Weblog

Yesterday we had to present a web page we created to our course at the BA. My webpage is valid XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.0. I chose not to care about "compatibility" with IE, because why should I work around quirk, bugs and broken behaviour of IE? So I assumed I could use something more standard conformant. Like Mozilla Firefox (which I used while designing the page). I also assumed it would be installed on the computer used for presentation (which of course ran WindowsXP). I was wrong. So Florian who used a computer from the room (unlike me who used his laptop, connected to the net with horrible WLAN speed like <10 kBit/s) downloaded Portable Firefox and off we went. So I thought. I politely asked our lecturer if I could use Firefox for presentation, as "the page sucks in IE, because IE is not sticking to seven year old standards". "What about the ninety percent of the users who use IE?" Okay, a little bit of a show stopper here. But luckily a discussion started and our lecturer was a little bit distracted. So I put in my USB stick and simply started Firefox. After I finished my presentation (not without a few sideblows to this awkward piece of software IE is) my follower on his way to the front asked me to leave my USB stick in. Of course I did (I was fourth in row of 24 or so) and after me almost all with the exception of two used Firefox for presenting. Of the two exceptions one worked perfectly with Firefox and one did not. Somehow I felt good having used Firefox despite what my lecturer said (and the others obviously too). If everybody thought like her than I suppose nothing would happen and "Best viewed with IE at 1024x768" would stick around forever. I myself use browsers like lynx and w3m occasionally and hate it when pages rely on Java(Script), Flash or something like that. And do not get me started on (i)frames.