Comment by mkmcdonald | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mkmcdonald | Hacker News Reader

These "developers" would have saved company X a fair bit of money by actually researching IE. Microsoft has graciously provided a massive amount of documentation covering most Internet Explorer variants and their quirks (via MSDN)[0].

One of the main problems in web development today is the creation of browser-specific code; "IE6" in particular is a scapegoat for poor code. I found that once I studied MSDN and wrote no browser-specific code that IE 8 became elementary to support. IE 7 soon followed. IE 6 & 5.5 were close behind.

For CSS, the key is understanding that every page does not need to look the same. Furthermore, reading MSDN's CSS compatibility grid[1] provides more insight.

For JavaScript, the key is simplification. Using DOM 0 events over fancy DOM 3 events yields big gains. Avoiding selector engines will also yield gains.

I'm getting very tired of incompetent web developers and their browser elitism. Do your homework.

[0]: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms533050(v=vs.85).as...

[1]: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc351024(v=vs.85).as...

Its not browser elitism when you have 4 browsers that work and 1 that doesn't. If you are doing trivial ui work, it is not hard to support IE. If you are doing anything close to innovative or competitive with what is out there, it is a huge pain.

s/browsers/platforms/. Don't lump all browser versions into one pile.

I can grasp what you're referring to. Bleeding-edge features are tough to support in large part because of Internet Explorer's slow release cycle.

However, the decision has still been made to jump onto a runaway train. All users should be treated the same. Choose an approach that doesn't pick favorites.

"Graciously", when IE browsers are the odd ones out, the most non-standards-compliant ones? I'd kind of take it as a given, and it still wouldn't remove the strikes against older version of IE.

BTW, when you refer to code that isn't "browser-specific", do you mean compliant to web standards? Or to the minimum working set between all browsers? Aren't most of the IE hacks people use "browser-specific" to IE?

The problem here is you're simply comparing applies to oranges. Internet Explorer 6 was released in 2001. For its time, it was a very nice product. IE 7 may have faltered a bit, but IE 8 was strong. Of course IE versions 6-8 are going to smell like manure vis à vis Chrome 27; a decade's elapsed. A proper comparable for IE 6 would be Opera 6.

Regarding your aside, I'm referring specifically to a generalized approach based on observations and not assumptions. I don't consider something trivial such as `event || window.event` browser-specific; it's a strategy used in accordance with multiple event models. You might be surprised to know that Microsoft created the blueprint for the DOM 3 event model (via attachEvent, etc.). They also were the first to use `innerHTML`, `innerText` and `Element.children`.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com