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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Friday 30 May 2003 (Day View)

Mon 26 May | Tue 27 May | Wed 28 May | Thu 29 May |   Fri 30 May   Sat 31 May | Sun 1 Jun | Mon 2 Jun | Tue 3 Jun |

30.05.2003 – Friday 30 May

• I slept in and missed my first two lectures. Who cares what I did for the rest of the day.

Internet

• I’m disturbed by the news that Internet Explorer 6 is the last stand-alone release, all new releases will be an integrated part of the operating system and thus aren’t available without upgrading your entire operating system – rather expensive. I fear this will mean that people will remain using IE6 for a lot longer than they otherwise may have, which will in turn drastically slow down the uptake of new technologies, or rather, the uptake of existing technologies. There is very little point in building websites that can’t be viewed by the majority, and the majority are now stuck with IE6. Mozilla and Netscape are still not, in my opinion, good enough for general use – and neither is Opera. One possible consequence I can imagine is that people might be able concentrate on building pages that will work in IE6, which apart from its box modelling is quite good, rather than the never-ending race to implement the latest cutting-edge feature. I find that I can work around IE’s positioning and box modelling quirks, and a simple fix for their incorrect font-size representation, but I can’t work around the problems my site has in Mozilla. Why? Because the problems are caused by bugs in Mozilla, whereas IE incorrectly (according to the standards) interprets CSS, but at least it’s rather bug-free. To the best of my knowledge, my site currently works in IE5 with a few cosmetic issues degrading nicely, and works almost perfectly in IE6. Switch to Mozilla and the bugs become apparent, which really annoys me as there’s no way to work around a bug, and they’re the same bugs present in Netscape 6, I’d have thought someone would have got around to fixing them by now. Mozilla (and Netscape) doesn’t even work properly on my secondary monitor – and I’ve tried it in three different operating systems and two sets of video cards so don’t try to tell me it’s a driver issue. Opera, well... I have Opera open right now, marvelling at the numerous relatively simple things that it doesn’t get right with my fully-standards compliant code. I have links, which are justified and have a border around them, sounds simple – Opera can’t handle that. Anyway, that all got rather long winded and wasn’t what I meant to say at all. I was supposed to be coming to the point, which I’ll try to do now. The way I see it, IE has very good real-world support. I can make a site and it works in IE without any bugs and in a consistent manner. My code is fully compliant with the W3C’s recommendations – I don’t even allow a CSS warning. Admittedly, I have to be a bit sneaky to fix IE’s font sizing, but if you want to be pedantic, you could say that IE’s font sizing works just fine – it’s just different to the current standard, although it wasn’t when they first implemented it. The rest works as it should. That’s what I’m trying to get at – it works as it should. Perhaps not as the standards say it should, but it’s easy to code something that will look exactly like I want in IE. Doing that in Mozilla however, is anything but easy – and impossible with Opera. They simply have too many inconsistencies. I currently have issues where Mozilla can’t handle element resizing, changing elements from display none to display block causes grief to the surrounding elements, switching from display inline to display block works, but switching from display block back to display inline doesn’t. It’s just not consistent.

Afternoon

• I dropped in at the shops on the way home from uni and did some shopping and got XMEN out on DVD, which I later watched.