Why I hate IE

I hate Internet Explorer with a passion. For a number of reasons.

First of all, it's buggy. When building web pages, it's best to periodically check that they are working OK in different browsers. In theory, they should all look the same- in practice, there are slight differences between the way different browsers render pages. Usually, these differences are small, but when they are significant enough to make an immediately noticable problem with the page, it is in Internet Explorer. More often than not, in my experience, it's due to the hasLayout bug, or the broken box model of Internet Explorer- both well documented problems with the way IE renders pages that differs from the W3C specifications (and therefore, most other web browsers.)

But it's not just technical problems that annoy me. From the way MS 'acquired' Internet Explorer in the first place, through to how it was developed and marketed all feed into my hatred.

What is the World Wide Web?

Before talking about the technicalities of valid markup, Web 2.0, or the politics of freedom of information, it's probably best to start off with the basics. What is the World Wide Web? After all, it is- in my humble opinion- the most important and significant invention since Gutenberg's moveable type printing press.

Firstly, the World Wide Web is not the same thing as the internet. The internet is a network of millions of computer around the world, all connected to one another. Every computer that's connected to the internet is a part of it.

The World Wide Web is not a physical thing- it's a system of protocols which allows computers that are connected to one another (whether on the internet, or on a private intranet) to send and receive information to one another, regardless of the type of machines or what software they use.

Before the Web, if you were to connect your computer to another machine to get some information from it, you would have to know how both your computer and the one you were connecting it to worked. Thanks to the Web, not only do you not need to know how the computer you're connecting to works- you don't even need to know what sort of computer you're connected to.

First post...

Welcome to my web blog. No, that's not a spelling mistake; this is my blog about the web. About how it works, what's going on in the world of the web, and no doubt some bits and pieces about my own work and development. Longer articles will appear on my main site at Somerandomnerd.com. And this is going to stay with the default Wordpress theme until I get round to creating my own. (At least, that's the plan- I'm sure it will be interesting to see how it actually develops...)

A bit about me- I'm Scott, and I'm training myself to be a web developer. Although I do enjoy getting involved in design work, I'm mainly interested in the coding side- ie. making pages that work well is more important to me than making them look good. But my aim is to be able to do everything involved in creating a website, with the goal of running my own agency and working full time for myself.

I'm a strong believer in web standards, so I make my pages in HTML with CSS. For the behind the scenes techy stuff, I use PHP with a MySQL database. I'm still learning about Javascript, but as my main focus is on making accessible sites, particularly for use on mobile devices, it's not a priority.

At some stage, I will start using Dreamweaver for the design- however, I want to know how all the code actually works; I don't want to find myself in a position where I need a particular application to build a site. So at the moment I'm doing all my coding in either Notepad++ (which I prefer because of it's code-colour-coding style) or Bluefish. I prefer to work in Linux where possible, although I'm still finding my way, so expect some blog entries about that too.
There will be at least one update every week- probably more, more often than not.

Check back for updates!