, and escape to whatever we think is true and good in our own mind (which is NOT internet explorer). No one should be shot down because they don’t conform to YOUR intentions.

By: andrewcook

andrewcook — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

Paragraphs can be your friend.

By: charmedlover

charmedlover — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

I think designing fun things like the examples you gave are fine to do if they aren’t needed for anything except experimenting. But yet one doesn’t work in Opera so I’m a little displeased.

By: sde

sde — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

i feel where you're coming from, but what about all the proprietary scripting you can do with IE?

so developing for just IE would be like just developing for Firefox. not the answer.

most viewers of my sites are on IE, .. and i would bet that a lot of them are technically challenged enough and probably don't really care about 'tools'

don't get me wrong, .. firefox IS like sliced bread, but unless you can control what people view your site with, then abandoning IE would be fatal to your web viewers.

By: AlexW

AlexW — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

Maybe we need a 10 commandments of DOM manipulation.

1. 'Thou shalt speak unto the all the little browsers, that of both paupers and kings'

2. 'Thou shalt not found thy entire house on the shifting sands of JavaScript!'

3. 'Thou shalt not covert CSS3'

Ok,.. three commandments doesn't sound quite as good, but I'm sure they'll come up a treat if we can chisel them into some rock or something.

Any other commandments? ;)

By: bwarrene

bwarrene — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

Thou shalt break all rules necessary to achieve client happiness. ; > )

By: Andrew

Andrew — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

But totally rad DHTML wizardry like Sitepoint’s first-click-on-the-page-gets-you-a-popup works cross-browser, baby!

By: Mark Wubben

Mark Wubben — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

Actually I’d say the wall is Safari and Opera. Those two browsers have made for almost all cross-browser problems I’ve encountered while working on sIFR. Of course Mozilla is more advanced than IE, but for me I haven’t run into the differences yet.

By: jbot

jbot — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

You should be coding for all browsers and all occassions. Blocking a browser with 95% market share is frankly idiotic and not good commercial sense. Come on, Sitepoint are capable of writing far better articles than the nonsense in this one.