I hate Internet Explorer with a passion. For a number of reasons.

First of all, it’s buggy. When building web pages, it’s best to periodically check that they are working OK in different browsers. In theory, they should all look the same- in practice, there are slight differences between the way different browsers render pages. Usually, these differences are small, but when they are significant enough to make an immediately noticable problem with the page, it is in Internet Explorer. More often than not, in my experience, it’s due to the hasLayout bug, or the broken box model of Internet Explorer- both well documented problems with the way IE renders pages that differs from the W3C specifications (and therefore, most other web browsers.)

But it’s not just technical problems that annoy me. From the way MS ‘acquired’ Internet Explorer in the first place, through to how it was developed and marketed all feed into my hatred. (more…)

March 29th, 2007 | Browsers | 1 comment

Before talking about the technicalities of valid markup, Web 2.0, or the politics of freedom of information, it’s probably best to start off with the basics. What is the World Wide Web? After all, it is- in my humble opinion- the most important and significant invention since Gutenberg’s moveable type printing press.

Firstly, the World Wide Web is not the same thing as the internet. The internet is a network of millions of computer around the world, all connected to one another. Every computer that’s connected to the internet is a part of it.

The World Wide Web is not a physical thing- it’s a system of protocols which allows computers that are connected to one another (whether on the internet, or on a private intranet) to send and receive information to one another, regardless of the type of machines or what software they use.

Before the Web, if you were to connect your computer to another machine to get some information from it, you would have to know how both your computer and the one you were connecting it to worked. Thanks to the Web, not only do you not need to know how the computer you’re connecting to works- you don’t even need to know what sort of computer you’re connected to. (more…)

March 20th, 2007 | WWW | No comments