Yesterday I was talking with a friend and she commented me the “benefits” from ASP compared to PHP. Comparisons are odious, and more in case of Microsoft. She told me that with ASP you can do almost all you need, but in many cases you have to pay an add-on or a plugin. In PHP, you can do almost all you need writing a line or a couple of lines of code.
In this case I can’t give my opinion because I never wrote a line of ASP code, and with PHP I only wrote a couple of hundreds of lines in simply scripts. But today, at my work, the title of this post came to my mind. Why? Because of Internet Explorer.
Have you ever noted that Internet Explorer 7 adds a useless vertical scroll bar in every pages that have no scroll? Ok, me neither (so it can be because I use Firefox 
). Look at the demo. Just open Google and look at the right of the page. Can you see the scroll bar? If you can’t, probably you forgot to use IE 7. Or maybe you are using a beta version of the explorer :-!
Well, my job was to make it dissapear. It’s horrible to have a good-for-nothing scroll bar there for all the time, and sometimes, when you really have scroll, to have a div’s scrollbar and near of it that ugly grey bar.
All were indicating that it would be a CSS job. CSS has an style attribute named overflow. Default value for overflow is auto, and other values are scroll and hidden. Specifying it, you can control whether a page element shows the scrollbar or not. So it’s done. I started to review from down to up in the element’s hierarchy what element had its overflow: scroll style attribute, and all of them that specified overflow was to set it hidden. Furthermore, the body element had overflow: hidden. I can’t believe it. I started to search in nextapp’s echo forums (we are using echo2 framework) and in one topic I found that there was a quirk on IE6 that was fixed in some beta of IE7 and reappeared in the final version. The fix was to put overflow style in the html tag. In the html tag!! What will be the next, activate it on the browser preferences??
And what is the answer to the title’s question? Because people would use a real internet navigator, and because programmers won’t have to waste many time making specific workarounds for the IE bugs, and because www would be made with standards and probably we could see not-mobile web pages in cell phones and because the most used web navigator won’t be a f****** rubbish.
If Internet Explorer were an Open source project, it will be abandoned very much time ago, and almost nobody would use it. I’m sure that there is some minor open source navigators with much more quality than Internet Explorer. But that’s the life.
Edit: Safari seems to be a little bad in some cases too. It generated me a lot of rubbish in this wordpress editor, but it can’t separate the paragraphs as I like. Sometimes I think it’s me the bad thing :-).
Aries is another framework to develop rich web applications. It is developed by Seresco, the company where I work. It is a very good framework to develop management enterprise applications because it was designed and made thinking about productivity in the develop phase. An Aries developer can develop client search and management screens with all functionality in about 15-20 minutes. Sometimes it looks like magic, things simply works and we don’t know exactly why.
An Aries application is like a desktop application inside of your navigator. You have buttons, text fields, data grids, and a bunch of advanced components which are updated with Ajax technology making a good effect because page is never refreshed. It has little limitations compared to desktop applications, so there are some.
Vale ++ 