Microsoft can’t be bothered
Not more Microsoft bashing …
… or maybe just a little:
Internet Explorer 5 was the first browser to implement all (or was it 99%?) of the CSS1 specification. That was in March 2000. Good work, boys and girls!
My copy of Internet Explorer 6 claims copyright 1995 - 2001. As far as I can tell, there are no updates available for it. It only supports a subset of the CSS2 specification. That’s OK, nobody’s perfect. On the other hand, they’ve had some years to work on the rest. But I suppose it’s hard for such a small company to make the resources available.
On Microsoft’s site there is a useful list of the properties and attributes supported by the IE6 style sheet implementation. That’s fine, too, if we leave aside the way they have put in extra ones on their own initiative, which is not particularly conducive to standardization and interoperability.
So all I really want to complain about is:
- there is no list of unsupported properties and attributes.
- Internet Explorer 6 does not reliably ignore things that it does not understand, as required by the definition of conformance in the CSS2 specification. This means that you can’t simply set things up so that Explorer can understand them and then add more rules for more advanced browsers: the extra rules confuse it and sabotage even the ones it could, in principle, deal with.
- The Microsoft site does not adequately document the differences between the different versions of their browser. Maybe because…
- In any version, the whole thing is full of bugs. Microsoft has not documented them, either.
Microsoft must know all of this. But they don’t seem to care about the extra work it makes for everyone else. No bug-fixes, no warnings …
… looks like they just can’t be bothered.
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