Wikipedia — Anatomy of an Error
My previous postings about wikipedia drew some fire, so in the interests of fairness I thought I’d examine a problem I recently found in more detail, as well as analyse what went on “under the hood”, so to speak. This means this post will be a rather long one, as I will be dealing with both the text of the article and the discussion behind the text, so please bear with me.
The subject is “quirks mode,” so first some background: The first attempts by browser makers to follow the CSS specification were rather abysmal. IE5 fixed many of the bugs in IE4, but still left all too many unfixed (including the infamous broken box model, probably the worst of the old bugs). By the time of IE6 and Mozilla, browser makers had a dilemma: make the browser work correctly and they would break all the designs which currently counted on old behavior.
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