(Yes, a string can be “arrogant”).
I have to give a thumbs up to the developers of Internet Explorer 7. Even if the developpers have just done a “paint job on their Pinto”, in my opinion, they have done a rather good paint job. Obviously, IE is still far from on par with Firefox or Opera, and I do not have any reason to switch back from Firefox anyway. However, it's not that much from a user perspective that I am interested in IE7, but rather as the amateur web developper that I am.
I had expected the worst and was pleasantly surprised (not too difficult once you expect the worst, admittedly). When I adapted this site's CSS to work with IE7, I already had one standards-compliant stylesheet for Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, NS, etc. and another one that was adjusted for IE6 (imported with conditional comments). I could basically take a mixture of the two to make it work in IE7. I just used Beyond Compare, a file comparison tool, to manually “merge” the two style sheets, and it was a quick and easy job.
I noticed that some things such as min- and max- work correctly now, as well as the overflow behaviour, whereas absolute positioning or widths specified relatively to the parent element behave exactly as in IE6 and require the same work-arounds – therefore, at least, once you have a layout working in both IE6 and the major proper browsers, IE7’s behaviour is pretty predictable.
However, apart from the fact that they feel they have to “educate” us poor souls about web standards and lecture us about how to make sites work with IE7 whilst the only ones still to require education about these standards that have been common knowledge for years are Microsoft themselves, there is one thing that particularly upsets me:
*/*
Yes, that's the mime type accept header, a string which, in layman's terms, allows a browser to tell the server in which format it prefers to receive content. Translation into human language: give me any content type – html, pdf, xhtml, whatever you want… – I handle them all equally well.
Impressive! So when, in content negotiation, my server asks whether the browser prefers my xhtml as text/html or application/xml+html, IE7 handles them both equally well and I can serve it application/xml+html by default? Fantastic! Wait, what are you saying? Does not understand application/xml+html… attempts to download it to a local file…only modern browser that does not…
I do not plan to get into the whole argument about IE7's lack of support of xhtml. Some have pointed out that several other browsers that do accept application/xml+html still handle it as plain old html. However, that's not my point. My point is exactly those three pompous characters */*. On the official IE7 blog, there was some debate going on about this very issue back in April, and they announced to “look into this”, but last time I checked (that was RC1), it still sent */*.
Why?
Some have pointed out that there are so many different types that it is impossible to list them all and that, at the end of the day, you can support anything via a plug-in.However, the point is weighting (e.g. a browser could send something along the lines of image/png,image/gif;q=0.8, which would mean: “I can handle both png and gif quite well, but when I have got the choice, I prefer png.) It is faster to view content in a format for which the browser has full native support. You can still list */* at the end of the Accept string with a weighting of, say, 0.5 as Firefox does.
I have always found Microsoft's marketing quite cheap and lacking in class. The same goes for this Accept header. Do you know those people who purport to be able to take one practically any task and tend to assert their programming, translating or universal genius with an annoying number of exclamation marks on public fora, job boards, etc.? In HTTP terms, this is exactly what */* means, and I don't like it.
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Keywords/tags: ie7 internet explorer 7 microsoft accept header http xhtml xml html css
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