ODP and IE

>I don’t believe that Microsoft has set any standards other than Windows OS and ActiveX

Microsoft has never set any standards. None. The entire company doesn't possess a single employee who has the faintest conception of what a standard is.

This is currently an embarressment for them, as they found (when trying to write specifications for their APIs as required by the court), that they'd never done such a thing before, and really didn't know how to begin.

No, the words "standard" and "Microsoft" don't go in the same sentence. And anyone who considers ActiveX an acceptable feature of a website, richly deserves every single one of the viruses he will inevitably get.

My web content design approach, rather than to pander to the idiotic software defects of the current Microsoft product, is to code HTML to internet specifications, and to avoid pushing the envelope in areas that I sense (based on my software development experience) are "difficult to implement correctly."

The disadvantage of that approach is that my website may appear different to me than it does to someone else who is so unfortunate as to not have the exact same monitor size, browser and version thereof, installed fonts, window size, font size, and eyeball focal point as I do.

The advantage is, that even if MicrobeSoft released another pathogenetic software version into the world, I am confident that the work I did will still remain just as freely accessible as before: since anyone who has a standards-conforming browser can view it: and such browsers are freely available, price-free, for nearly all computers that exist now (and, since there are multiple open-source browsers, I can also include nearly all computers that will exist in the foreseeable future.)

I've been doing software development since before the days that Fortran standards had year-numbers attached; and in that experience, portability has time and again been of great value: coding to the proprietary platform du jour has invariably meant all of everyone's work was made completely worthless within a few years at most. So the idea of doing anything I personally consider valuable ... for a non-standard platform ... strikes me as the most idiotic bit of insanity conceivable. There's too much work or permanent value to do, in my opinion, to waste any time reviewing sites that aren't going to survive through the next software version.

How you do your website is your choice. But ... I'd suggest talking to someone with a clue about robust portability before setting your mind in concrete, if it is not too late already.

A standard is most certainly not what is perceived by you or some one else. It is a set of rules, pertaining to a certain task, described precisely and be followed hence forth to accomplish that certain task. There are numerous API’s defined by Microsoft that are considered standard to accomplish a certain task. ActiveX, however flawed and inferior it may be, is still a standard by definition. I can point you to Merriam-Webster’s definition of a standard, “STANDARD applies to any definite rule, principle, or measure established by authority”. Let’s not get into the definition of authority, please.

defined by Microsoft that are considered standard

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Considered standard by whom?

What nationally or internationally recognized standards body did they work with?

What public process did they go through?

Just because the boys in Redmond write code or their own versions of software designed to lock out or screw up their competitors, does not make it a standard, no matter how loud they yell and shout.

And, their concerted efforts to damage or destroy industry standards (can you spell Java), is the proof of their bad intentions.

No, your beloved M$ is a bad actor in the standards arena. I've been to standards meetings where they have attended -- they only partiicpate when they can dominate. Huge? Yes. Well-mannered? No. Cooperative? Defiitely not.

But, getting back on topic. The point is that:

Editors are free to use the browser or browsers of their choice.

Editors are free to include notations on any site that is not compatible with other than MSIE.

Editors are free NOT to review a site for any reason (or non-reason) they choose. Note that not reviewing a site is vastly different than deleting a site.
Editors owe their allegiance to the directory and the surfer, not to the webmaster or the browser manufacturer.

Think about this: the average ODP editor could almost be called a professional web surfer. We have editorsw here who have performed more than 100,000 edits, which probably means they have visited 3 to 5 times that number of sites (since everything one does as an editor does not necessarily count as an edit in our internal system).

So, we have professional web surfers, and a huge percentage have made free will choices to use other than the web browser that was foised on them by M$ in an anticompetitive move designed to drive other vendors out of the browser marketplace. They use these browsers desipte M$'s highly aggressive tactices designed to discourage the use of third party browsers (such as making their own websites violently anti third party browser). Yet these editors kep using these third party browsers for their ODP and regular surfing activities.

What does that tell you?

a set of rules, pertaining to a certain task, described precisely and be followed hence forth to accomplish that certain task

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Isn't that a 'How to' document?

Surely a standard sets goals that must be accomplished and minimum specifications which must be met or exceeded.

I personally view Redmond output as an effort to produce the lowest possible commercially acceptable quality that avoids lawsuits. They obviously gave up long ago on their own attempts to meet the standard web specifications and began a campaign of noise to hide their incompetence - a typical marketing trick.

"Let's not tell them it is broken - let's sell the non-comformance as an improvement over the standard. User's are dumb and will believe what we tell them."

spectregunner said:

Considered standard by whom?

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Enumerable software developers that need logo compliant seal for their products.

spectregunner said:

And, their concerted efforts to damage or destroy industry standards (can you spell Java), is the proof of their bad intentions.

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I have never speculated on Microsoft’s intentions, bad or otherwise.

spectregunner said:

No, your beloved M$ is a bad actor in the standards arena. I've been to standards meetings where they have attended -- they only partiicpate when they can dominate. Huge? Yes. Well-mannered? No. Cooperative? Defiitely not.

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My beloved Microsoft! The whole point of this thread was to ascertain whether ODP editors share a clear and profound prejudice towards IE.

spectregunner said:

So, we have professional web surfers, and a huge percentage have made free will choices to use other than the web browser that was foised on them by M$ in an anticompetitive move designed to drive other vendors out of the browser marketplace... What does that tell you?

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It tells me that the end user of a product is free to choose a vendor. Describing OPD editors as professional web surfers does not entitles them to be perceived as a standard setting authority.

wjcampbe said:

Isn't that a 'How to' document?

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‘How to’ document may describe a standard in the context of explaining it’s implementation and deployment by the end user, in this case a software developer.

Thank you for your definition, riz, and for the benefit of your vast experience.

I have personally shepherded only three compilers through their first error-free DOD qualification at the highest available level of three different relevant ANSI, POSIX, or DoD standards, and one of those was believed unqualifiable by managament. I've only provided one primary review of a major draft Ansi Standard, and that was only for a minisupercomputer manufacturer (although it was for their primary programming language, and that WAS the LARGEST minisupercomputer manufacturer.) I've only been the technical review for four users' technical reference manuals, and only three of them were from mainframe computer manufacturers.

But I did have to be able to read those international, professionally-written, peer-reviewed, widely-implemented standards AND understand them well enough to implement them fully, so that programs that had been written for a completely different architecture (different underlying instruction set, floating-point-representation, word length, byte size, byte order, integer representation, and operating system) would give exactly the same results.

Oddly enough, I've also read some of Microsoft's "documentation" -- I had to, in order to write and debug software development tools that were used by over a thousand (inhouse) developers. And, in my admittedly limited experience, Microsoft simply was not able to list the parameters of a function and describe what the function would do for all combinations thereof. This was true even for standard libraries like the ANSI C standard libraries (which, as I mentioned, I had helped implement for one compiler) or like C++ STL -- where full functional specifications were already publicly available.

Although my experience is limited, I'd call your attention to a couple of other things:
(1) the "Ubersoft" cartoon, which even in the last millenium were making fun of this Microsoft inadequacy
(2) the current state of the EU antitrust litigation against Microsoft, where the company has admitted in court that the kind of documentation absolutely REQUIRED for a compatible implementation of a standard (and, by the way, required by the court) was "not something Microsoft had ever done before.")

So I don't think my experience is completely unique.

Dear hutcheson,

Let’s clarify a few assumptions:
- I have not raised any issues regarding your professional qualifications.
- I have never claimed that IE is a standard compliant browser.
- FireFox and Netscape browsers are NOT fully standard compliant. FireFox and Netscape browsers support exclusive extensions in implementation of CSS standard.
- I have never claimed to be an expert on anything, what so ever.
- I have worked for Intel and Motorola in the past as a software developer and I share your disdain towards incomplete implementation and documentation of Microsoft API’s.

>> described precisely <<

Is there a document that does this for the codebase you should use to make sure that your HTML renders in IE 5?

If there is, then why does the same HTML render differently in IE 5.5 and IE 6? That would mean that MS didn't even follow their own "standards".

Firefox and Mozilla cover a much wider amount of what is in the W3 HTML and CSS standards, than IE does, and then add a few extras on.

IE seems to go out of its way to do anything but what is in the standards, starting right at the very basics.

I am not in disagreement with the html standard compliance issues of IE. It is the precise reason why I asked the question in the first place.

giz said:

>> described precisely <<
Is there a document that does this for the codebase you should use to make sure that your HTML renders in IE 5?

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Pardon my ignorance, but I don’t seem to understand the context. If you are asking about the description and implementations of different API’s, MSDN is a very vast resource of insight into Microsoft’s interpretation of standards.

Microsoft’s interpretation of standards.

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That, in an of itself, is quite telling.

Why would anyone be interested in Microsoft's interpretation of standards? Wherever I've had to check, they've been wrong.

We're not really having this discussion, are we?

Some people use IE, some people use Netscape, Firefox, and other assorted browsers. Editors use whichever browser that they want. Let's please not get into an argument here about how we feel about Microsoft. There are plently of other forums and newsgroups that cover that topic.

My conclusion

I have formed an opinion based on all of the thoughts shared by the officials at ODP in this thread. My deduction have taken into account only the relevant information, pertaining to the actual question; Will ODP editors penalize a website delivering substantially enhanced content to IE users and not the others? It is quite apparent that some editors share a very passionate and a hard-line stand against products offered by a certain organization. While formalizing my opinion, this particular disliking, whether based on facts or hearsay, was not taken into account.

A website may not be penalized just because it delivers substantially different content to various browsers.

I have chosen the word “may” rather than “shall” intentionally. It is based on the opinion rendered by jimnoble in #3.

jimnoble said:

An editor who can't evaluate it because it requires proprietary browser features should leave it in the unreviewed pool

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There was further elaboration by jeanmanco in #9.

jeanmanco said:

If an editor realises that a site requires a browser he doesn't care to use, then let's say it is regarded as good practice to leave it for another editor to review.

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Based on these particular responses, it is fairly easy to hypothesize that the judgment, whether to remove a site from the review pool based on the underlying issue, is left to the reviewing ODP official. There is no set guideline to standardize this practice.

I appreciate the effort of all contributing individuals to share their opinion. (Some times quite passionately. )

That's a fair summary. As a webmaster, remember the corollary: if you want to help us not be accidentally unfair, make sure to tell us up front that it's an X-brand-only feature, so we can be sure to leave it for an editor who does brand X.

However, if a site appears to be totally broken - delivering nothing to the screen - when an editor reviews it in their browser of choice, then there is a possibility that it gets deleted with a note saying "not working / broken". A quick site:domain.com search in Google can yield the URLs of some other pages to try too, and I expect that quite a few editors would try something like that.

That said, any other editor spotting that a deleted site does still work (or has been made functional after being offline for a while) would be free to review it and add it back to the queue. I am sure that some editors have deleted sites that appeared to be broken, but would have worked for someone else, in the past - but the number is probably very small.

Editors do ask on internal communications "does www.whatever.com work OK for anyone?" quite regularly. Mostly the site is non-functional, but another editor often finds another URL that does work. It has been a rare experience for something to be totally non-functional in one browser and fully-functional in another; except where some esoteric plug-in was required (and not available for the particular OS, that the first editor was using).