Zeldman Does the Wrong Thing With IE7
Zeldman, whom I very much admire for his book Designing With Web Standards, seems to have a left a very bad example for the rest of the web development community when it comes to Internet Explorer 7 beta.
What’s he doing exactly? He’s concerning himself with incompatibilities between his site and IE7 beta.
If you’re wondering if you should be doing the same, testing your existing sites with this beta, in a word, don’t. The next beta will obviously improve upon the last beta as will the final release that comes some time after that (and the service packs and bug fixes that come after that) and if you spend your time looking for incompatibilities between now and then, you’ll be wasting a lot of time chasing a moving target. When it gets close to final release, you’ll know it’s time to check out how it fair with standards-happy code. (Just look for the multiple stories on Digg.) In the meantime, isn’t that time better spent getting real work done? What about that novel you’re always talking about writing?
If you do like this sort of compatibility exploration, why not delve into the next line of web standards we are looking forward to, like real implementations of CSS3 and SVG support? Exploring standards compatibility for your code is certainly a more healthy exercise than exploring IE7’s beta foibles.
Internet Explorer 7 is Not a Community Project
The other mistake Zeldman seems to be making and encourage others to join an unpaid test team for Microsoft.
Using IE7? Finding bugs? Microsoft and The Web Standards Project want to hear from you.
Microsoft has no shortage of money to hire oodles of testers and shouldn’t need your help in squashing their bugs. Remember, this isn’t Firefox. If you spend your time bug hunting with IE7 and the time to write up a bug report to Microsoft, you’re simply helping them make more money without paying you for your work. (Note that if they somehow rewarding people for finding these problems, that would make a little more sense to me.) If you do the same for Firefox, then you are creating something everyone gets to enjoy and benefit from.
Finding Beta Bugs Is Not Our Problem
Microsoft is a corporation and they certainly don’t need your charity to develop a web browser. Finding IE7’s bugs is not a community problem. It’s a business problem and it’s one that belongs to Microsoft.
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You make some very good points.
Although I can understand developers’ frustration & impatience with IE, it is, as you say, a product being developed by a very big company with enormous assets.
At the same time, hasn’t it helped that the standards community has made contact with the IE7 team, to try to “encourage” the development of a better browser? And isn’t it true that a better IE makes life easier for all of us struggling to write code for this bugger? Because, like it or not, IE in some form or another will be around as long as MS is–and there will always be people who just won’t take the time to download and use Firefox.
But I do agree with you. Maybe everyone who has been writing freebie bug reports should band together & negotiate for some compensation. At least some good swag!
I appreciate what you had to say. Actually I wasn’t worrying about incompatibilities between my site and IE7 (notice I didn’t change my site to “fix” the display in IE7). All I’m interested in is making sure that IE7 supports CSS correctly *and* doesn’t choke on hacks and filters the design community spent half a decade creating to compensate for standards compliance flaws in versions of IE prior to 7.
The second part of your essay suggested that it’s wrong to help Microsoft stamp out CSS bugs in IE7. You’re entitled to your opinion, but The Web Standards Project believes it makes sense to help a browser maker attain compliance. That way, the browser will support standards when it is released. Helping Firefox but not helping Microsoft doesn’t make sense if the goal is to have a web where all browsers support standards.
I certainly understand the perspective of the Web Standards Project and absolutely support them in their efforts to advise (or nudge) Microsoft and others to get products out the door that implement standards correctly.
I guess the part that stuck with me was what seemed to be a recommendation to the general dev community to pitch in with IE7 beta testing (and not just those directly related or involved in the Web Standard Project) and it just seemed like an unfortunate way to donate ones time, what with no end to better charity work available (technical or otherwise).
Regardless, much thanks to you for DWWS and everything you’ve done for the community. I’ve certainly learned a great deal from your work and appreciate the effort.
Everyman’s complaint:
This fuciking browser literally crashed my system. I thought you were full of shit and I generally support MS, but it fucking crashed my sytem. Thank god Windows has a sytem restore option. What a nightmare.
That’s why it’s beta software. Tread carefully.