Broken?

Nope. At least, not if you're using a decent browser. My sidebar link lists are now actually lists, to be more semantically correct. IE's getting things wrong. Sorry folks.

And so the tables turn

Ben Goodger, main Firefox dude, is now blocking users of IE, citing standards compliance.

The browser you are using (Microsoft Internet Explorer) is not supported at this time due to incomplete support for web standards. By using Microsoft Internet Explorer you are making it difficult for web content providers to give you a better internet experience because they must design material for the limited functionality that it offers.

Please upgrade your browser today and enjoy the web as it was meant to be!

I'm not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, I'm sick of all the IE-specific crap on the web. OTOH, Ben will probably turn off more people than he draws in. Maybe a better way to approach it would be to give a cut-down version of the site, with a header or footer reading "See this page in all its glory with Firefox!"

I see Ben lets Opera in, but displays a similar message at the top of the page (basically, what I had suggested above)

Go Oleg!

Look, I am sick of dumbing down what I do at work to satisfy Internet Explorer. At least on my personal site, I can experiment with cool features in Mozilla.

I'm right there with Oleg. IE's just holding us all back. Screw it. Standards, standards, standards. Which happen to let you do really cool stuff, and also happen to be in Mozilla/FireFox/Gecko.

You're where and doing what?

My project is careening towards the end-of-March implementation date. We're into test mode, finally, and putting all the pieces together. This phase is supposed to be two parts - IT testing/integration, followed by business area testing. Once everything's through, we move things into the production system and flip the switch. The original plan called for IT having the system for one month (February), then the business folks getting their paws on it for March.

Like I said, the original plan. Business didn't like that. They want to see things "right away" and of course they aren't ready yet. We manage to fend them off with "OK, you can have it for the last week in February, and if we're ready sooner, you'll have it sooner."

So what happened a week and a half ago (check your calendars)? You guessed it, the business people are testing. They're not supposed to be. They're reporting bugs that aren't really bugs because that piece isn't wired yet. Or we haven't cleared out all the old, bad test data and they're looking at something from 3 months ago.

But the worst came this week. Now they're panicking and throwing out questions because they don't know how things work. Things they spec'd out. Things they asked for. Things we did to make their lives easier. Now I'm undoing some of those features.

But maybe some good will come of it. I decided that rather than hold everyone's hand, I'll just cram them all in a room and explain the whole thing to them. We're supposed to have training for the end-users before they start using this application. Why are we not doing the same for the testers? Why let them file imaginary bugs simply because they don't understand how things work?