Gluemeat

Guess what folks? It’s almost November! It’s almost Gluemeat’s anniversary! So you know what that means… A NEW GLUEMEAT WEBSITE RE-DESIGN!!! Will it be as appreciated as the last one was, or will it be as controversial as the Year 2 design? Time will tell… but one thing is for sure, I want it to be busy; give the users access to a lot of features real easily, but busy. Anyhow, you’ll see how it turns out in a couple of weeks. Trust me, I’ve been toiling hard!

It’s important I share with you know that I have taken the solemn decision to no longer design the Gluemeat website in accordance to Internet Explorer and its skewered web standards. It may sound like Im abandoning the bulk of web users and giving them the big heave-ho, which may come off as a completely preposterous attempt of turning me into a self-righteous David against a very large and capable Goliath.

But no. The new Gluemeat web site will look fine in IE. Not perfect, but fine. IE users will still be able to appreciate the site and its content without any hindrances. However, I have very strong ideas about how my internet experience, and I feel to be completely consistent with them I need to apply them to my own site and thus share my philosophy with others who will come here.

The reasons I have decided to drop spending hours debugging my site in Internet Explorer are twofold. Well, threefold, actually, but I’ll spare you the Evils Of Microsoft™ discourse.

There are gaping security holes in IE which make it terribly risky program to use. Even the US Government warns not to use it. I don’t understand why Microsoft releases software like that. VBScipt applications and ActiveX controls are notoriously risky and are only supported by IE. Malware of all types get automatically installed when certain ads are read through IE. Microsoft should just fess up and call it as it is: beta software. Patch after patch after patch is released, to try to get the program to work, but it never seems to be enough. And when you think about it, when you patch up a pair of jeans too much, they shoddy and terrible to wear. I don’t think anyone should be tricked into using an incomplete piece of software. I don’t use it, and I don’t encourage you to do so either.

I’ve been using a good deal of CSS for the new site, and I’ve grown to love its simplicity and flexibility. IE is notorious to not be compliant with various web standards, CSS being the major field where it still fails to keep up with. The bugs are numerous, but Microsoft has no intentions of fixing them, probably keeping their new fixes and features for their Longhorn browser-within-a-desktop thing. But then again IE owns the market, so why would they want to change the bugs? If that’s not acting like a monopoly, I don’t know what is. Not to mention that they confirmed that they would stop development on IE for Mac once Apple announced it was going to release Safari. When you combine those aspects, once IE won the browser wars and blew Netscape out of the water as credible competition, Microsoft had little motivation to keep their browser strong and up-to-date.

Anyhow, back to the code: I’ve tried so many things to try and keep it clean in IE, but it’s frustrating when every single other browser I check the Gluemeat site with (Safari, Firefox, Camino and Opera) gives perfect code while little old IE always has to force me to find workarounds, substitutions or compromises. I’ve had it. No more designing for IE. I mean, it’s not that the website looks terrible in IE, it’s just little things that throw the whole thing completely out of sync and make the design look junked. I’m not going to bend over backwards to try and make my site pristine for a go-it-alone, soon-to-be-obsolete piece of software which has never had the users in mind, but rather its goal of imposing its standards on a digital medium still in need of non-proprietary intervention.

I suggest you follow-up all this at the Web Standards Project and its project site, Browse Happy for more. Or why don’t we discuss it:

Have a great weekend everyone!

This entry was posted by Mike on Friday, October 22nd, 2004 at 12:00 am and is filed under Comics. Stay fresh on your flaming needs by following responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.