Re: [rant] IE shows its 'excellence' -- yet again.

[Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

__/ [The Ghost In The Machine] on Friday 02 September 2005 22:00 \__

> While researching other issues which I won't get into regarding
> UTF-8/ASCII/ISO8859-1, I've discovered the following.
> 
> [1] IE can't handle <anything>.xml unless it has a proper <!DOCTYPE>.
>     Apparently it thinks XML is always XML, even in the
>     http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace; this leads to
>     certain bizarrities.
> 
> [2] IE can handle "UTF-16LE" but not "UTF-16BE".  Now that to me
>     is just bizarre.  For its part Mozilla has no problems with
>     either one, though it doesn't like control characters in
>     XML files, even if they're specified in the form '&#3;'.
>     That's probably somewhere in the XML specs.
> 
> [3] If one puts a bad encoding in the first XML line
>     <?xml version='1.0' encoding='xxx'?>
>     IE complains that it doesn't support the given encoding
>     but doesn't say which ones it *can* support.  Grrr!
> 
> [4] Pi (&#x3c0;) is a nice character that pops up in a lot of places.
>     (For example; if one has slats or boards of a certain width,
>     and one throws an idealized toothpick of the same length as
>     that width onto them, the probability it touches a boundary is
>     2/pi.  This is apparently called "Buffon's Needle".  A nice
>     applet is available at
>     http://www.ms.uky.edu/~mai/java/stat/buff.html .)
>     However, IE has problems rendering &#x3c0;, at least on my one box.
> 
> If IE is the "standard" browser, Windows users need a different standard.
> :-) Or perhaps we just need to go some other way?

It gets worse:

http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2005/08/26/when-printing-kills/

Internet Explorer also dies if you do not obey the secret Microsoft 'Web
standards', which of course no-one has access to. I find it rather humorous
more than anything. I think it is well-deserved that MS-centric behaviour
leads to their own demise in a /direct/ way.

Roy

PS - The only thing IE does not suffer from is the ability to play and
support proprietary formats. That said, DVD Jon has done something on the
matter:

http://www.theregister.com/2005/09/02/dvd_jon_mediaplayer/

-- 
Roy S. Schestowitz      | Useless fact: 85% of plant life in in the oceans
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