May 18, 2002
In addition to my friends' blogs (like Shields and Tristan), I also check the blogs of a few of the Mozilla developers. Unfortunately, it looks like the average Mozilla user (a) doesn't bother to read up on the "standard" he's requesting support for and (b) bitches when the Mozilla developer (rightly) points out that the guy doesn't have the first clue what he's talking about. Examples:
Standards vs. Quirks Mode. Mozilla has two rendering modes. In Standards Mode, everything is laid out exactly as the specs say they should be. In Quirks Mode, some of the older browsers' oddities are emulated. This works out fairly well -- only a handful of document types trigger Standards Mode and everything else defaults to Quirks. In other words, it isn't breaking the Web, and it allows Web developers who know what they're doing (and this does not include people who use WYSIWYG editors) to code for the standards when they want/need to. Mozilla even keeps a list of which doctypes do what (unfortunately it seems to be out of date). But every once in a while, someone duplicates bug 22274 and then bitches about how he's being ignored, and Mozilla sucks, and how he's going to run home to Momma and use IE forever and ever and ever. Friggin' crybabies.
Alternate text. In the <IMG> tag, there is an attribute called "ALT". "ALT" is short for "alternate". It's where you put the information that a user wouldn't be able to do without if the image can't/won't be displayed (in a great many instances, that necessary text is the empty string -- <IMG ALT="">). Years ago, Netscape did a very stupid thing and put the ALT text into a tooltip that appears when the cursor sits on an image for a few seconds. Unfortunately, if you use image-based navigation, you need to duplicate the text of the images (like <IMG SRC="me.gif" ALT="Me">, for example) for people who can't see the images, so you wound up with a graphic that said "Me" and a tooltip that also said "Me". Can we all agree that's idiotic? But people have gotten used to it. So now there's bug 41924 in which a luser is arguing against supporting the standard so his old-style layout (for which he's using a new-style doctype, which screams "amateur") won't break. Basically: "I'm too stupid to do this for myself, bend to suit me."
And people wonder why it took four years to get a 1.0 release, when this is what the people who should be coding have to deal with. Guys, I feel your pain.
