CSSquirrel A look at web development and web design by Kyle Weems

I’m not a browser security expert, so I’m not weighing in on the topic as such. However, I am a web developer/designer/guy with a slash in his title, so I certainly feel free to hurl my opinion at the topic regardless.

Today’s comic is in reference to Internet Explorer’s dirty little habit of MIME-sniffing, a process by where under certain circumstances the browser politely thanks a file for trying to tell it what it’s Content Type is, then proceeds to beat it about the head until the file cries uncle and sobbingly agrees to be something else.

(I’m aware that all browsers to an extent have to do some sniffing around in certain circumstances. But rather than chastely sniffing a guest’s shoes, IE is the dog that has stuck it’s head up someone’s skirt, only to frequently come to the wrong conclusion as to what it found).

This is bound to be useful in some cases, I’m sure, such as backwards compatibility with old servers that serve all html pages as plain/text. However, historically there’s been an number of reasons to not do it, such as pictures with bad script hiding in them that IE goes ahead and runs, and the fact that it goes against specifications implementation. While we’re at it, it continues to subdivide the Internet into two different groups, those users that see a page as it should be (with a standards-compliant browser), and those that don’t (with IE).

The good news is that according to this post at the IEBlog, they’re fixing a lot of this with IE8. The bad news is, they’re not going as far as they should, for example: “…if Internet Explorer finds HTML content in a file delivered with the HTTP response header Content-Type: text/plain, IE determines that the content should be rendered as HTML.” All in the name of ‘compatibility’. The only way for a page to be rendered as plain/text in IE8 when it has an HTML tag in the file is for the server to include authoritative=true attribute to the Content-Type header.

So… wait, we’ve got to opt in for plain text files to render properly in IE8? That sounds familiar, a lot like IE8’s original plan to force developers to opt-in to rendering their sites correctly in IE8 with a new meta tag. If you didn’t include this little tag, your page would render in all future browsers as it would in IE7. Long story short, that created such a storm from developers that the IE8 team stepped back and changed their minds.

I don’t think that rendering plain/text files as HTML if they’ve got markup in them is an equally volatile subject, but it seems that this new, IE-specific attribute is another step away from standards, rather than toward standards. I think Microsoft is slowly wandering out of the dark and into the sunlight that is a standards-compliant Internet, but I get the feeling that the company will have to keep being poked with sticks to keep it moving in the right direction.

(this is reprinted from my workplace blog here where it was originally posted.)

Either Microsoft came to its senses, or I’m going crazy. I haven’t decided which yet, as it’s still early in the day and the caffeine hasn’t kicked in. In a surprise annoucement Microsoft declared that contrary to their prior decision on the matter they’d be making Internet Explorer 8 support advanced standards by default. Their now infamous meta tag will still exist, allowing a site’s developer to choose instead to target their site for an older version (such as IE7), but those who fail to do that will have their sites render in as up-to-date a fashion in IE as they would in any other browser.

Reactions vary, with critics either skeptically stating that Big Blue is doing this due to recent EU legal conundrums or are caving in to mass complaints of the developer community. On his part, Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer, says “Microsoft recently published a set of Interoperability Principles. Thinking about IE8’s behavior with these principles in mind, interpreting web content in the most standards compliant way possible is a better thing to do.”

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(this is reprinted from my workplace blog here where it was originally posted.)

Like the kid that just won’t start poking the wasp’s nest, A List Apart has decided to push the angry topic button of the web development community by posting not one, but TWO new articles this week about the already infamous decision by Microsoft to incorporate a version targeting meta tag in Internet Explorer 8.

I’ve already poked my toe into the swimming pool of controversy in my post Loud Noises!, where I tentatively agree with the whole idea. After all, Netscape did essentially the same thing when they introduced the DOCTYPE tag as a way to control standards mode, and nobody got together a group of vassal warriors, went to their hall and burned it while standing at the door with swords. But Microsoft, being the two ton gorilla it is with a standards compliance history that is spotty to say the least, apparently hasn’t earned the right to try to follow suit and keep the Internet from breaking on their newest browser when it is released.

In his article They Shoot Browsers, Don’t They?, Jeremy Keith essentially says “Hey, we shouldn’t add a single meta tag just because one browser needs it.” Well, I hate to break Mr. Keith’s bubble of fantasy, but the fact is that for now, the vast majority of people on the Internet are using Internet Explorer. Heck, IE6, which is eons old and about as standards compliant as a clown on a unicycle (no, I don’t know what that metaphor means either), has a larger market share than FireFox and Safari combined. Add in IE7, and their share is so large it hurts.

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