I don’t how many people even remember the olden days of web development. I’m talking about the time when under construction GIFs were accepted, even if a site had been “under construction” for over a year. It was during this era that what has been known as the “browser wars.” We pretty much all took a side, and our pages advertised quite obviously what side we chose. These ubiquitous banners saying “This Site Designed For…” inhabit some dark and painful corner of our minds. When the wars were over, it stopped mattering if you were a Netscape supporter or a Microsoft supporter. You survived and that was all that mattered.

People talk about the war; they say that Firefox started it up again. I don’t think I believe that. Microsoft and Netscape worked very hard at pushing the differences. These days, all of the major players (even Microsoft) work towards a standard. This makes all of our lives easier. I wake up and realize that one day in the future I won’t have to worry about whether or not my design works in both browsers.

Don’t misunderstand; it already has gotten much better, and we are continuing on that path, even if our progress isn’t always in the direction I would hope. But then I see something like this(theregister.co.uk), and I lose much of that faith. For even a small manufacturer to say that the standards are “too hard” or able to be compromised is a statement of arrogance. For it to come out of one of the major players is unforgivable. As a developer and designer, I want to know that by working with one set of rules I can reach the most people. As I have a number of Mac users in this audience (a member am I), as well as an important minority at my full time gig, I can assure you that any solution for me will address them. That solution has historically been the standards.

Reading this article, I find myself imagining a new series of website badges proliferating. It is this vision that shows that, despite all talk towards progress, we still feel the need to homogenize. Microsoft has made some unique strides as of late, and the corporate dialog is one of working together. They have sat on a broken html renderer for the better part of a decade. If Trident cannot be expected to handle web content correctly, it is past time to replace it. And if there are sites that get broken by this fact, it is time they were made to uphold the standards we have all agreed upon years ago.

Bandying around the term “backwards compatibility” is a disingenuous way to say that you are above the standards the community has set.

You are not.

It’s good to see that my website does handle IE7 fine.  Aside from that, I should post a bit of an update.  In the past two months, I got a new job and moved up to Boston.  i will be strating everything back up again soon, in case you are still waiting patiently.  (If so, thanks)

In my new job, I am blessed (HA) with a Windows development box.  This has been awhile for me.  I thinks that it has been five years since I have done web development on a Windows machine.  The world has changed a bit since I left; I’m just trying to figure out how.

For development, I have been working with Dreamweaver (pretty much the same as five years ago, except that I now strictly use code view).  Photoshop is the same throughout. 

In a month, I have lost at least two days of total time to Windows Update and AV updates.  The OS is still slow and feels cludgy (more so than Linux even).  I come home at night and enjoy simple acts of checking mail and surfing the web on the Mac.

Being on the OS does allow me to try out some of the new toys (reviews of which are forth coming).  I am actually writing this on Windows Live Writer and it actually seems to be fairly intuitive.  Here’s to a brave new world.

This moment is the one I have feared for months: IE7 is here. Along with this momentous day comes the possible breaking of a great many sites.

If you haven’t figured this out about me yet, well, I’ll just tell you. I see the worst possible end result constantly, and, in this case, my Powerbook is of no use in determining if I have reason to be frightened. I have heard good things about the betas, but I do understand that the rendering engine, while much better, has some different behaviors when playing with compliant sites. If you are a Windows user who has upgraded, please let me know if anything isn’t working with my site…