AngstyBill is back.

The IE7 Myth

The IE compatibility team contacted this guy to say his site didn’t look right in IE7 because he was using IE6 CSS hacks to correct for bugs which are now fixed in IE7. That sounds like a fairly reasonable concept, unless you actually know how a CSS hack works.

CSS hacks are little bits of CSS that trigger bugs in certain browsers, which allow a website to specify different code for different browsers. Generally the idea is to make good standard code, then use a CSS hack to apply a fix to one specific browser which doesn’t follow the standards, and thus hoarks up your good standard code. The CSS specification actually specifies that invalid CSS should be ignored, so all other browsers simply ignore this extra kludge and use the good standard code.

The problem with what the IE team told this guy is that if they really did fix the problem in IE7, it should ignore the code like other good browsers do, and the hack will have no effect on the page layout. If the hack really is causing problems in IE7, then IE7 still has CSS support problems causing it to try to interpret the extra code. Short and sweet, either IE is still broken or this isn’t really a problem.

Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence. I think it’s very likely that these people are just dumb. However, being Microsoft, it’s hard not to think of the possible malicious intent. Their suggestion of removing the CSS hacks to fix IE7 will obviously break the page in previous versions of IE (or the site wouldn’t be using the hacks in the first place). If a whole bunch of sites stop working in IE6, many people will upgrade to IE7. That in itself is probably a good thing. However, IE7 is only for XP and up. I think there’s been enough Firefox publicity that a user would switch to an alternate browser first, but I’m sure there are people who will find a site that doesn’t work on their Win2k/IE6 box and instead pay for WinXP so they can upgrade to IE7. So is MS asking you to help them break a bunch of older PCs to force an upgrade, under the guise of updating your site to work with their new “standards-compliant” browser? It’s impossible to know for sure, but I wouldn’t put it past them.

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Hellooooooo nurse!

http://www.myspace.com/invisibilldotnet
Well, I still have a little bit of fixing, but it’s much better than the pile you start with…

Mike Davidson is a god.

Nope.

I’ve set up a phpBB at http://www.invisibill.net/forum/ if you have any feedback or whatever. If it doesn’t really work as a comment to a post here or you want to contact me about something completely different, that’s a good place to put it.

This is in no way just another geek thing for me to play with. =)

yes i’m alone
then again i always was
as far back as i can tell
i think maybe it’s because
because you were never really real
to begin with
and i just made you up
to hurt myself
and it worked
yes it did
there is no you
there is only me

FCC Chief: AT&T Can Limit Net Bandwidth

FCC Chief Kevin Martin yesterday gave his support to AT&T and other telcos who want to be able to limit bandwidth to sites like Google, unless those sites pay extortion fees. Martin made it clear in a speech yesterday that he supports such a a “tiered” Internet.

Last year, AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre said Google and Vonage were “nuts” for thinking they could “use these [AT&T’s] pipes for free”.

So even though Google is paying (someone) for hosting/bandwidth to run the site, and we the customers are paying our ISPs for our internet connection bandwidth, the ISPs should also be able to charge the sites? As it is is, both ends of the connection are already paying for the person to look at the website. When websites pass these extra costs on to end users based on their ISP, I wonder how much money the ISPs will make off that after all their customers have switched to ISPs that don’t incur these extra costs?

It looks like Mr. Whitacre may have realized this, or it may just be spin to make you think they’re not trying to charge as much money as possible for anything anywhere near them. “Any provider who blocks access to the Internet is inviting customers to find another provider,” Whitacre said in his keynote speech. “It’s bad business.” He then emphatically stated that AT&T would not block independent services, “nor will we degrade [Internet access]. Period, end of story.”

While we’re on the subject of telcos, what happened to all that fiber that they’re running to everyone’s houses? You know, the 86 million households with 45Mb (both ways) connections by 2006 that got them $200 billion worth of tax cuts and incentives. You can find a couple articles about Bruce Kushnick’s book on this topic here and here.

I got talking with someone about personality stuff last night. I found a little test for it. It’s fairly short, but seems to be a pretty good judge too. http://keirsey.com/ and http://typelogic.com/ have some explanations of the different types.

The test said I’m INTJ. It doesn’t seem perfectly accurate (we all vary some), but it’s a pretty good description of me.

I’ve created another little util. This time, it’s an extension for Thunderbird that lets you easily report spam to SpamCop. Check out the MozillaZine thread or SpamCopper’s home. It’s just a directory with a few files now, but it will probably get a real page at some point in the future.

I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.
–Albert Einstein

Indeed.