Microsoft asks Webdesigners for help
No I am absolutely not kidding. After years and years of ignoring the standards set by the worldwide official acknowledged internet standard setting body the W3C Microsoft is now figuring that it better follows the standards with its up coming Internet Exploder 7. Now you may think "that is noble" - the irony on the story is that this will brake compatibility with the hacks that the webdesigner employed during billions of hours just to make their website work with Internet Exploder 6 and smaller - and every webdesigner in the universe can tell you the pain and lost hours felt because of the past incompatibilities - some have completely lost their nerve developing anything for the web. These old hacks that build on errors in the Internet Explorer code are now haunting Microsoft as it switches to standard conformity. It seems that Internet Explorer 7 is not displaying any CSS with hacks in place correctly - box model, fixed positioning etc etc. Microsofts solution? Ask the webdesigner to correct their code and write another set of code just for Internet Explorer 7. They MUST BE FUCKING KIDDING. Webdesigner have now developed a deep ensuring hatred for anything coming out of Microsoft in connection with the web and I predict either two of the following reactions to that "call". First their will be types of webdesigners who do not see that the Windows XP+ only Internet Explorer 7 will catch enough market share to reward changing the code - so in effect leaving all the hacks as they are and breaking IE 7 compatibility. Secondly their will be the purist webdesigners who take out all the hacks they can as fast as possible as they see this as the way out of the year long standards hassle and put a "IE7 and other standards conform browser only" sticker on the site. This will haunt Microsoft in the years to come and surely will eat into their market share as more and more consumers see them self confronted with websites that just don´t work with IE or look butt ugly or strange or whatever. Someone on the heise.de forums posted the Goethe classic "The ghosts that I called" and I can only say the master might not come in time...
Personally I never got around to use any of the hacks - all my code is 100% standards conform and it is and was always possible to do about any design with this - it just took more time - now I am happy not to need to change any code on any of the sites I created...
Read the Microsoft cry for help here.