I’ve said before that I used to work on Internet Explorer. But when I worked on it IE really was effectively the only browser out there. We actually took compatibility with Netscape very seriously, but then we went way ahead and implemented more features from the standards. The problem is, we made mistakes in those implementations and since there were no other browsers, our mistakes actually became a sort of standard.

But those days are long long gone. Now it’s far more often the case that my code works “the first time” on every browser out there except for Internet Explorer. The other browsers are all more standards compliant by far. They also score better on the Acid Tests, and that’s why I love the Acid Tests.

When asked, Microsoft will say that the Acid Tests are random, that they aren’t developed with real world scenarios in mind. There is a great Microspeak term invented at Microsoft: the Acid Tests are a forcing function.

A forcing function is a situation or constraint that forces you to make a decision you would not make otherwise. For instance, in my end days at Microsoft, while working on the Windows Presentation Framework, one of the high level managers told me to come up with a plan to implement a feature that I was very outspoken about not implementing. I was given a week (I think) before presenting this plan to a group of all the highest level managers in our group. They were very sneaky saying that they didn’t necessarily want to implement it but if we did, how would we do it? The idea was to get me to do the work under false pretenses, then they would force me to put it in the product since it was already done. While talking about this later, the term forcing function came up, I hadn’t heard it before that. That situation was one of the nails on the coffin of my relationship with Microsoft.

Now that I’ve finished with my Microsoft story, I’ll say that learning the term was the best part of the experience because it describes that kind of situation very concisely.

The snakes were the forcing function that made me decide to mow my lawn on a regular basis.

If you decide to go live on the 10th, that’s going to be a forcing function for about five other required sub-projects and your bill is going to be a little higher than usual.

So Microsoft, it’s time to take your own medicine. We don’t care if you don’t think the Acid Tests represent real world scenarios. The truth is, fixing these bugs to pass these tests will actually and truthfully make your browser better. All the other browsers have proven it’s quite possible. You’re not protesting, as I was, out of a belief that the forcing function will make you do the wrong thing. You’re protesting because you’re incapable of actually fixing your browser.

Microsoft, please get out of the browser business and make everyone’s life easier. I’m tired of waiting for you to figure out how to write software.

Quick Facts

Featured Story

after Firefox 3.6 – new font control features for designers

What

Video and article showing advanced typography features coming to CSS

Who

Jonathan Kew, John Daggett

Excerpt

Using @font-face allows web designers a wide palette of font choices and with commercial font vendors supporting the WOFF font format, the set of font choices should improve even more. So the next step is clearly to try and make better use of features available in these fonts.

For many years, “smart” font formats such as OpenType and AAT have provided font designers ways of including a rich set of variations in their fonts, from ligatures and swashes to small caps and tabular figures. The OpenType specification describes these features, identifying each with a unique feature tag. But these have typically only been available to those using professional publishing applications such as Adobe InDesign. Firefox currently renders using font defaults; it would be much more interesting to provide web authors with a way of controlling these font features via CSS.

Håkon Wium Lie of Opera, based on discussions with Tal Leming and Adam Twardoch, proposed extending the CSS ‘font-variant’ property to include values for font features. Mozilla is actively working on a new proposal along these lines. This is a fairly big addition to CSS, so it will most likely involve some complex discussions about how best to support these features.

Comment

I’m so glad someone is working on this. The type community has embraced ligatures as far back as printing began. But the Microsoft powered browser team would never be able to appreciate or in some cases, even understand these features, and they certainly wouldn’t be the first to implement them.

When I worked there, there were people who appreciated type to some extent. The people who design all those fonts Microsoft keeps unleashing onto the world. Like everyone at Microsoft, though, can they really appreciate type very much to work in such a non-creative environment?

There still isn’t broad OS level support for ligatures, and Word has some very limited Office only implementation. That’s the funny thing about Microsoft, I keep expecting someone to say, “We have the most used word processor in the world and we don’t support this obvious feature.” But they never do. I worked on WPF, and that has support for a bunch of typography features, (tested using Zapfino) but I would highly recommend against using that. Microsoft won’t even use it.

Firefox has released a security update. Firefox isn’t my primary browser, that’s Safari, so sometimes I feel like there’s a security update available every time I open Firefox or Opera.

Of course I test on them, though. I like that there are multiple browsers now, it’s a much healthier community. And they’re all better than Internet Explorer. Open source also seems to really work for browsers. I think any time you need to conform to standards, your product should be open source. If there’s predefined work that people can do for free, by all means, allow them to do it! I wonder if Microsoft is aware of that concept?

One thing I would like is for Firefox to render form elements, such as text inputs, the same as other browsers. Firefox adds some space around them that’s not styleable, so firefox inputs are always a couple of pixels bigger than they are in other browsers.

This is probably the hardest I’ve ever worked on a WordPress theme so far. I’m sure there are a few bugs, but I went out of my way to make sure as much was themed properly as I could. The search results, archives, pages, are all themed appropriately.

The hardest part was actually the search box in the upper right. Not functionally, but I hadn’t realized that all the browsers render form elements so differently. If you you say a text input has a height of 18, Firefox will make it 20. And all the browsers render the “Search” button text at a different height within its space. I wonder if this is included in the Acid 2 or Acid 3? Anyway, I finally got it to be effectively the same on all browsers.

Then IE7, of course, doesn’t wrap floats as well as all the other browsers so I had to write code to insert a structural break between the rows of post thumbnails below and on the archive pages. But that wasn’t a huge deal.

And I love having the big area so I can display photos in large format and very clearly. Although most of my photos won’t be of dogs, I think it’s appropriate to celebrate the theme.

One thing I notice though is that sometimes it gets hung up when trying to load a page, right at the beginning before you get any information. It’s going to be interesting to see what kind of pressure these modern browsers put on Windows users to switch from Internet Explorer. There are four browsers now that are significantly better than Internet Explorer: Safari, Chrome, Opera, and Firefox. Businesses are bound to start making the switch sometime soon.