miscoded

There is a new and very Spolskyesque article on browsers, web standards and IE8 just out from the one and only Joel Spolsky.

Some selected quotes.. On the IE8 team being stuck between a rock and a hard place:

"The IE team has to walk a fine line..." This is incorrect. It’s not a fine line. It’s a line of negative width. There is no place to walk. They are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

On why "standards" generally aren't:

despite general agreement on what constitutes kosher food, .. you will not find a rabbi from one ultra-orthodox community who is willing to eat at the home of a rabbi from a different ultra-orthodox community. And the web designers are discovering what the Jews of Mea Shearim have known for decades: just because you all agree to follow one book doesn’t ensure compatibility, because the laws are so complex and complicated and convoluted that it’s almost impossible to understand them all

standards are sometimes misinterpreted, sometimes confusing and even ambiguous (...) it’s a platonic ideal and a set of misinterpretations

It's all so true. The web is badly under-specified (and quite likely anything as large and complex as the web and its underlying technologies would be, wouldn't it?).

However, while Joel has been busy selling MP3 players on Mars and watching Microsoft there are a couple of developments he's missed: maybe, maybe Microsoft has moved from what he calls a "pragmatist" position to an "idealist" position - but at the same time, the good old consortium has sort of moved in the opposite direction, from the merry idealism of un-implementable X-es to the grassroots pragmatism of HTML5.

Today the standard ITSELF is in beta, and planning to be in beta for a while among other things in order to figure out if it is compatible with the Web content. Standards Trotskyists are not cool anymore.

Joel asserts that we're dealing with "some mythical, platonic 'standard' that is not actually implemented anywhere". Actually, any modern standard has a reference implementation, it's called a test suite. (Note that I'm using circular logic here: if a standard doesn't I won't call it "modern" ) HTML5 will even have reference parsers. It's not quite the mind-reading validator which checks that your CSS rules are according to the spec and do what you had in mind. A site's compliance to the standard can't be tested beyond basic structural validation - but the user agent's compliance can! And the IE team understands this situation very well, as evident from the fact that one of the spin-offs from their CSS 2.1 implementation is a public test suite!

For all those websites Joel found that were broken in IE8, some of them may be broken due to bugs in the new implementation, some because the IE team fixed their CSS parser before implementing the specific issue a parser-based hack worked around, some because of the site violating standards generally and the rest - the whole lot of them - because of user agent sniffing. Every site and every detail needs analysis. We don't know yet to what extent the improved standards support causes these failures. Microsoft will have to figure that out over time and see on each count what there is to do about it. Even if it's down to the nasty quirks of client-side browser detection it may be possible to add workarounds. For example, if it turns out that most CSS served within IE conditional comments is now harmful, IE8 could stop parsing STYLE and LINK rel=stylesheet tags inside conditional comments unless the comment explicitly targets IE8.

Finally, Joel describes a world where the players don't cooperate. Today browsers are from Venus, we've spent more than 10 years exploring each others' quirks and collaborate on making compromises. Compromises that can be disappointing but useful. Joel is excused for not noticing, since we already know he's from Mars.