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 Administrative / General / 5293
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Subject: 
Why MSIE sucks for the HTML writer
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.admin.general
Date: 
Fri, 17 Mar 2000 21:26:36 GMT
Viewed: 
1359 times
  
In lugnet.admin.general, Mike Stanley writes:
Ok.  Do you have a form running now that demonstrates this inability in IE on
LUGNET?

I called it "bug" because IMHO it is a User Interface bug.  But yeah, more
objectively, it is simply an "inability."

Okie dokie, here ya go, here's a page with two forms...  Type text in the
boxes and hit Enter.  If nothing happens when you hit Enter, it's a bug.

   http://www.lugnet.com/temp/form/msieieio.html

Here's the document:

<HTML><BODY>
<FORM METHOD=GET ACTION="/">Form #1: <INPUT TYPE=TEXT NAME="q" VALUE=""></FORM>
<FORM METHOD=GET ACTION="/">Form #2: <INPUT TYPE=TEXT NAME="q" VALUE=""></FORM> </BODY></HTML>

Just tried this on MSIE3/Win32 and it failed.  Tried MSIE4.5/MacOS and it
worked.  (One hand clapping.)


Gotta admin, knowing your personal hatred for M$, these little "hey,
if you're using IE you may have a problem with this so complain to your vendor
but if you're using Netscape N/C you should be fine" announcements seem a
little silly sometimes.

It's much more a profound professional disappointment than personal hatred.
(I simply ignore MSIE altogether when I make personal pages.)

MSIE is/was a clone of NN.  It was an amazing feat what MS did back in 1995.
But in the cloning process, MS flarged up quite a few things -- perhaps
unintentionally, perhaps intentionally, but wrongly nevertheless.

Most of the incompatibilities are in the rendering engine ("devil in the
details").

One of the bugs, for example, is that MSIE puts extra whitespace _past_ the
border of a hyperlink image with a nonzero border.  That is, it correctly
draws the n-pixel border in <A HREF="..."><IMG BORDER=n ...></A> but then it
also ridiculously adds _another_ n-pixels of border around that.  :-/

Another bug is the way the leading is handled between <UL></UL> and <P> in
MSIE.  (I can't remember the exact details, but NN got it right.)

Antother (this one extremely braindead) bug is that MSIE sometimes likes to
break lines of the form "foo&foo;foo" at the entity boundary.  *WAY* wrong
thing to do when the entity is &reg; or &copy; -- or worse when it's a
European letter.

Another totally braindead UI problem (maybe they've fixed this recently?) is
that MSIE will stop loading a page if you click a link in it and the link's
target is a different window -- i.e., something that happens very commonly on
framed pages.

Yet another totally braindead MSIE problem is multiple-select lists with the
<SELECT> tag.  If none of the <OPTION> items within a <SELECT> have the
SELECTED attribute, MSIE is its infinite wisdom decides to auto-select the
first item for you!  Wonderful.  So you have to add an empty foofoo item at
the top if you're serving pages to an MSIE browser, if you don't want anything
selected by default.  (Perhaps MS has fixed this bug by now.)

I could go on and on.  It's really quite terrible what they've done, but not
really surprising.


You're certainly entitled to your opinion about browsers, and I would hardly
argue that both major browsers have major issues, but sometimes it almost
seems like you go out of your way to label one as crap while few but Netscape
employees would say different about its product.  :)

Nah, I'm well aware that NN has quite a few problems also.  What steams me
is that MS made MSIE 99% but not 100% compatible with NN.  "Embrace, extend,
exterminate."  Chairman Bill is only missing a monacle and a white cat.  ;-)


Not sure what that has to do with IE3/4/5, but if I were responsible for
administering publicly available systems (what a surprise, I am) I'd stick
with NN 3.0 (were I able to make that choice) for performance and stability
issues more than anything else.

Me too.  I liked a lot of things about NN 3.0 much better than NN 4.0+,
especially under Win32.

--Todd



Message has 6 Replies:
  Re: Why MSIE sucks for the HTML writer
 
(...) on (...) Works on MSIE 4.0 for Windows (98). James (URL) getting paid for this --> alladvantage.com Sign up via me, the reference $$ go to fund Lugnet. (25 years ago, 17-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)
  Re: Why MSIE sucks for the HTML writer
 
(...) Just tried that on IE5 and the searches worked fine. Entered the value and pressed enter. _ _ Scott Smallbeck scotts@contactics.com (25 years ago, 17-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)
  Re: Why MSIE sucks for the HTML writer
 
Todd Lehman wrote in message ... (...) IE on (...) <- snipped a bunch of incompatibilities -> Have you worked with a more recent version of MSIE than version 3? What might be interesting is to put up a test page with some of those other problems (...) (25 years ago, 17-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)
  Re: Why MSIE sucks for the HTML writer
 
"Todd Lehman" <lehman@javanet.com> wrote in message news:FrL4wC.GsL@lugnet.com... (...) IE on (...) VALUE=""></FORM> (...) VALUE=""></FORM> </BODY></HTML> (...) This works on IE5/Win32 (as someone pointed out). I don't have the Unix version or Mac (...) (25 years ago, 17-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)
  Re: Why MSIE sucks for the HTML writer
 
(...) This works fine with IE5. So it isn't a bug, unless you define a bug as something that didn't work 3 years ago. I'm sure we could find a lot of things in older (or current) versions of Netscape that don't work the way you or I want them to (...) (25 years ago, 18-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)
  MSIE5 better but still buggy (was: Re: Why MSIE sucks for the HTML writer)
 
Doing some testing with MSIE5 under Win98 under Virtual PC under MacOS9... Replying to my message from last night... (...) Fixed in MSIE5. Yay! (...) Not sure about this yet. (...) Fixed in MSIE5. Yay! But it looks like there's a new "oddity" ("it's (...) (25 years ago, 18-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Search button
 
(...) Ok. Do you have a form running now that demonstrates this inability in IE on LUGNET? Gotta admin, knowing your personal hatred for M$, these little "hey, if you're using IE you may have a problem with this so complain to your vendor but if (...) (25 years ago, 17-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)

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