June 18, 2007

Can you please sue Microsoft?

I get extremely pissed off every time I stumble upon something like this page. This is an official Microsoft manual where they're "teaching" how to format text on CSS documents, in this case the so-called "word-wrap Attribute". Now, let me quote W3C on this: "Property word-wrap doesn't exist : break-word". In fact, if you go and see the standard, CSS 2, nothing there about it. If you go to the upcoming versiona, CSS 2.1, still not final and thus not a standard, nothing there about it. Oh, but you can find it... on the CSS 3 proposal. Too bad that CSS 3 is yet to be released, and there are no plans to see it out soon. Also, only the latest version of IE implements CSS 2... so why are they recommending CSS 3 stuff?

Microsoft: wanting the world full of garbage since... ever.

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous11:10 PM

    * Is the CSS 3 property implemented properly?
    * What are the troubles or issues it creates for you using it or not?

    I would like to understand your consumer point of view and the *practical* issues, if there are, to find a solution.

    Karl Dubost, W3C
    http://www.w3.org/QA/
    karl@w3.org

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  2. Anonymous12:37 AM

    No, IE does NOT implement CSS 2.1 nor 2.0 in full. I reckon few or none browsers do, at the moment. What they do is implement parts of the specification.

    Do you know what pisses ME off? Ranting at Microsoft just for the sake of it. They even stated in that page you just pointed to that the property is specified in CSS 3.

    Really. This bashing of Microsoft is getting really old... And what are you doing on their website trying to learn css? Were the w3schools.com down? Gosh.

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  3. OK, some clarifications:

    * IMHO the CSS 3 property is implemented properly, but recomending its use already is shooting your own foot;

    * Despite this property being implemented on CSS 3, it is so because Microsoft decided that this should be valid CSS, so they started using it and recommending its use way before CSS 3: they started supporting in IE5.

    * What I'm pissed off about is on Microsoft doing such recommendations: not only using but telling people to use invalid stuff or stuff that is only going to be valid and supported some years from now, just because they already implement that, so those websites will be "locked-in" to work only on IE.

    * One of the things Microsoft _said_ that IE7 does is to implement CSS 2.0.

    * I'm not bashing Microsoft just because they are Microsoft, I'm pissed off with them because they're telling people to break the web - using stuff that isn't valid _yet_.

    * I got to that website because I was trying to find out why the fuck there are so many fucked up CSS's with several tags, like that one, and got into the conclusion that people use it because Microsoft does so (and they automatic CSS generation tools also), and they claim you should do the same. Furthermore, on this particular case, if you don't specificly use this, some pages will appear badly-presented by IE: which ultimately is their bug and not a bug from the website.

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