MSIE passes the test because Microsoft used this test [LWN.net]

MSIE passes the test because Microsoft used this test

Posted Oct 21, 2004 12:26 UTC (Thu) by pdc (subscriber, #1353)
Parent article: How to kill a web browser

The reason IE passed this test is that this sort of stress testing is done by the IE developers. They obviously take pride in having a parser that can cope with arbitrarily lousy HTML. (The flip-side of this parse-at-all-costs strategy is that there is no reason for people to learn to write non-lousy HTML, which in turn creates headaches for all future browser creators. See the endless discussions of error-handling in XML for details.)

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MSIE passes the test because Microsoft used this test

Posted Oct 23, 2004 17:59 UTC (Sat) by jhouchin (guest, #2966) [Link]

I think that IE passes the test because it has to be able to handle all the malformed HTML produced by all the MS Frontpage users. :)
Probably a part MS's embrace and extend. :)

MSIE passes the test because Microsoft used this test

Posted Oct 23, 2004 21:03 UTC (Sat) by mly (guest, #2171) [Link]

Well, if the competing browsers would have rejected the bad HTML in a controlled way, you could have viewed it like that...

Having worked in projects where C++ apps were coded in Visual Studio with Solaris as target environment, I've certainly seen Sun's compiler complain quite correctly over obvious bugs which Microsoft's "friendly" compiler happily swallowed. A sort of "he must have meant..." attitude.

As a programmer, I certainly prefer a compiler that rejects my bugs over one which tries to guess what I intended...but it wasn't difficult to understand why MS did it like that, and I certainly felt that it was a bad thing for the programmer, and a reason not to use Microsofts development tools. (As I returned to that site four years later, it seems everybody stopped compiling anything on Windows before moving to the target platform. :)

In the browser case, whether you see it as "embrace and extend" or not, it certainly speaks in favour of Microsofts browser. (But that still doesn't have tabs, does it?)

MSIE passes the test because Microsoft used this test

Posted Nov 3, 2004 23:45 UTC (Wed) by turpie (guest, #5219) [Link]

Or,
They obviously take pride in having a parser that DOESN'T CRASH with arbitrarily lousy HTML.
There is no point excusing the open source developers for these bugs, because that is what they are bugs. In this case Microsoft has done a better job. If you dont wont your browser to attempt to display invalid HTML thats fine, but it shouldn't crash. It's quite possible that these bugs could be security holes.

The correct thing to do here is admit our software has these problems, work out why it has happened, and implement changes so it can be prevented from happening in the future.