Safari developer David Hyatt has attacked Internet Explorer for letting website developers get away with writing 'malformed code' and consequently holding back the development of Apple's browser. In his weblog Hyatt explains that most of the reports he receives about 'bugs in Safari' are 'essentially differences in error handling and error recovery between Safari and the dominant Web browser, WinIE'. 'If we lived in a world where browsers could refuse to display malformed content (with useful error notification of course so that authors could easily repair their content),' he says, 'then all of these "bugs" would simply disappear. I could focus my efforts on real bugs, and not have to waste my time emulating the behaviour of WinIE.'
He continues to emphasise his point: 'The whole reason nearly all Web pages on the Internet are malformed is because browsers let Web page authors get away with it. As long as browsers are permissive in their error handling and recovery, Web authors will continue to produce invalid Web pages, because they won't even have any idea the pages they are authoring are invalid!' So next time you come across a site that doesn't work in Safari, it's not Apple's fault, its Microsoft's.
News source: PC Pro
