Boy am I hating MSIE

I've been working on an e-commerce site for a former colleague for the past few months and the experience has brought with it a new level of hatred for Microsoft Internet Explorer.

First, I built a little data record editor in PHP. The specifics aren't important, but the key thing is that the HTML is served from an SSL site and it imbeds images from a non-SSL site. Firefox will give you a warning, off to the side, that the page contains SSL and non-SSL content. MSIE (v6) pops up a dialog box which you must acknowledge telling you that the page contains mixed content. There does not seem to be a way through normal MSIE options to turn this off, or to consider the specific non-SSL site to be "safe".

Next up: HTML 4 has been out for years. MSIE v6 came out well after HTML 4 was settled on. I made the mistake of assuming that MSIE 6 handles <button>. Sure, it renders them, but I've learned two things:

1. If you have a group of buttons which all have the same name, MSIE submits the value of the last button in the group as the value of the pressed button, regardless of which button you've pressed.
2. Given this markup: <button name="action" value="save">Save</button>, what do you think the value of name will be when submitted? Bzzt. No, it will not be save, it will be Save. MSIE is submitting the text of the button as the value, ignoring the value attribute.

So now I am recoding this portion of the site to HTML circa 1998. I guess I just forgot the utter contempt Microsoft has (had?) for any semblance of web standards. I didn't think to search around, I mean, the spec I'm using is dated 1999. But had I searched even a little, I would have discovered MSIE and the <button> tag or [thelist] MSIE Form Submit Issues Discovery or from Microsoft itself: BUTTON Element | button Object.

Note that the HTML 4 spec says nothing about submitting the content of the <button> element as the value, only that the value of the value attribute is to be submitted.

MSIE v7 seems to allow you to have multiple buttons with the same name, but again submits the text of the button as the value of the button, and not the value of the value attribute.

What a waste of time.

Posted in Problems