We’ve noticed some unusual things with Internet Explorer 7. We feel that the world would be a far superior place if Microsoft had simply discarded IE and supported Mozilla – Firefox being a standards-compliant browser that web developers can actually make use of as a presentation medium.
Not only does IE completely ignore most HTML/CSS/XML standards, they decide to make up their own standards which break all rules of common sense. But then again that’s the basis of every Microsoft product – design everything poorly, steal designs & concepts from the little guys but implement them poorly, develop work-arounds on top of poorly designed software in an attempt to resolve the original flaws with the software, charge a ton of money for software and provide no support whatsoever.
One thing we’ve noticed is IE’s interpretation of the null string. When applied to an img tag (width=”” or height=””), IE considers the null string to be zero, and as a result the image isn’t displayed. The width or height properties must either be defined with a numeric value or not specified at all. In every programming language the null string is absolutely in no way equal to zero – yet IE screws up the comparison. Specifying the null string for a width or height tag in any other browser, including older versions of IE works fine – the tags are simply ignored and the image is dispayed as its native size.
How frustrating!