Postel's Law and IE8, was Linux... desktop

["Ted Roche-2" <user=127@nabble.blu.org>]

 On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 5:16 PM, Jonathan D. Arnold / Daemon Dancing 
<[hidden email]> wrote: 
> 
>  This 'robustness principle' by Jon Postel has been getting some 
>  seriously bad press lately: 
> 
>  http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html
> 

Yeah, but Joel has been taking a hammering on that essay, too. 

Take Sam Ruby, for example: 

http://intertwingly.net/blog/2008/03/17/Martian-Mindsets

And Mark Pilgrim: 

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2008/03/18/translation-from-ms-speak-to-english-of-selected-portions-of-joel-spolskys-martin-headsets

Anne van Kesteren documents her findings of MS plans for IE8: 

http://annevankesteren.nl/2008/03/ie8-bad

I think Joel guesses wrong on the outcome. Right he is that IE will 
continue to lose favor, but that ought to be true no matter which path 
they choose. I think a site designed to work correctly only in IE7 
ought to die a cold, hard death. It was my impression that IE7 only 
had a couple of incompatibilities with everyone else. A site that 
renders correctly in Safari, Opera and FireFox had better render 
correctly in IE8. Or we'll have to go back to the bad old days of 
"Best Viewed With..." 

Nothing renders correctly in IE6. 

IE8 could do worse that defining compatibility as rendering everything 
the way FireFox does. 

Whichever way it goes, we can count on continuing to live in interesting times. 

-- 
Ted Roche 
Ted Roche &amp; Associates, LLC 
http://www.tedroche.com

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