Web Devout tidings

In case you haven’t noticed, I haven’t exactly made a lot of progress on the standards support testing. And I don’t anticipate that changing any time soon. I don’t have much time outside my day job (which has been increasingly demanding in the last couple of months), and the free time I have is usually spent taking a break from work or working on other projects that have higher importance for me.

I know I’ve been saying this for a long time, but I think the solution is to build a community-driven system that lets the public file, categorize, and vote on bug reports. Reports that have been confirmed by enough users would get added to a table structure like we currently have. A simple wiki wouldn’t be sufficient; more than 95% of the change requests I get in the current system are incorrect or of unusable quality, which has led me to basically ignore those submissions altogether. I really think a more robust system, with test cases and links to the bug reports on the vendor’s bug trackers, would be ideal. But then it’s an issue of actually writing such a system, and that again requires free time.

At some point, I’ll do something. When I start making promises about how I plan to use my free time, that’s when I tend to suddenly lose motivation to follow through on those plans. So, for now, I suggest looking into other resources for standards support information, but stay subscribed to my RSS feed.

Seeing this makes me really glad I didn’t take that job with Microsoft.

http://www.microsoft.com/australia/ie8/competition/

Seriously, I don’t know if you’re trying to be funny, but it comes across as really dickish, especially to those of us who’d rather not use Windows.

Update 2009-06-17: It looks like Microsoft took it down. Here’s TechCrunch’s article on it, along with a screenshot.

For reference, the “dickish” parts were the “But you’ll never find it using that browser. (So get rid of it, or get lost.)” part and the “Ditch the web browser you’re using. If you try to find the $10,000 with your current browser, you’ll get nowhere.” part.

The “[Internet Explorer 8 is] the only browser capable of cracking all the clues.” is also pretty misleading. A more accurate claim would be “You need Internet Explorer 8 to play, because we are blocking all other browsers.”

Update 2009-06-17: It’s up again.