Implementor

1. The river is really green.
2. The sky is really grey.
3. The Stata Center at MIT is absolutely amazing.
4. It’s sort of expensive and sort of not. Like, I just ate an incredible dinner. And it cost $100 for two of us. And fifty quid seems like a lot. But it would have cost twice that in the UK. So… um… I don’t know. We won’t be doing that every night, anyway.

It’s nice here, I think.

So I finally got round to downloading the IE7 preview. I didn’t really want it, but a lot of sites are effectively my problem now, so I thought I ought to check if our stuff was going to work all right.

The first thing I noticed was an absolute abortion of a user interface, but it’s hardly as though I’d ever seriously consider using it as my main browser anyway, so I skipped ahead to testing some of the problems they claimed to have fixed in order to be more standards–compliant.

Thing is, in the main, the problems they’ve fixed aren’t the problems anyone had, erm, a problem with. What they’ve fixed are all the bugs that people used to get around the actual crippling flaws in the IE rendering engine. The shitty positioning errors are still there. The margin implementation is still fucked. Still no support for min/max width and height. The hacks to avoid those problems don’t work any more.

Amusingly, last year the IE development team chided people for using those hacks and suggested seriously that everyone immediately remove them, replacing them with another shitty IE–only fix. Incidentally, at that point there wasn’t a public release of IE7 to test those changes in.

An uncharitable observer might suggest that it’s unreasonable to expect people to make changes against a piece of software that’s in a constant state of flux and that you can’t even see. Me, I think it was taking fucking liberties.

Still, we all have our valued users to think of, right?

Now, it’s still in beta, sure. Maybe everything will be peaches and cream come the final release. But any software developer not clinically retarded should know better than to fix the fix before fixing the problem. Personally, I’ve already had enough. IE6 is the last browser for which I’m going to make exceptions. Right now, this page doesn’t serve any CSS to IE7 whatsoever. That might change when IE7 Final ships, but if it’s still broken, it won’t.

Microsoft are the richest software company in the world. Apparently they “hope” to have min/max width and height sorted out for the final release. What kind of software company doesn’t a) know what features they’re actually building for a particular release and b) can even consider it acceptable to ship without basic, fundamental functionality missing? A shit software company, that’s what kind. So fuck ‘em.

And y’know, much as I’d like to, obviously I can’t do that in my day job. Management are never going to go for shutting out potentially 90% of your user base. But I don’t know. Fast internet connections are commonplace now. You can switch to a better browser in about five minutes. And the browser isn’t the application. The web that it browses is.

In 1993, iD Software released Doom and people spent hundreds of pounds on new PCs to play it. If a few cool, popular web applications — last.fm, flickr, myspace, heck, even google, etc. — required that people download Firefox or Opera, you can bet they’d do it. Mostly, they don’t give a shit what they use to get the job done. We have to care about that; they’ll use whatever it takes to get at the cool web site their mates are all talking about. Nobody bitches about downloading a Flash plug–in to watch the latest retarded cartoon going round the office. Firefox doesn’t take any longer.

Imagine if a handful of sites like that closed their doors to IE tomorrow. Would the sites die or would IE? What do you reckon IE’s share of the market would be the day after? How compliant do you think the next version of IE would be?

We’re constantly told that we have to support old browsers, browsers that don’t obey the standards, browsers that actively and purposefully break the standards.

Says who?

So I’m sitting in the bar at work. A perfectly ordinary end to a perfectly ordinary week and I’ve barely tasted my second beer. Surely a splendidly relaxing evening lies ahead.

Well, no. Not five minutes later, somebody wants to get past. There was probably room anyway but I’m an accommodating sort, so I pulled my stool in. And in the process, slammed my knee into the corner of an unexpected beam under the table.

It didn’t hurt or anything. It didn’t hurt because I’d hit a nerve so precisely that pretty much my entire left leg had immediately gone numb. And the numbness spread. I had just enough time to hear my colleague start taking the piss before I came over all dizzy and keeled over.

From that point it’s a little hazy. Apparently I came to a couple of minutes later just as every first–aider in the building rushed to my aid, only to stand up as if nothing had happened. And thirty seconds later promptly collapsed again, backwards over a stool, in cartoon fashion, cracking my head on the table and then floor along the way.

All of this was to the accompaniment of OMD’s Enola Gay, incidentally. Words can’t describe the feeling.

The second time I woke up, flat on my back on the floor, I felt absolutely fine, just a little bit tingly in my hands and face. Even now I find it hard to believe I banged my head twice in quick succession. But obviously, everyone was very concerned, so I had to explain that no, I’d had plenty to eat, very little alcohol to drink, had no history of illness in the family and hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary all week two or three times to different people. And then to the paramedics in their ambulance.

Interestingly, it turns out I don’t bleed very much even when purposely stabbed with a needle. Apparently it’s also really, really hard to take my blood pressure and heart rate, although once they’d managed it everything appeared to be okay. It took a while to convince them that I haven’t seen a doctor since I was about 12 years old but other than that I just had to sign to say I didn’t feel like I needed to go to hospital and that was that.

This story could probably use some sort of insightful conclusion about now but really all I’ve learned is that it’s possible to be apparently entirely indifferent to pain but still bang your knee hard enough to knock you out twice in rapid succession. Also that Friday nights in are pretty fucking dull.

What’s ailing you this evening?

Seriously, they’re completely awful. I’m sitting here trying to code a relatively trivial application and having to use a CRT for the first time in months, because it’s either that or have the code window open on the laptop screen and only be able to see the left half of about four lines, and it’s an utterly miserable experience even compared with the last four days of coughing and stinking headaches with a cold.

How I ever learnt to program looking at screens like, no, significantly worse than this, I don’t know. The colour’s crap, it’s fuzzy and the whole thing bulges out at me like a fish–eye lens. Plus, I had to move my desk like a foot away from the wall just to accommodate the bastard.

Three cheers for George Heilmeier and his team of LCD inventors, I say.