Why Microsoft will ruin HTML5 and CSS3 for us

February 27, 2010

HTML5 and CSS3 look very exciting, and is defiantly a game changer for us web designers. I felt like a spoiled child on Christmas morning when I read the spec for the first time; getting all the toys I wanted. Things like round corners and shadows are nice and make designing a lot faster. But I that’s all peanuts compared to HTML5 video, offline storage, and drag and drop functionality baked right into the browser. Sounds all really awesome, and it isn’t even half the stuff that’s included in the two new specs. But wait, where’s the support?

Mozilla, Opera, Apple, (and others) are all working with the new specs, tinkering with their browser engines to support the new additions, in a fact a handful of CSS3 functions are already in release browsers. But then there’s Microsoft.

Well unfortunately for us it looks like the evils of yesteryear are coming back to haunt us. Surely you haven’t forgotten about Internet Explorer 6, the retarded offspring that Microsoft produced, the poor child that can’t even draw the box-model properly. Well I believe we may have a less extreme but similar experience waiting for Microsoft once again. They still  have yet to produce a proper DOM in Internet Explorer, so we all have to use JavaScript libraries or hacks to work around the stupid thing. Hell it’s not just the DOM, look at CSS support. Internet Explorer 8 is the golden child according to Microsoft, but the only thing it has on its siblings with that in almost can render the CSS 2.1 spec properly and its got new UI.

So what can we expect from Microsoft when CSS3 and HTML5 get finalized. Most likely a proverbial middle finger like we got before when web developers told them that there pride and joy Internet Explorer 7 was not that good at all. I still get a laugh when reading the Internet Explorer page on microsoft.com check this out.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/get-the-facts/browser-comparison.aspx

I think that the table above clearly illustrates two things. One; Microsoft has not used Firefox or Chrome, and two; Microsoft thinks that Internet Explorer is the best no matter what you say. With that mind-set how the hell are we going to convince them that their browser needs HTML5 and CSS3 support?

There are three ways that this could turn out. One; Microsoft realizes that web standards in important (haha as if). Two; Internet Explorer looses more market share because us designers forget about it and stop making hacks and workarounds for it, Rendering it useless because nothing will render properly on it. Three; We wait long enough for us to forget about HTML5 and CSS3 and Internet Explorer regains market share. Lets hope for the first or second option k. I promise you though if it comes down to it, I will not develop for internet explorer at all if it comes down to option two. I refuse to assist in the stagnation of web technologies.