A Win for IE?
posted on 07:16 04/15/2010 by planetidiot.com
File this one under "astonishing". Internet Explorer 8 actually beats Firefox 3.6.3 and Chrome 4.1 at something. I'm putting together a rich text editor using HTML5's contenteditable feature. This is where you can just type right into an HTML element, and there are built-in ways to apply styling to text like bold, italic, underline, stikethrough, etc. My main worry was what the markup would look like and sure enough, every browser is completely different. What surprised me however was how much better IE was than the other two.posted on 07:16 04/15/2010 by planetidiot.com
Disclaimer: This post was written on Blogger.com's rich text editor, and is far from perfect itself. So let me be the first to demolish my glass house with a wrecking ball. Moving on...
First off, Firefox, the web developer's browser of choice. Offering superior debugging plugins and enjoying a large user base, it's hard to complain about Firefox these days. But it's not impossible. Using the contenteditable feature, I typed a simple paragraph and applied some styling:
This is just terrible. Inline css? BR tags? Ugh. What happens when a designer wants to change something site-wide? Are they supposed to go in here and edit all these inline styles? I'm more than a little disappointed in you, Firefox.
Next up, Chrome. The little browser that could isn't something I use for work, but I do my personal surfing on it thanks to it's easy to use incognito mode and being fairly crash-resistant. I didn't expect much from it in this test, and it didn't deliver:
I'm almost at a loss for words here. I understand the misuse of divs. It wasn't so long ago everything wanted to be a div. That doesn't make it any less wrong though. What is really goofed up here is the use of HTML 1 style formatting tags. Now I'd argue it's a lot easier to type "b" than "strong", but the web standards gods have spoken and we're supposed to use "strong". Considering how new Chrome is I'm surprised they'd go for "b" and "i" tags.
And now IE:
Paragraph tags? Check. Strong and em tags? Check. Strike tag? Wait a minute, I'm gonna digress here for a minute. I understand (though disagree) that they changed "b" to "strong" because "b" means "bold", and that implies a font and that makes blind people sad. But "s" meant "strikethrough". Why was this changed to "strike"? Are we being paid by the letter? Ok, I'm done digressing.
But I gotta say IE is the clear winner here. While I'm not sure why they are capitalizing their tags, that's easy enough to correct on the back end if you are anal (no pun intended).
Where all this becomes a major pain in the ass is when Alice uses IE to type in some rich text and Bob comes in with Firefox and tries to edit it, everything goes to hell pretty quickly:
What the living eff. So what am I supposed to do? Tie our applications to a bloated 3rd party rich HTML plugin? Or parse out all the horrid html that Firefox comes up with? Then re-horridify it when they try to edit with Firefox? Even as browsers get more and more compliant, they still insist on finding ways to be completely incompatible with each other. The more things change, the more they make me jump out a window. Or something
« Back to main