UPDATE, 12 March: due to being Slashdotted, Dean has taken the site down for the time being while he searches for another willing victim…er, host. Give it 24 hours or so. Oh, and nyah nyah nyah! I scooped Slashdot by three days!
Everybody who knows jack about Web design realises that IE is a scourge on the landscape of the Web. Most of us would probably rather see IE shrivel up and die a slow, lingering death than continue on as a browser.
Those people unlucky enough to pay their bills via Web design, however, might sleep a bit easier tonight knowing that Dean Edwards has developed a DHTML patch for IE 5.5 and 6.0 that brings full W3C compatibility to IE’s CSS rendering engine.
The delightful irony of this little gem is that it patches IE by using W3C-standard CSS.
Keep an eye on this site for a possible beta-test. I need some time to digest what Dean has done before I start messing with code again.
On a related note, I really really really REALLY appreciate the effort that went into something like this, and I think it will probably be welcomed with open arms by most of the Web design community.
But there’s a big problem with something like this, just as there is with user-agent spoofing:
It does nothing to encourage the developers behind the stupidity to FIX THEIR BROKEN PRODUCT. In fact, not only does it not encourage developers to fix the shortcomings, it may discourage them from doing so. Why put forth the effort to fix a problem when someone else has already done so?
An honest, forward-thinking developer would fix the code because it’s the right thing to do, but if honest, forward-thinking developers and managers worked for Microsoft, we wouldn’t have this problem in the first place.
Something to think about.
Look, they’e not going to fix it anyway. Their next Internet Explorer, whatever that will be, will only be a part of Longhorn. In the meantime, anyone who won’t update to Longhorn gets lumped with IE.
The only IE-related updates we expect to see at the moment are bugfixes. It won’t happen.
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