Cal Jacobson's Blog

I’ve dusted off my GooglePages site and added a section devoted to extending ConnectedText’s functionality via scripting.  Right now all I’ve got are some rather simple Python scripts, but hey…it’s a start.

I’ve been trying very hard not to get worked up by the various details that have come out of the Internet Explorer 7 development team over the last year or so; maybe I just didn’t bother raising my expectations once I heard that CSS 2 and CSS 3 implementation wasn’t as high on their list of priorities as was, say, tabs.

Today’s post at the IE blog, however, sent me over the edge.

There will be two versions of IE 7 — something in itself that isn’t too surprising, since there were multiple flavors of IE 5.x (Mac, Win9x, WinXP/2000). Unfortunately, some market-mindful monkey has decided that they will be called different things: IE7 for Win2000/XP/2003 and IE7+ for Vista.

What’s the difference between the two, other than the operating systems? Obviously if it’s IE7+ then it has to be better, right? Wrong. Apparently features as “Protected Mode, Parental Controls and improved Network Diagnostics” qualify as the “plus”. You know, critical things that most folks like you and I will likely never use.

The big problem with this inane naming convention — and the crux of my problem with it — is that it merely sows confusion. Ever run into anybody who was baffled by the differences between Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional or Visual Studio Standard and Visual Studio Professional? How about the dozen or so different flavors of Office?

Even more frustrating is the monkey wrench this throws into the usual convention web developers use to describe browser support. For instance, if my website works under Firefox versions 1.5 and later, I merely say that Firefox 1.5+ is supported. Same with IE5.5.

Now what? “This website supports Internet Explorer 7++”?

The IE7 dev team claims:

These [aforementioned] features take advantage of big changes in Windows Vista and weren’t practical to bring downlevel. The IE7+ naming gives us an easy way to refer to this version. (“The version of IE7 in Vista” doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily…)

Right. So instead of you guys dealing with a perceived naming issue internally, you’re going to force the rest of us on the planet to adopt a name that will help tout the superiority of your next OS product. Thanks.

Jeff Atwood has an interesting post today comparing programmers and chefs and how both need to work "clean" in order to avoid problems down the road.  I think it's a great analogy, I just wish coders were afforded the same respect and received feedback as quickly.  Maybe we need white jackets and silly, poofy hats?