W3C has set since much time ago, several set of standards to rule rendering of webpages and to unify criteria among navigators.
This time, I am not refering to how IE treats margins in a completelly different way than all the others, but I am refering at how internet explorer does not seem to look at the provided charset of an X/HTML page.
But this is not the first time that Microsoft goes on his own way contrary to the world, let me mention a bit of history about encodings.
Some time ago, where there wasn't any formal definition for anything that went outside ASCII encoding, several models were proposed from International Organization for Standardization (ISO): For example, the ISO-8859-XX for european languages, and not forget the most used UTF-8 encoding.Well, while all, and when I say all is all, the Operating Systems in the world adopted any (if not all) of those standard models, Microsoft came along with a new, different and incompatible charset: windows-xxxx character sets (for example windows-1252.Not happy with being the only one who broke the international standarization rules, some time after came Internet Explorer, parsing and rendering X/HTML elements as it wants, sometimes it is correct, and sometimes it is not.
But let's get back to main topic: What is wrong (this time) with Internet Explorer? One of the things I will comment here is a problematic one: it ignores provided character set and uses windows' default one! Despite this error seems not reproducible always.
This (and all IE problems) are not easy to deal with, because one can think: then let people know and use safer and better navigator, but this won't be an accepted solution, so what are the problems IE cause?
- It forces developers (despite following strict standards) to put an extra effort in developing, which translates in more money to spend on project.
- Since it is the default on Windows, an unexperienced user (a potencial client) may use it and unknow other navigators
- Much more problems that I will not write about now.
Now you have to buy some new batteries because the old ones ran out, and discover that there is only one vendor who is not following those standards and the batteries you bought are a bit bigger and with more voltage than what you need. This is the question I want to ask to everybody:
Will you change your remote control to a new one (provided also by that vendor), or will you discard those batteries, keep your remote control and ask that vendor to follow standard to produce items as it should?
Now, think about Internet Explorer and keep in mind previous example: Why in this case, we need to change our developed code (remote control) in order to work with Internet Explorer(batteries) instead of doing what makes sense: Just discard Internet Explorer and force Microsoft to program a quality navigator?
Think about it...
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