Posted using Mozilla Firefox 3.0.5 on Windows.

Hm, actually I think we can’t diagree with each other. We just see the situation from a differen perspective.

The current situation simply is, that modern browser are close to each other, while IE is far away from them. If IE doesn’t move, it’s bad for the web (and its standards). If IE moves, there’ll be a big loss of backwards compatability.

Both are no good, but given the current situation it makes more sense for IE to move.

Besides, IE includes both user and developer contolled functions to mitigate the worst-case scenario (a site that can’t be handeled). What to think about these functions is a different story.

Posted using Mozilla Firefox 3.0.3 on Windows.

*Mitch has a dream sequence with bids chirping, cute animals frolicking in a field by a fresh, sunny morning… and one single properly validated CSS file for his whole website, for all browsers)*

I however disagree with you on what would actually happen on a DOM overhaul for IE: while correcting CSS support in IE 7 did bring corrupted pages, one could still use workarounds to navigate:
– scrolling to deal with f*ed up boxes resizing in an unexpected way
– tabbing to deal with f*ed up z-index boxes overlapping
And quite rarely, a browser crash (CSS intensive sites dealing with IE 6 idiosyncrasies could trigger some bugs in IE 7).

However, DOM support may produce the following:
– older page detects an Internet Explorer (through UA sniffing MOZILLA/4.0 + MSIE, for example): it loads IE-specific code for IE 9. It fails.
– recent page uses standard dynamic DOM for all browsers, user still has WinXP with IE 6, 7 or 8: page won’t load (currently, IE can’t deal with DOM modifications before what other browsers call “DOMContentLoaded”)

Meaning that IE 9 correcting its DOM support will lead to a lot of sniffers rewrite.

That is, provided IE 9’s DOM support matches other browsers’ (which aren’t identical either, although tests like Acid3 actually helped).

Posted using Mozilla Firefox 3.0.3 on Linux.

The web – or at least some other factors – made Microsoft to enable IE8’s Standards Mode to be the default. That’ll cause much trouble again, though it’ll be slightly mitigated by their meta madness. the devs stated that they prefer not to add another mode but they could if they wanted.

Even if they do, the web or at least those other factors will make IE9’s Standards Mode the default again. Meta mitigates (the meta tag is made forward compatible for such cases).

It’s true, that Microsoft can’t remove things like document.all anymore, but fixing the DOM is possible. If IE 9 wouldn’t include a major DOM overhaul, it would be its end.

BTW, it looks like Win7 may come out next year. It’ll include IE8. Since many companies don’t like Vista this could be the needed boost to finally eradicate IE 6.

Posted using Mozilla Firefox 3.0.3 on Windows.

Correcting the CSS was relatively easy: with many websites still being table based, the majority of all websites remained functional if ugly. If you try to improve DOM support, stuff like white spaces not being taken into account in DOM, two ‘event’ objects and some other not-quite-standard-but-it-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time stuff will, this time, make websites go boom.

Now, this would probably be greatly mitigated by Firefox’s market share having forced most websites to correct these shortcomings; but, we still have one bad thing remaining:

IE6, and its DOM support, will be supported until 2014. Yeugh.

The way I see it, the only way to really get DOM support upgrades from MS would be if next WinXP (and Vista) SP contained a DOM-corrected browser. Or we’re in for another metatag switch.

Posted using Mozilla Firefox 3.0.3 on Linux.